Recently, I was on the phone with a customer who asked me this question: “How can we better help you to help us?” That’s a question that I was not used to getting. But it made me think about what customers could do to get better tech support. I ended up taking a day or two for me to really think about it, but I came up with the following which I decided to share with you:

1. Make sure you’re on the authorized list of contacts: Here at WinMagic – like in most organizations – we will only provide support to people who are authorized by your organization to speak to us, and if your organization has a valid support contract with us. If you’re not on that list, I would recommend speaking to whoever is in charge of your SecureDoc deployment within your organization and ask them to reach out to tech support to ask for the enrollment form. Once we’ve received the form, and the list of authorized contacts for your account, we’ll be able to provide the support you need.
2. If you do phone tech support, make sure you have the proper support package: I say this because most organizations have multiple levels of support.  We at WinMagic have three levels of support – Basic, Standard and Premium. Only the latter two have phone support. Thus, I would ask you to ensure that you have the right level of support that your organization needs.
3. Follow the correct tech support procedures : WinMagic has a customer portal that not only allows you to easily submit a ticket. But it also allows you to see the status of any other tickets that you might have. Plus you get to see our knowledge base and see the status of your support agreement too. Quite frankly, using the customer portal is the best way to submit a non-critical ticket as it allows you to put down as much detail as you need to including screenshots (I should also note that if you have a critical issue such as a sever that is down, you should just call us so that we can jump in right away and help you). That helps my people to better troubleshoot whatever issue you have. If you don’t have access to our customer portal, please reach out to tech support and we’ll give you access if you’re on the authorized list of contacts.
4. However you choose to submit a ticket, have all the details at hand: The more detail you can provide about the problem you’re facing, the better. Make sure you have the EXACT error messages that you are seeing or make sure you can describe exactly what you are seeing (as well as what you were doing at the time). It also really helps us if you could also provide what version of your software, the OS, and even noting drive type/model that is play. This will help support teams to more rapidly diagnose your issue and work towards a resolution.
5. Be polite: Chances are, whatever problem you are having is not the direct fault of the person you’re speaking to. No matter who ends up being at fault (you, them, a computer somewhere, a mysterious Internet gremlin) for the issue that you are having, you’ll get a faster and more helpful response if you don’t begin by making the person who truly wants to help you defensive.  Being rude, swearing at them or yelling at them sets everybody off on the wrong track. Take it from me, tech support is on your side and they want to help you to the best of their ability. And, those calls are most likely recorded – ours are – meaning that if you’re rude, swearing or yelling at an agent, their manager will know about it.
6. Constructive feedback is always welcome: One last thing.  Customer Support mangers always encourage feedback from our customers so that they know what their team is good at, and what they need to improve on. There’s always multiple ways to provide feedback.  Choose what is most comfortable to you.  Here at WinMagic, we have two ways you can provide feedback to us. One is the anonymous customer service surveys that get e-mailed to you when your case is closed. I encourage them to fill them in and leave some comments in as we really do read every single comment and share them inside WinMagic. The other way to leave us feedback is to email us at feedback@winmagic.com as that allows us to directly respond to your feedback.

So in summary:  Follow the right processes for your level of support enablement.  Be prepared with details of your issue.  Be courteous.  Provide feedback to help us continually improve our customer support.