I referred in a previous post to the fact that remote support is great in that it puts the technician in the cockpit and lets the user sit back and watch, but that fundamentally, support can’t solve the problem of complexity that caused the support incident in the first place. 

I received a comment to that post from a soldier in the support trenches warning me that most customers don’t really want to understand complexity. “Many of my customers don’t care. They simply don’t care.” Well put. 

Anyone who is the least bit technical has had the experience of explaining a simple computer concept (“look, just RIGHT-click. It’s like the click you never knew you had!”) only to be rebuffed with a user’s complacent aversion to actually learning anything. “can’t you just right-click for me and go ahead and fix it?” Not that you can fault them (ok, you can fault them some); users have to learn a lot of other things to allow them to do their jobs and learning something they didn’t need to know would use up precious CPU cycles and hard drive space. 

While I think this point is well taken, I still don’t think it lets software vendors off the hook for simplifying their products. In a perfect world, support would simply be an issue of resource economics.

In the first tier, you would have features and functionality core to the product that were so easy to access and use that a help manual would be insulting. Everyone should be able to access these features without thinking or remembering. Zog the user should be able to walk up to the application, click the button he or she (Zogette) wanted to click and get the desired result from clicking the button that one would naturally click if one wanted ____ to happen. 

In the second tier are features that not everyone will use or not everyone will use immediately after beginning use of the program. This is where economics come in. If it is not a sure bet that everyone will use the feature, then it makes economic sense to just train a few people (i.e. support reps) on the feature set so that they will be able to train others should the need arise. 

In the third tier are features that the user will not and should not use (“Watch what happens when I delete this file”). Like in the second tier, it makes more economic sense to train a few people and let the rest languish in blissful, copasetic ignorance. 

Problems arise when technology products break form and you have support personnel supporting the same feature for each and every user. When this happens, something has broken down in the process. Maybe you misjudged how important the feature was or maybe you thought you had made it simpler than it really is, but the bottom line is that until a product’s features fall cleanly into one of the three tiers, support looses the economic benefit of specialization and becomes a one-on-one tutoring organization for students that don’t want to be taught.

At NetworkStreaming, we endeavor to create products with this in mind.

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