Good support is vital
Good support is vital to help users get the most from a system like Truckcom. We discovered this very early and our support principles grew out our earliest activities rolling out Truckcom software and devices to our first customer in late 2004.
The principles are quite easy to describe:
If someone needs help, the most fundamentally important thing for us to provide is a telephone helpline that they can call to speak to someone, there and then. Some businesses are run these days on the principle that they should try to avoid customers calling them – but for us the helpline operation is a central part of our business
On-screen help is very powerful. We do this with office users, of course (lots of IT companies can do that now) but crucially we do it with mobile users as well. When a truck driver in Scotland sees us pressing buttons on his smartphone remotely from Essex, sometimes he’s slightly spooked but he’s always grateful
Whatever the question, we should try to answer it. Often users in their first few days with Truckcom will ask several questions, which don’t relate to whether the system is working properly or not, but just arise because they’re new to it. If we do our jobs properly in these early days, the users will be well informed and won’t need to call us again, and everybody wins
Treat people with respect. Some people who call our helpline have been driving for a living for a long time, and might not, initially, be that keen to use a system like Truckcom. But if we deal with them in a friendly and helpful way, always asking for their name and using it in our conversations with them, we can often win them over
System uptime is very, very important. On the small handful of times we’ve suffered a major service outage with Truckcom, each time we’ve put things right within 30 minutes at the most – often before most users have even noticed a problem. The most frustrating thing is dealing with service problems that aren’t ours (for instance, when one of the mobile networks has a funny turn) – but even then, we see it as our job to try to get them to fix it and keep everyone informed
So now, six years on from those earliest experiences of support, we regard support as a central part of our business, and we pride ourselves on the level of support we offer. A lot of the product design work we do focusses on avoiding problems – making the system easier to use, less likely to go wrong. But we know that while this can reduce the number of support calls and keep them handle-able, it can never eliminate them.
