Identifying and alleviating performance and usability issues can go a long way toward preventing Support cases. That reduces Support demand and enables your teams to focus on higher-value initiatives.
Support must take the lead in identifying product-related root causes of support demand and aggressively advocate for mitigation of these circumstances. Support must also work with Engineering groups to improve product supportability, advocate for fixes to performance issues, and work to identify and address issues related to product usability.
To help lessen Support demand, leverage these 7 strategies for issue prevention:
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- Establish a well-defined escalation path from Support to Product Engineering.
- Integrate Support case-tracking and Product Engineering bug-tracking systems for seamless integration and ongoing progress tracking of reported issues.
- Establish service level agreements to define the type and frequency of action for Support and Product Engineering cooperation.
- Provide performance and security updates and patches on a regular schedule to address top issues.
- Automate update and patch management – make it frictionless for customers to access and apply updates.
- Use remote system monitoring and alerting to provide early warning of potential issues before they become critical.
- Improve the supportability of systems and products with the goal of increasing the rate that products can self-heal.
