Support Activities Prior to New Product Launch
by Tom Sweeny, Director SSPA Research

Before a product is released to customers, Support organizations engage in a variety of prerelease activities. Support’s involvement prior to general product availability provides Support with the opportunity to become familiar with the new product as well as provide valuable feedback to the development team. The chart below illustrates the types of pre-release activities support is involved with.

Figure 1: Percent of Support Organizations that are Involved with Pre-Release Activities

• Support Beta Customers – The vast majority of Support organizations are involved with support for beta test customers. This practical experience provides Support with a sense of types of issues customers are likely to encounter. Good tracking and reporting of the issues during the Beta cycle is essential so that Support can provide feedback to Engineering on probable usability and performance issues.
  
  
• Product Testing – Support is often involved with early product testing. This activity provides Support reps with practical hands on experience using the product.
  
  
• Train Support Staff – New product training accounts for a significant portion of a Support representative’s total annual training time. This is an important pre-release activity that is ideally followed up 4 – 6 weeks after initial product availability to provide supportability training based on top support issues reported to date.
  
  
• Revise KB Articles – A significant portion of the Support knowledge base can become obsolete with the release of a new product. Issues and symptoms documented about previous product versions will not change, however the solution may need to be revised to encourage the customer to consider the new product. Although this is time consuming this has the potential to offer a high return from the investment of time and effort.
  
  
• Develop New KB Articles – With a new product comes an entirely new set of issues that must be identified and documented for both internal and self-help knowledge resources. The success of self-help resources depends on the availability of timely accurate information. The Support knowledge base must be revised prior to the availability of a new product.
  
  
• Train Customers – Pre-release training for customers is done by a small percent of support organizations and is often handled by a dedicated training organization.

The Bottom Line
Support typically does not wait by the phone for calls to come once a new product is shipped. Support’s early involvement in the product development, testing and release cycle assures that Support is ready to respond to customer issues with new products. Support’s early involvement with Beta support and product testing will result in the identification and correction of potential support issues. New products will inevitably generate support demand, thus investments in new product training and knowledge base development are critical pre-release activities to help control the cost of support.

If you have a question or comment please contact jsouth@theSSPA.com.

Thank you