Xarg blog Archive

I think anyone who works on bug-tracker should read Call Center: Profit or Loss? by Bruce Tognazzini in his AskTog column. It's a funny article and he makes the very good point that call center support can be a real material expense and that properly handled can be both much cheaper and improve the companies products and support.

You have to believe that most call centers have a support DB to help field calls (and the ones that don't probably cost companies even more money) and it is a small step to turn tie that into a ticketing system and generate real dollar figure costs for helping people resolve problems with your products. Which should ultimately direct you to how to resolve the problems at the source: your product's design and documentation.

I think the improvements in consumer class PC hardware installation documents are the product of this feedback loop (the simple install poster for hard-drives certainly has that feel).