Recently I had the opportunity to review the support given by four of our vendor partners. I was struck by the state of things.  Generally we saw 15 minutes to get an answer, 2 days to get in touch with someone with knowledge to answer the question. Not a good sign. 

I think that the true measure of the quality of a support organization is how they act and react in a crisis situation. My recent experiences have revealed three specific crisis strategies. 

Its Not My Fault!

I am always amazed at the support organizations that can provide 10-15 reasons why their lack of communication or support is YOUR fault. Its frustrating when you are looking for a solution to your problems to have to debate with someone on whether this could be their problem or not. Having this attitude echoed by Managers and Directors is even more astonishing and makes friends with both resellers and customers. Unless your technology is flawless, this attitude will quickly erode confidence and revenues. More so, people walking away from this vendor will have quite the story to tell their neighbor - and that really will hurt in the long run. 

Cant Really Help Ya

When faced with a problem, both resellers and customers are looking for the solution. Some organizations tell you why it cant be their product and to look to another vendor in the solution. As a reseller I constantly have to conference call multiple support organizations together to keep this sort of finger pointing to a minimum. These conference calls can grow heated between vendors - especially in those instances when neither can under the others accent.  The point here is that those organizations that say "I dont think this is us, but here are the symptoms I have found and why I think its this vendor" makes it easier to track then those that say "It cant be me - go call them". With anything its attitude, its ok to not be the cause of something, but the customer (and reseller) should feel loved and not irritated at the end of the call. 

The Good Hands People

We recently had a catastrophic event caused by a vendors latest patch of software. We actually had two events by two different vendors - but we will only focus on one of them here. The vendor responded by engaging with the customer, communicating twice a day in conference calls with status reports and action items, and doing everything in their power to ease the tension of the failure while fixing the problem. They immediately kept and increased the trust of the user and reseller in the vendor and even earned another purchase from the customer with the disaster. Its a shining example of what the support should look like and was a reminder to me why everyone envies Alstate for their trademark.