Truckcom Blog

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.

In dealings with software suppliers, you’ll quite often come across the “Charge for Change” mentality. It makes a certain sort of sense. If the software they have isn’t quite what you need – then no problem, they can change it, and they’ll charge you for the changes. They might do this on a daily rate, or on a quoted cost for each change.

Even though it makes some sense, you find that there are a lot of problems with this kind of arrangement. One of the main ones is on the supplier’s side. Software costs are notoriously difficult to estimate, so they may well be undercharging (or more likely overcharging) you. But the most important problem affects you, the user. If  a software supplier charges for each change, then financial pressures will tend to make the software change less and less over time. We’ve found that in working arrangements where “Charge for Change” has become the well established way of doing business, actually, there’s hardly any change, and there’s hardly any charge. It stabilises everything, so you get a software product which is fixed and unchangeable (because users can’t afford to change it).

However, software products which are fixed and unchangeable are not very good software products. The beauty of software is how easy it is to adapt it to new requirements – how much you can do with the right suggestions – and how quickly you can do it. At Truckcom, from the very outset, we decided that change was good, and, within reason, the more the better. If we got suggestions from the front line saying “could it do this?” or “could it do that?” then these suggestions were very valuable things. And (again within reason) if we made it “do this” or “do that”, it would have a greater appeal to other potential users.

So we decided on a fundamentally different commercial model: “Charge for Use”. In fairness the Charge for Change people do this as well, they tend to charge for change and charge for use, but for us, the only charges we make are for use – we never charge for change. Actually, the way we charge for use is a bit different to other suppliers, and we cover this in another blog post. But back to changes – when people first hear that we don’t charge for change, they are slightly taken aback, but it’s a very important part of our business model. If we charge for use, and the product is getting used, then we’re making money. If we change it so it gets better, and then more people want to use it, we can grow our business. This is exactly what’s been happening, so it seems like quite a good way of working, especially because the customers are very happy that the product adapts to their requirements at no extra charge. Customers in “Charge for Change” arrangements tend to be far less happy.

But the most important part of the never charge for change philosophy is the power of evolution it gives us. Based on feedback from customers (and new prospects), Truckcom is constantly changing. There’s no commercial barrier to this pace of change, so the product really does change all the time – often a couple of new versions in a single week. Truckcom has been around for about 6 years in its current form, which is actually quite a long time for a software product – and within that period, the speed of evolution has been very high.  So we have a highly evolved, highly specialised, and very, very capable product.

How do you get a good piece of software? By talking to your users, and doing what they suggest. How do you get a bad, old piece of software? By telling people they need to pay to make it change – and hey presto – they don’t, so you’ve got an old dog with no new tricks.