Peculiarities of national support: in 6 languages ​​from Moscow, plus Delhi, Bangalore, Bucharest and Tokyo teams

- You have reached English Support. Will you be comfortable communicating in English?
- Can we talk in Russian?
- My apologies as Russian support is not available at the moment. I can help you translate. Can I? I translated my answer using google.
- Good!
Dialogue with Delhi during Russian holidays

Historically, it happened that even when the first Acronis people were sitting in the attics of MIPT, Germany, the USA and Japan were our main markets. Therefore, from Moscow we support advanced, second level in English, German and 4 more languages. In other countries, there are teams that provide support mainly at the first level. So, Japan is supported from Tokyo, in Bucharest there is a support team with several European languages, as well as Turkish. Two more large support teams working with English around the clock, in Delhi and Bangalore. Sometimes our Russian colleagues get to them during non-working or holiday hours - below there will be a couple more examples of what comes out of it.

I will talk about how we work, how we look for and train teams, and how the Japanese standard support case differs, for example, from the German one.


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Selection

The first difference of multilingual support from the usual organization: you need to recruit people who can speak fluently in the required languages. For example, in English, even Upper Intermediate does not always suit us - we need those who can speak like their own, without hesitation. Alas, but from the point of view of the technology company, the surprise is that, for example, for French, Spanish, Italian and German - these are most often graduates of humanitarian specialties. That is, people who obviously all their life dreamed of helping IT professionals.

In practice, we tried to take IT graduates and teach them the language, and take future translators and train them in the necessary part of IT. The second is much more efficient, since everything really serious in any case goes to the experts of support or development with the collected information and translated into Russian or English.

The second procedure is that all people in all languages ​​need to be taught new information, for example, before release. For this we have a special trainer who speaks Russian and English and can speak freely with the heads of language teams (they also speak at least English).

The trainer picks up on a new product before its release with QA and developers. It is important for him to understand not only and not so much the list of features, as to reveal new technologies, to understand exactly how they work. For example, a user through the interface may get the impression that his data when restoring "magically" appear on the SharePoint site. In fact, this data is first temporarily placed in the temp folder on the machine and only then placed in the Content DB database, after which the temp folder is deleted along with the contents.

This is all important for support, because you need to understand how everything works. Accordingly, after reading the technical writer's documentation, the trainer and several people take soldering tools from the support, arm themselves with patience and go to feed the developers cookies. Why is it important? For example, in one of the functions, the creation of additional network resources is now based on another protocol. For the developer, this is just a library change, and for support, a circus with horses in non-trivial client configurations. And it is better to know in advance what the pitfalls can be. And such “small replacements” are not always documented, therefore, it is necessary to walk with your feet.

Immediately after the release, another wave of updates for the teams is going on - this is an analysis of support appeals, viewing reviews in social networks, feedback from exploitation. New support cases are created, something instead of solving a “patch” of support right away is transferred to the development for completion or to QA as bugs (for example, it can be an auto-configuration feature so that the client does not do something with his hands).

How information is collected

First, the symptoms, you can already do something about them. But in the case of technical problems, symptoms alone are often few, and when complex diagnostics on the first or second line are needed, it is usually done with internal tools. This is either a method included in the product and accessible from the menu, or a separate utility that the client downloads and launches to collect data.

Our main tool is AcronisInfo , which collects data about the machine, product, system, selects the OS logs and product logs. It is launched immediately from modern products or sent by reference, if we are talking about support for Legacy. Acronis Cloud Connection Verification Tool is our utility for checking client's connection to the data center. In essence, this is a bag of ping, tracert, and the like. ProcessMonitor - very often we use this tool in order to understand what is happening at the client on the machine in the process of performing our tasks (backup, restaurant, synchronization). We also use Wireshark (or tcpdump in Linux systems) if we need to understand what is happening with a network connection, with a NAS, network folder or something else on the network. It is convenient, popular and also does not need comments.

This is where the first feature of multinational support arises. The fact is that in general, in almost all countries, employees are allowed to run utilities during a remote access session. But not in Germany.

When contacting from Germany, it is often necessary to explain in a long time and in detail why exactly each utility is needed, what exactly (in detail) it does, what the employee is going to do with it and why, and how he guarantees that there will be nothing more than what was described be done in stealth mode. This can take up to half of the call time - say, 20 minutes for a dialogue and 20 minutes for a direct remote session and solution of the problem. On the other hand, when we use something from our internal corporate toolkit for private clients, total happiness comes on that side. Because in Germany, they really appreciate something that they have done specifically for you, such steps to meet.

Training

Training is conducted in two cases: for beginners and 1-2 weeks before the new release. From time to time, the quality control department comes to support and teaches people to speak with other people more intelligently. On the basis of the same courses, novice etiquette and mentality education from different countries is built. By the way, we have fewer languages ​​of support than product languages ​​- “difference” is supported in English.

For a month, a graduate of a humanitarian specialty (most often a linguist, psychologist or teacher) learns basic things and learns what a command line is, understands the symptoms of different products, understands about the technologies of these products.

In Japan, for example, it is a common phenomenon, when only a team leader is fluent in English, the rest speak only Japanese, so our coach teaches them, and he teaches the others.

Entering the team through a series of interviews: for general adequacy with HR and then with a hiring manager, checking the language (including a phone call with a native speaker), then homework for some simple technical topics (checking learnability), then concluding with the department director.

At the end of the first month, the practice begins with relatively simple cases (more often - letters, where you do not need to react instantly), plus go for 1-2 hours of training per day. And preparation for the documentation. We have a number of laboratory works with our virtual girls. We deploy pre-broken images of virtual machines, and beginners need to connect to the client, figure out what is wrong, and repair or transfer them to the experts. At the end of training - the exam.

Here is a girl from the team:

“Just starting to read, google every word. When she came, she did not know what tape libraries were and looked at them in google pictures. For 3 years - a third of work: googling or search in our documentation. I have mastered a lot of things - all the same I need to know about all the products. I am not an expert on Linux, for example, and if I need to describe something in the settings, I will definitely go to the expert and check with him. ”

As a learning management system, we use the Docebo web platform for learning. It makes the Italian company, which provides a very good, and most importantly, reliable service. We started recently, because we realized that we need to somehow somehow build up the knowledge base correctly - various internal courses are located inside. There is also documentation on the analogue of the internal Wikipedia. Since we support all current versions and “minus one” of them, the difference is up to 3 years, so you need to keep old cases, but also not to load newcomers with what was 5 years ago.

Support procedures are documented. Usually, information comes from development in a rather chaotic form, but rather quickly - within 3–8 hours from the implementation of the feature. All this is documented and entered into standard work scripts. However, sometimes you need to walk and ask questions. Considering some interesting features of communication of people with different worldviews, this is often a whole story. Because the developer has a thought, and he has no time. It so happens that the techrayter comes and makes it clear that he will not leave until he gets an answer, then they try to help him a little more than usual. Well, besides the interaction processes between teams, well-established and well-established links with specific development experts often help.

National features

The lowest grades of customer support are in Germany and Japan. In Russia, for example, they can deliver the highest score if they just hear a competent and polite technical speech (especially in contrast to previous negative experiences; the service component in Russia is not as developed as, say, in Germany, Japan or the USA), but a quick decision important too. In Germany, getting the highest score is a rare luck. A quick decision, a detailed explanation, “licking” and all that — this is the norm for local support. In order to get an assessment above the norm, it is necessary to tell in detail what exactly was done for a person within the company by an expert right by steps. They love to get reports on how they worked for them, and go into details.

In Japan, the three or four is already good. To get the top five, you need to improve in solving the same ticket, probably from the very birth, learning like a ninja. The philosophy is this: if something does not work in the product, then our contact has already taken the time to tell us about it. About the highest estimate of speech can not be.

The peculiarity of the US market is that many try to break through immediately to a second-line expert, not really listening to the first one. Experienced specialists are able to prove their skills and solve a problem. But it also happens that some very important clients have a direct connection immediately with experts - and do not hesitate to call on minor issues. For speed of decision, often their “back” is not transferred to the first, but still the main contact for them is also usual support.

Well, and more about customer support from Russia: it happens that appeals fall into the English-speaking team, because it works around the clock and on holidays.


Well, and finally - a few facts about our support: 63% of technical inquiries, 37% of licensing questions, web site and other topics, 95% of problems are solved without the need for referral to experts, 58% of problems are solved after the first contact; up to 35,000 remote access sessions with customers per year; 40% of girls work in support, 60% of men work in total, we provide support in 9 languages, and this whole crowd can drink coffee from about a ton of coffee beans in a year.