I have spoken before about my personal “Time to Screen” , for the record I currently think I can achieve from wake up to screen in less than a minute now (with always on Ipad and Iphone sitting on bedside cabinet) but that is probably too much information for you. I wanted to explore with this post a bit more than I have in the past how the technology is affecting us as developers and service providers and how use of technology changes how we are perceived and expected to react through our role supporting users.
First is technology really affecting us and people in general – I think so and so do others see this video by Sherry Turkle – Author of “Alone together” a great read on the subject.
In one particular example Turkle quotes
“children and adults who hesitate to use the phone because it seems awkward and intrusive; it is much easier, they say, to dash off a text or email.”
At the same time, she points out, because of this behaviour, people expect quick responses.
So I postulate we need to meet ever increasing expectations, therefore we need systems that enable and help us to do that. With the introduction of our supportworks gatekeeper James, who has been doing sterling work I think we definately are improving our support service, however with the advent of the realtime web upon us do we need to incorporate realtime into our support infrastructure, I worked a while back on some html and css enhancements for Supportworks self service but I don’t think they went anywhere, or maybe this is a demand too far.
Maybe we should make more use of the realtime (realtime/like) social media channels that we know exist and do seem be frequented by our users – Twitter, Facebook, Path etc.
Ultimately I think the only true answer, and it would be interesting to know , comes from the end user, we really need to know what they are looking for in the level of support. As we are concerned about design, with user centered design we should be concerned about support from a user designed support perspective.
