Importance of Training in App Support

What is Application Support?

An Application Support is a process where resources are intended to provide the Customer or end user with information and support related to a company's products and services. Their primary responsibility is catering incidents and requests received from end-users, investigating these and either responding the end user with a solution or escalating it to the other teams that can resolve it. The purpose of an Application Support team is usually to troubleshoot problems, provide guidance, and resolve tickets raised by Customer or end user for the software /services being used by them. Companies usually provide Application Support to their customers through various channels like toll-free numbers, websites, instant messaging or email. There are also in-house Application Support designed to provide assistance to employees.

So it becomes necessary that the Application Support Team is trained in the Domain in which they need to provide assistance. Such kind of training depends upon the structure of the company, the Application Support is working with, like Service Based or a Product Based company. 

In Service Based Companies, they tend to have proper trainings scheduled before a resource is On-Boarded on the project. The primary reason behind structured protocol for training application support resource is that, the cost is billed to the client by the Service providing Company so that proper service is provided to the respective client. 

But when it comes to Product Based Companies, they usually have their in-house Application Support team to troubleshoot problems, provide guidance and resolve tickets raised by Customer or end user. The product based company develops new features month by month and release them to the Customer or end user. Customer or end user try to use these new features and usually don’t understand how to use it and get confused or encounter error while using the same. As a result, they reach out to Application Support team for assistance, expecting that their issue / query will be resolved instantaneously (assuming that the Application Support team is aware of the newly released features and can resolve their issue). However if unfortunately, the Application Support team hasn’t received any training on the functionality / feature which was released to Customer or end user, it results in a delayed / incorrect response to the Customer or end user. This directly impacts the face value of the product due to delayed support provided to the Customer or end user. This situation can be avoided if proper training plan and process is in place.

There are various areas listed below in which an Application Support team should be trained:

Communication skills:

This is the backbone of Application support which is missed in most of the cases or taken for granted. In order to understand an issue correctly and provide appropriate response which the requester understands easily, all the Application support executives should be thoroughly trained on written and oral communication. This can include various aspects like, listening skills, decent command over the primary language used for communication, usage of appropriate words and written communication with respect to grammar. To achieve desired results, periodic training should be scheduled apart from the base training that is conducted during on-boarding. Ideally Soft Skills trainer should be hired to impart such training. Periodic tests (Verbal and written) should be conducted to make sure there was some value addition done by the training.

Domain training:

This is another critical factor essential for providing efficient and perfect application support. In order to provide accurate solution as quickly as possible domain training is very important. This can be executed by proper planning, creating training material if required, deciding the time that would require an average individual to understand the application well enough to resolve queries in an optimum time, preparing test material to check if the respective executive have understood what was taught and last but not the least periodic trainings on the new features or enhancements that are developed and deployed.

Team building training:

This is another important aspect of a successful application support training. This is vital not only for application support but any group of people who have to work together. Team building training helps an individual to be a good team player, to learn to back you team members in emergency, efficient transfer of knowledge within the team and last but not the least trust. This factors can be achieved by conducting team building workshops once a quarter, team lunch and team outings. This helps the team to get together which in turn will help in achieving above mentioned objectives pretty easily.

Conclusion:

Thus, it can be concluded that proper Industry training specifically covering above types should be given to the Application Support Team so that they can help the Customer or end user whenever an issue / request is raised. This not only helps the customer or end user, it helps the App Support Team to understand the business process thoroughly and are aware of the development happening in the company, which increases their interest to grasp the knowledge and increases productivity and quality of services and products

About Author:

Amol Bhembre is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: amol.b@spluspl.com