A large multi-national company recently installed our software.  They put a lot of time into evaluating various software offerings.  Once they selected IssueTrak, they did a thorough job of planning the rollout.  They brought members of our Professional Services team to their headquarters several times to be sure things would work just right.

In a Linked-In ITIL group, someone posted a general question asking for recommendations for a good software package.  Here is what our customer wrote:

"You need to check out Issuetrak. http://www.issuetrak.com/ It will far exceed your expectations. Steve Anderson is the sales rep you should speak to. We are deploying this across the globe for 13 thousand users. Too many features to highlight. Go to their site and download a trial copy. Yes do your requirements which will help you determine the best way to set up this tool. The greatest thing is it is all configuration data driven. Their support is top of the line as well. We are using it for all our Operational and Service management needs. You will not want to use anything else once you see this product. Good Luck!!!"

We work hard to be sure our customers get top value from our software and services.  It's gratifying to see such good feedback.

Comments from the support survey

When someone contacts IssueTrak for support, we later send them a link to a survey so we can monitor how we're doing.  Here are some recent comments:

"Lisa from the Quick Response team was on this in about a second, and had a fix within one minute.  I had a deadline (of about five minutes), and was still able to hit it.  Doesn't really get much better than that.  I told Lisa she should take the rest of the day off... but I'm not sure if she did or not."

"IssueTrak as a product continues to be more and more inegrated with our business and the support is downright mind-blowingly good."

"Julian was awesome.  He called back quickly after hours and we got our issues resolved.  Excellent service and excellent knowledge and professionalism.  A nice and rare treat for customer support these days!"

A glimpse into IssueTrak's corporate culture

Here is an excerpt from the weekly report of Paul H, one of our tech support people:

"Juan with NCH Europe had a few problems when he wanted to search for issues. This was the type of issue that we should’ve been able to replicate fairly quickly, but I wasn’t. I had everything set up nearly the same as the customer, but I just couldn’t replicate the error. That’s where Lisa C. stepped in. Our normal process is to email Lisa and Brian when we are stuck on an issue, but Lisa was too quick for that.  She had noticed the issue and already had an idea about resolving it. She took the issue to dev and created a patch before I was able to ask for help. Both Brian and Lisa are really quick to help when they see an issue that they can assist with. They make our lives a lot easier here in support."

Paul didn't hastily turn the problem over to development.  He was working hard to replicate it.  Lisa in development is busy with a lot of other projects, but she is always monitoring support issues just in case there is something she can do to help out.

With such excellent cooperation among departments and dedication by all to a good customer experience, we end up with very loyal customers. 

We're all in one place

Of all the telephone sales solicitations I get, the ones I get most often are from off-shore software development firms offering their services.

I got another one today, and I explained once again that we do all of our software development in-house.  We find that there are lots of advantages to having the developers right here in our offices.  If the programmers have questions, everyone they might need to talk to is here.  If we have questions for them, we can gather in a conference room and discuss things using a whiteboard and looking at each other's notes.  I can walk down the hall and chat with the programmers to see how things are going.  If our support people run into a problem, they can talk to the developer who wrote the feature face-to-face.

After telling the off-shore salesperson today why we like doing our development in our own offices here in Virginia, he asked would we be open to having our testing done off-shore.  I said no, for the same reasons.  A lot of testing is cut and dry -- either the code passes the test script, or it doesn't.  But sometimes questions come up.  Sometimes a tester will point out that maybe the program does what it is supposed to do, but it might be easier on the user if we took a different approach.  Again, with our testers in-house, they can have a face-to-face conversation with the spec writer or the programmer to make sure the product is the best that it can be.

Likewise, our technical support is right here in our Virginia Beach offices.  They are part of the company meetings, and hear about the features of new releases.  They are able to talk to the developers if they need to.  If there is a question about whether a customer is current with their support agreement, the support rep can walk down the hall and talk to accounting.

If we outsourced development or QA or support, we would be able to save on our per-hour labor costs.  But the quality of our product and services would suffer.  We find that communication is key, both internally and externally, in our quest to be our customers' best software company.  By having everything here in one location, issues get addressed earlier on, problems get solved faster, and our software and support remains top-notch.

IssueTrak Community Forum

Like a lot of companies, we try to stay close to our customers.  We have the traditional avenues of communication, such as technical support, newsletters, and contact with our professional services staff and developers.

In addition, we have a person, Chris Thompson, whose main responsibility is to proactively call customers and ask how things are going.  She keeps a tally of our Net Promoter Score as well.

We just rolled out the IssueTrak Community Forum, one more way for us to stay in touch with our customers, and for our customers to connect with each other. It provides an easy way for customers to ask a question, share an idea, report a problem or even give praise. 

We look forward to this new form of interaction with our customers.  We have several IssueTrak team members ready to respond.  We hope to see customer-to-customer interaction too.

Give it a try and let us know how it works for you.  One way to do that would be write a message in the forum!