Part #4 Agile Customer Support

I worked for a company where in the morning I was booked on a flight to troubleshot issues at a customers site in Switzerland at Midday it had changed to Germany and by the time I went home I was booked on a flight (for the next day) to Florida. That’s agile customer care for you. The ethos of the company was to adapt your schedules to meet the customers' need. Indeed the competitive edge that we had was the fact the we responded to the customers needs and had a well trained customer support department which was backed up by a test dept, R&D, project managers, product managers, technical sales and even the technical manager and technical director who all had the ability to visit customer sites with the view of fixing problems. The agility of all technical staff meant that the company had a great reputation for customer service and therefore won repeat business and experienced greater ROI year on year, that's got to make good business sense!

I believe that our success was down to two very simple attributes that each member of staff had adopted:
1. We worked hard to be better than the competition.
2. Everybody was customer focussed.
This meant there was very little time for internal company politics and the petty little immature things that causes a company to loose its way.

Success depends on how agile your customer support is – is it down to a few individuals with the job title of 'customer support engineer' or is it the whole company.

See also: Part#1 Implementing an Agile Frame Work