Links: How to get good customer support

Couple of articles discussing the customer support and what both sides could do to make it better.

1. An article from the Mobile Magazine where they called a number of support lines and compared their processes and results from the user's point of view. What is good about this article is that the problems were known and the same for each call, so you could judge for yourself who went through a troubleshooting process and who only had a decision tree to rely on.


2. A blog entry from Jason Fried, who supports Basecamp, Backpack and Ta-da list. He writes how to get a good customer support by being nice to the support person and providing them with the relevant explanation. The entry also has more than 50 replies elaborating on the issue and providing additional links.


3. MySQL support page for technical level examples and for additional couple of links to other detailed descriptions.


4. Finally, if you want to make your own mark, there is a Wikipedia page with the basic information that is crying out to be fleshed out.

For myself, I am starting to wonder if the only people who really get what the suggestions mean are those who had to do some customer/technical support themselves. Until then, it is often hard to understand why you are being asked for the configuration file every time, even if you believe that nothing was changed. (Answer: Often people will change something to try fixing a problem and then change it back but not completely. Everything looks like before to them, but is not anymore.)


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