Why we do not have customer support by mail?

Normal weekday:

- This is a real raider seizure. They opened an office in Moscow without coordination with me, and now they are trying to transfer all assets to themselves, including the site registered to me.
- Today, different people apply to us all day asking for access to your account. But since it is registered to you, we cannot do this. We have already sent all printouts and call recordings to law enforcement agencies.

This is not a quote from a detective novel, but a fragment of a very real dialogue between our company's employees and one of our clients. Of course, on the material of the incident that we encountered several months ago, it is possible to write an interesting and non-trivial detective story. But the competence of the technical support service does not include the investigation of detective cases. Her work should be organized in such a way that controversial situations are, if possible, excluded.

The history, the details of which can be found on the link above, once again convinced us of the correctness of our approach: we do not provide customer support either by phone or by e-mail. All work is carried out only through the ticket system. This approach is quite convenient for old customers, but new customers who are just starting to work with us often have questions. By phone and by mail, we answer only general questions. As soon as the client starts to deal with private questions, we ask him to write the corresponding ticket.

Why the main channel of interaction with customers is a ticket system?

First , a customer who calls technical support by telephone is often at the mercy of emotions and cannot provide an accurate description of the problem that has arisen. Very often we have to deal with users who are not technically literate and unable to talk coherently about their problems.
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If the dialogue has to be conducted exclusively in formalized writing, then the client invariably has to describe the problem as accurately as possible, highlighting the most important and distracting from secondary moments. If the request came from the client by phone, then the technical support staff would have to spend a lot of time clarifying the details. It would take a lot of effort to compile a logical description of the problem situation based on the verbal messages of the client, more than half of the experiences.

In addition, when communicating by phone, in most cases it is impossible to immediately answer difficult questions that require additional study from our side. If technical support is carried out by mail, then one has to constantly face losses and distortions of information: someone forgot to put the desired addressee in a copy, someone missed important information when quoting, the message accidentally got into spam, etc. In the ticket system, the entire interaction history is saved. Regularly analyzing the history of correspondence with customers, you can identify typical problems and ways to solve them - this greatly simplifies and speeds up the work of an engineer. For clients, you can also develop recommendations for actions in recurring problem situations, which also allows you to make their communication with the technical support service more informative and effective. In addition, in situations where several specialists are working on a client's request, the ticket system helps them coordinate actions and track the status of the issue.

There are often situations when the solution of a problem declared by a client is required to be transferred to a strictly defined specialist who is not currently in place. When transmitting information communicated by telephone through third parties, inevitable distortions arise, which affects the speed and quality of the solution to the problem. If the ticket is addressed to this specialist directly, then this allows you to establish direct contact with the client and avoid the effect of a “damaged phone” when communicating with him.

We also add that many engineers are much easier to communicate with customers in writing than by telephone. The company's management can more quickly evaluate the work of technical support engineers by analyzing the history of correspondence in the ticket system, rather than wasting time listening to telephone conversations.

Secondly , customer support exclusively through the ticket system is also provided for security reasons. When a user creates a new ticket, the system records the dates and time of the call, the contract number, and the IP address from which the call was made. Based on this information, you can easily identify the client.

With telephone technical support (even if all caller's numbers are determined and all calls are recorded without fail), such identification accuracy is impossible. Many social engineering schemes (i.e., access to information resources through psychological manipulation and the use of the human factor) are based on telephone calls from nominees. Expanding these schemes is extremely difficult, since identifying the caller is a very difficult and sometimes impossible task. In addition, a separate problem is proving the presence of criminal intent in the actions of the caller.
Technical support by mail also does not guarantee the exact identification of the user: anyone can send a dummy message on his behalf. Since it is very difficult to identify the sender of a message uniquely, mail is often used as a tool for phishing and social engineering.

When registering a new user, we definitely require to indicate passport data

This fact often causes outrage among new customers, who consider this requirement a manifestation of pickyness and distrust on our part. The reasons for such indignation are quite understandable to us: indeed, in recent times, a passport is often required to be presented in situations where it would be quite possible to do without it. However, registration as a client of a hosting provider does not apply to such situations.

The fact is that we very often have to deal with controversial cases. Often, for example, it happens this way: the programmer has not been paid for the work, and he threatens to completely disable access to the site to his dishonest customer. One more, not less often meeting situation: the head of the web project leaves the company, and only he has access to the sites. There was even a case in our practice when the site owner died, and his colleagues tried to regain access to the equipment. In all the situations described, there is one common point: a kind of “third party” appears, declaring that the site belongs to him, and not to our client.

In any dispute, we always act as impartially as possible and firmly follow the rules according to which the actual owners of the site are the person whose passport information was provided when creating an account. If access to an account is compromised for one reason or another, we ask the client to come to our office with a passport in order to establish his identity. Clients from other cities and countries, in such cases, please send your own photo and photo of the passport reversal.

In order to prevent illegal actions with client accounts in case of theft of passport data, we also provide for certain measures. The client can not change the passport data specified during the registration on his own. All changes are made by our specialists upon request through the ticket system after additional checks. So even if the credentials were stolen, the real owner always has the opportunity to return his account.

We also distinguish various categories of clients (individual, legal entity, individual entrepreneur, state institution). For organizations wishing to become our clients, we recommend registering as legal entities, and not to set up an account in the name of any of the employees. This elementary measure will help to avoid disputes about who actually owns the site.

What problems do you face?

The organization of the work of a technical support service is a very complicated issue and in many ways a controversial one. Each of you probably has experience of communication with technical support as a client. What is the best approach to organizing technical support? What needs to be done to improve customer support?

I would also like those who are "on the other side of the barricades" to speak on these issues - support engineers, call center employees and other professionals whose work is somehow related to customer support.

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