Hi, welcome to Just Support.

I’m Ryan, and I work in support. I’ve worked in some form of technical support for the last 2 decades. Technical support for students in dorms, retail technical support, educational technical support. I’ve done technical support for SAAS (software-as-a-service) companies, and technical support for the people doing technical support (which I liked to call “support support”).

Customer support, and customer technical support, is everywhere. Every company with customers has to have some kind of way to provide answers and solutions to those customers. Every company who works in technology will need to provide some kind of assistance to the users of that technology.

At some point in their working life, a huge amount of people have spent time providing answers to customers, and nearly every single human being will take advantage of the answers provided during their lifetime. Support can be given in person, over the phone, over chat, via email, via social media, in articles, in videos. Parents do it for their kids at first, kids eventually do it for their parents. Our lives involve technology constantly, and the only constant in technology is that it will break and we’ll need to fix it.

If everyone uses technical support, why isn’t it talked about more? Oh, it’s complained about plenty. Complaining about tech support has been a staple of comedy for the last 30 years. But for a key feature of the technology industry, I don’t see a lot of speakers, books, or conferences around the art and science of support. Most of the work done around customer connection in companies is around customer loyalty and success, which focuses on sales to extant customers. And as much as I love another support director quoting Effortless Experience to me, it doesn’t quite cover what customer support and tech support do.

So much of the current industry focus is around using touchpoints with customers to drive revenue, making support just another channel for the upsell. This sucks. It sucks to tell your customers that you would be happy to help them for a one-time fee, or if they’d like to upgrade their support package. It sucks as a customer to have already bought a product or paid for a service and now have to shell out more to get it working right.

In this newsletter, I plan to talk about the philosophy of support from the frontline perspective. In future issues, I’ll cover topics like the emotional cost of support, support’s relationships with other parts of the company, how to do support well, support management, support knowledge & training, promotions, data, outages, and I’ll tell my own support stories. I plan to get help from some friends in the industry in the form of interviews, guest posts, and links to good content. Please subscribe!