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Goldstein Steven (STNA-IN/PRM1) wrote:
> My company manufactures products that are sold internationally and
> installed through a dealer network. These dealers have technicians on
> staff that are responsible for installing and maintaining my company's
> products. Therefore, my customers are the dealers and technicians, not
> the end-users who own my company's products. In fact, my company's
> Technical Support department only takes calls from
> dealers/technicians.
snip
> Quite simply, the need is to reduce calls coming into Tech Support,
> and
> to reduce the duration of the calls that do come into Tech Support.
The dealers are shifting their training costs to your company, and you want
to push back.
> My boss has challenged me to develop a plan that will address the need
> mentioned above (this is what I get for being the new kid on the block
> with fresh ideas!). My first step in accomplishing this is to improve
> how we document our troubleshooting procedures. I will be teaching my
> technical writing peers how to document an analytical troubleshooting
> approach that will get the technicians to the root cause of the
> problem
> more quickly, with less confusion. This will result in fewer calls to
> Tech Support. Also, Tech Support will use these new troubleshooting
> procedures to handle calls that do come in, which will help them
> reduce
> the duration of the call.
This is the best part of your plan. It will improve the product down the
road, too.
> My boss loves this idea, and I have his full support. But he doesn't
> want me to stop there! My customers (the technicians) don't have
> Internet access when they're on the road, so he wants me to do
> something like provide all of our product literature (mostly PDF
> format, and
> there's a lot of it) on CD-ROM, with an easily navigable user
> interface
> so that the technicians can find the documentation they're looking for
> easily.
Technicians don't read now, and I expect this behavior will continue.
I've snipped the rest of your post, wherein you mention tools and processes.
These items have the potential to improve the documentation. By all means
get company to invest, and change your work flow. You are still left with
the proposition that technician training takes time. What do the dealers
want?
Ed Wurster
http://www.eWurster.com/blog/
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