Sometimes my first gut reaction to a question from a customer is: RTFM. But of course I never answer anything like that. We are always pleased with any question from the customers.
When a customer never asks anything from us and never reports any bug, it usually means that they either don't use the software at all or that they use it very little. And such a customer at some point will realize that they are paying for a support contract that has given them no support and that made them more likely to drop the contract the next year.
So, no, there are no stupid question. If a customer is asking a question that we feel he would not ask if he had read the documentation, we patiently answer the question and indicate where in the documentation he would have found the answer by himself.
There are three kinds of reactions to such an answer.
The customer may thank us and we reply that they are welcome.
The customer may apologize for asking such a trivial question and we answer that they should not apologize, because we are happy to answer any question from them; this is what their support contract is for.
Or the customer may indicate that he has read the documentation on the subject, but that he feels that the documentation is ambiguous. Then we enter into a dialogue with the customer to improve the documentation.
At the end, every one wins: the customer has the answer to his question and we have interact with the customer which makes his support contract worthwhile and then more likely to be renew the next year.
And of course we really think that there are no stupid questions, because we all have been in the same position as the customer and also asked some questions that in retrospect seemed stupid to ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment