What’s The Role Of Technical Support In Business?

Category: Total VDO Date Published: September 11,2022

What’s the Role of Technical Support in Business?

Technical support helps businesses compete. In other words, it generates a competitive edge by helping you execute critical business processes quickly and efficiently. That’s hard to beat if you’re a competitor.  Technical support also helps you make crucial business decisions that can maximize profitability.

In short, technical support resolves technical issues that can stop a company’s business processes dead in their tracks. Its services include:

   1)Troubleshooting, diagnosing, and resolving technical issues

   2)Setting up accounts for new employees and new users

   3)Replacing and repairing computer equipment

   4)Testing new technology that businesses may buy

What Types of Companies Use Technical Support?

What types of organizations use technical support? All kinds of companies use this tool. These organizations include everyone from Fortune500 companies to small and medium-sized firms—and everything in between.

Companies that provide technology products tend to use technical support the most. But professional service organizations such as legal, financial, and medical offices. Manufacturers, retailers, and telecommunication companies also use technical support.

Only as Good as their People

Technical support teams are only as good as their people. So, if you’re thinking of creating a technical support team or expanding one, you want to hire dedicated people that have the right skills, commitment, and personality to be on that team. 

A technical support specialist’s foundational skill is the ability to solve complex technical problems. To do this, support specialists need to know a variety of programming languages and any relevant information associated with them.

Additional technical support skills include:

   1) Good communication

   2) Multi-tasking

   3) Attention to detail

   4) Ability to work independently

Building Technical Support Teams

Companies take different approaches to building and structure a technical support team, which may be called customer support teams depending on whether they serve internal or external customers. In short, no one-size-fits-all when it comes to building and structuring technical support teams.

Some companies prefer having a technical support team with only a couple of team members and outsourcing partners to handle other issues. This approach lets the company’s internal teams concentrate on the most critical issues.

Challenges Facing Technical Support Teams

A 2016 IDG TechPulse survey sponsored by CGS points out three challenges companies currently facing with technical support. In fact, 93 percent of respondents saw these three headaches as supercritical

   1) Addressing the knowledge/skills gap

   2) Optimizing support processes

   3) Enhancing self-service

All three issues present difficulties that managers need to address to drive business growth. Addressing these issues cost-effectively, however, is easier said than done. More than 40 percent of respondents, for example, said they were struggling with getting self-service right.