In my previous entries I've talked about the QA group in SharedBook, and about the way we struggle to locate and fix as many bugs as we can before launching any new feature. Today I'll discuss our Tech Support group and the way we are dealing with all those bugs that 'got through' despite our best efforts.
In order to get some idea what Tech Support is you can view the following short, funny video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZek
As I've mentioned before, working in a dynamic Beta environment with Open API and data integration clients can be very risky. Not being able to test every feature thoroughly with the addition of the outside data that enters our application can cause many problems to be discovered by 'real' users. Our tech support objective is to make sure those problems will not prevent users from using our application and will cause them as little interference as possible.
We discover problems two ways – loud and silent. Loud, meaning that the user who encountered the problem has reported it to our Customer Care team. In order to make it easier on our users, when our application generates an error the user is presented with a 'nice' error page containing a unique error ID and the ability to either report the error by e-mail or enter his own e-mail address for us to contact him.
In addition we also have a "silent" way – each time the application generates an error, an automatic e-mail is sent to the tech support group with all the error details. This allows us to check and even fix problems as they occur, sometimes before the user reported, or even noticed them.
As soon as we discover a problem, whether reported by a user or reported by the system, we start our investigation. Sometimes that investigation will require a lot of 'digging' into the system logs and database because we don't always have a lot of info; usually it feels like trying to solve a very complicated jigsaw puzzle where you don't have all the pieces. It is a very delicate and sometimes frustrating work, but we try to always remember that on the other end of the problem there is even a more frustrated customer who is having difficulties using the application and that we must do our best to solve his problem as quickly as possible.
"We received my father's Books! WOW! So very beautiful. What a tribute. We shared as a family on Easter Sunday, and it was beautiful. You did such a nice job. We were all very touched. I wanted to thank you so much. Please share with your company. I will let others know what a wonderful thing you have provided to us. Thank you for all of your help while I was ordering."
Responses like that make all the hard work and frustration worthwhile.
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