An important aspect of support that is easily forgotten is the need to build out your infrastructure to support your support efforts. This may include:
- Creating a support knowledgebase so that your support engineers can capture solutions to the problems they solve.
- Provide access to the support knowledge base to support self-service by end users. This access is often limited for privacy reasons – end users should have access to solutions to common problems but not the details to specific incidents.
- A support environment to simulate problems. In some cases, such as an online trading system perhaps, you don’t want your support engineers trying to diagnose end user problems on the live system itself due to potential side effects of doing so.
- Installing communication systems such as chat software and a phone/call in system.
- Automated support systems such as integrated voice response (IVR) and artificial intelligence (AI)/bots
Figure 1. High-level architecture for a Support environment (click to enlarge)