Technical Support’s Secret Advantage

SSCS technical support has an ace up its sleeve. It’s called our development department.

Those familiar with SSCS know we take a lot of pride in our support department, but their value to our company goes beyond warm and fuzzy feelings. We depend on their performance, day in and day out, to sustain our standing as a provider of the finest customer care in the business; it’s a fundamental driver of our success.

There are plenty of reasons the support department excels—look over previous blog posts if you’d like to read more details—but today we’re putting a spotlight on one resource in particular: the backing of our professional team of developers.

Much of the development department, which includes not only our software engineers but our quality assurance department, works in SSCS Headquarters—the same building as technical support. This encourages regular interaction between the two teams, the kind of face-to-face access that perhaps isn’t as common as it used to be in a software company. Collaboration intensifies when a particularly thorny customer concern surfaces. There’s no one better qualified to get to the bottom of a complex, perhaps obscure issue than the people who dive deep into the code every day.

“Because as a support technician I can tap into the expertise of a coder or a tester almost at will, it allows me to be prepared for almost anything a customer might encounter,” says one seasoned SSCS support professional. “It’s like having an ace up your sleeve that you can pull out to help solve user concerns. It builds expertise and confidence in our entire staff.”

Engineers and quality assurance staff benefit, as well. “If you’re developing software for customers, you need to grasp the needs of those customers as thoroughly as possible,” notes an SSCS developer. “That we get the opportunity to interact freely with the front lines of our support department builds our understanding of the user. Many times you’ll walk through our building and see support techs and programmers sitting together at the same cubicle in conference with a customer. That kind of synergy goes a long way to making SSCS the best it can be. We become more than the sum of our parts, and the customer wins as a result.”