Support is like a Fire Department
Often we have difficulty using a service the way it was intended. Maybe that new ADSL connection you installed just isn’t working, even after checking the darn modem is plugged in and powered on. But that silly little light still teases you with an orange glow when you know damn well it was green just over an hour ago. You cry, you curse, you throw your hands up in the air in defeat - and that’s when you ring Technical Support. Hopefully, they help you to get back on your feet. But what about the times things go well without any any dramas? Or those times that there are dramas but you manage to fix them on your own?
What does Support do when nothing is going wrong, everything is working as its supposed to and support tickets are few and far between? Learn crochet? Watch daytime soaps? Write blog posts?
Think of support as similar to a Fire Department. If there’s a fire, someone makes a call or an alarm goes off and the support team grabs their gear, jump in the fire truck and race to the inferno to put it out as quickly as possible. Thankfully ‘things’ aren’t on fire all the time. But that doesn't mean we aren’t proactively looking for ‘spark points’ and potential issues that may need to be ‘back burned’ a bit to control a future blaze or kill it off entirely.
Like firefighters monitoring areas prone to cause fires, we constantly monitor the firewall, the inbound and outbound traffic and more, to ensure our cloud computing services are all running as smoothly as possible. Pretty much anything you can monitor and test, we're there staring at it, prodding and poking it, ensuring that if anything was to go wrong we would be able to control the blaze and stamp it out before any damage can be done to our infrastructure, services or customer data.
Furthermore, firefighters are constantly training and testing themselves. They run controlled tests and sometimes uncontrolled tests to simulate real fire situations. We do that too. No, not pyromania, but VMmania! We constantly start, stop, destroy, reconstruct and punish VMs in different environments and different combinations every so often to ensure that customers can successfully spin up and use the VMs the way they should be used. We also get to see first hand if anything goes wrong and set out to fix it before anyone else gets burned.
Sometimes though, things don’t always go well. Firefighters don’t always get to save a building and the same goes for support. Sometimes, it is best to start afresh and move on. However, once we migrate the occupant (customer) safely across to a new area and VM, our job is not yet over. We must go back and examine the burned out shell to figure out why it happened, how it happened and if possible piece it back together.
Finally, firefighters like to do public awareness and community outreach. We do the same, constantly calling and speaking to our customers to get a better understanding of what they want, need and expect from us. We also call to ensure they are up and running, if they have any questions or concerns and address them promptly. We collate and provide feedback and circulate it to the relevant parts of the team - Marketing, Product Development or Management - to ensure we constantly meet the expectations of our customers and consistently provide new and innovative features for the future. Whilst doing all this, we can also help advise and develop tutorials of how to best use our services and troubleshooting steps should customers ever find themselves in an ‘inferno’ and in need of a little bit of help.
Customer Support isn’t just about waiting for something wrong to happen. It’s about helping to ensure things don't go wrong while making sure that if something does happen, we know how to fix it, address it and prevent it from happening again.