February 26, 2009

ZTEC Customer Support Changes Strategy

Christopher Ziomek, President, ZTEC Instruments

Christopher Ziomek, President At ZTEC, we strive to provide our customers with very high quality technical support. Because our products require software development and system integration, we feel that we must provide expert advice and consultation to assist our customers in the successful use of our products. This article describes my personal experience with making customer support a company priority, and with the day-to-day activities involved in providing superior customer and application support.

Years ago when establishing our customer support team as part of the sales department, we staffed the team with high-level application engineers. By linking support to sales, we ensured that all customer-facing staff would collectively work towards customer satisfaction. At first, our support team functioned very well, and customers were genuinely satisfied with the pre-sales and post-sales assistance that ZTEC provided. Although support was stated as a company priority, over time our most accomplished support staff were elevated to more prominent positions within the organization. This cycle continued until finally it became apparent that our customer support team was no longer providing our customers with exceptional technical advice and consultation.

Consequently, we decided to make dramatic changes within our customer support team approximately four months ago. We moved the support team from the sales department into the engineering department. The name of the team was changed to Application Engineering to emphasize the need for strong technical expertise within the staff. We added senior-level engineers and co-located the team amongst the R&D development teams. We defined process and added automation tools to increase thoroughness, traceability and documentation. In order to make a strong statement about the importance of customer support, I personally started living and working within the Application Engineering team. For months, I have been responding to technical feedback and application questions, creating knowledgebase solutions, and experiencing our customer's pain and successes first hand. In essence, I have been learning by doing. It has been a great experience and has kept me thoroughly in touch with the people that we serve.

Over time, I have seen some patterns emerge that have helped clarify the mission of the Application Engineering team in a way adds value to the entire ZTEC organization. At a fundamental level, we define our Application Engineering mission with three basic concepts:

Responsiveness
Quality technical advice
Positive experience with ZTEC

These three concepts guide our continuous improvement in delivering superior value through technical advice to our customers. Essentially, the ZTEC Application Engineering team represents the voice of the customer. In order to gauge our success, we have created metrics and have added a customer survey to quantify our results. We endeavor to respond to your needs in a timely fashion, to provide effective technical advice and solutions, and to enhance your image of ZTEC. If we do not measure up to these goals, please let me know personally. We value your business and want to ensure your continued success with our products.