Web support, if well done, has the wonderful potential of delivering both customer satisfaction and lower costs. What does it really take to create and sustain a solid web support offering? This article starts by describing the different tasks at hand for web support and then suggests ways to allocate the tasks within dedicated web support organizations, to staffers who have other support tasks, and even to outsourcers.

1. Web Support Roles

Staffing for web support requires at least seven different roles.

The web support owner is responsible for the overall health of the web support offerings, including researching and suggesting new ideas and tools, selecting and implementing tools.

The knowledge base owner is responsible for the contents of the knowledge base, including the way the contents are organized, making sure needed documents are created, and overseeing the review process.

Knowledge base category owners ensure that the categories they own are complete and that the documents within them are correct. They may not personally review and approve all the documents in their categories, but they designate reviewers for them and orchestrate their efforts.

KB authors create documents.

KB reviewers review documents from a technical perspective.

KB editors review documents from a language perspective.

Tool managers ensure that the various web support tools are working properly.

2. Do you need a Dedicated Organization?

Seven web support roles! How can you staff them all? Do you need a dedicated organization? It depends…

If you run a large support group, then there’s no contest: having a dedicated organization will allow you to keep a constant focus on web support, unfettered by the realities of having to respond to customers. A good rule of thumb is to dedicate about 5% of the organization to web support, so if you have more than 30 or so staff members, it makes sense to start a small web support group.

A dedicated organization includes the web support owner, the knowledge base owner, the knowledge base editor and writers, if you have any, and the tool managers unless they belong in the IT group. Very large support organizations usually have dedicated tool managers right in the support group (and you may have to hire your own if IT is too busy to attend to your needs in that area). In smaller organizations, one person may play multiple roles, for instance the web support owner and the knowledge base owner could be one and the same.

Even if you have a dedicated web support organization, you may not want to centralize the ownership of the knowledge base categories and the creation of knowledge base documents, at least if you support complex products. Why? In a complex support environment, it takes a great deal of technical knowledge to create and review documents, and that level of expertise is best found within the support delivery organization. So while the web support team should own the management of the tool and of the process, the technical work can be done in a distributed manner outside (and under the direction) of the web support team. If you support simple products, you can centralize all roles as you wish since technical expertise is not a problem.

3. Web Support without a Dedicated Organization

When some or all the web support work is accomplished outside a dedicated organization, it can be a bit chaotic to expect busy support staffers to also work on web support. Maintain order with the following techniques:

Pick effective owners: the roles of the web support owner and the knowledge base owner are particularly important when you rely on part-time participation. Look for enthusiasm, flexibility, great organizational skills and an ability to get things done across organizational boundaries.

Assign quotas: if you expect support staffers to write documents, tell them how many you expect to get published per month. And measure the results.

Define SLAs for document reviews: support staffers care about customers, so they will put them before “non-urgent” knowledge base tasks. Assign deadlines for reviews so they get done quickly. Make them count as much as SLAs for traditional customer requests.

4. What about Outsourcing?

Traditional outsourcers concentrate on responding to customer requests. But there is a new breed of outsourcers that understands the benefits and the challenges of web support. You don’t have to do all the web support work yourself.

Tool Management

It’s possible to outsource the management of some or all your web support tools to ASPs. But even if you don’t want to outsource every aspect of tool management, using outside resources for web support tools can be a good idea. In particular, the implementation work required to roll out a commercial tool, especially if integration with other tools is required, is a difficult and specialized task. Why not outsource it to someone with plenty of experience with web support? (Look for someone who specializes in web support, it’s quite different from other web work).

Content Management

In my experience, content management is a very poor relative within the support center. There’s never enough time to identify areas that need to be documented, to write up documents, even to review existing documents.

While many support managers feel comfortable outsourcing the editing of documents to outsiders, many feel that only internal staff can possibly know enough about their environment to create and maintain knowledge base documents. In fact, a small cadre of specialized outsourcers has the resources required to manage content. Given the high ROI of self-service, you may find that outsourcing content management is the best investment you can make in your support center.

About the author
Francoise Tourniaire is the founder and principal of FT Works, a consulting firm that helps technology companies create and grow their support operations. She is the author of the recently published Just Enough CRM and she is a big fan of web support. You can reach her at FT@ftworks.com or 650 559 9826.