Supporting You: What You Want and How We Can Deliver

By Peter Fearey | Posted on January 24th, 2006

On the QuickBase team, support is a team effort. We have leads that triage and handle the bulk of the cases, but we all take support cases handling different areas of expertise. My area is usually on things like compliance or legal questions, as well as handling folks that have gotten really mad. (I don’t want to see any of you there!) While it can get stressful at times to juggle support and other priorities, it does also keep us in touch with customers, which we all appreciate and hope you do too.

With that as a backdrop, when I look at the complaints about QuickBase support the two main buckets are:

1.  I want better answers to my questions.

2.  I need an answer immediately.

Let’s work together on the first one to get it off the list. The best way to improve answers is to give us more in the question. Even for a simple case like "How do I calculate how many days a task is open?", often there are multiple answers. In this case, the customer was using the number of days a task in some baseline calculations, which meant it made sense to set the calculation up to return a number, rather than a duration.

Understanding the specific business problems you are solving gives us a huge leap forward in giving you the information you need to get QuickBase dancing to your drum beat.

Another quick hit: Telling us what you have tried helps us gauge where you are with your QuickBase understanding. Sometimes, folks find our answers to assume too much knowledge, and sometimes too little. So, in the example above, it helped to know that the customer had tried several formulas and what the results had been in trying those.

Does this make sense? Think we can solve this one together?

As for #2, first thing is noting the word choice. I used "need" instead of "want" for this. I’m talking about the situations where you really need an answer immediately, and waiting even an hour, much less a day, won’t work.

From what we’ve seen, typically "need" happens because something is blocking your use of QuickBase. One cool idea given to us for this was a status hotline. If, for example, our monitoring (that “uses” QuickBase from across the country) found an issue with access from the MidWest, we would update the hotline to tell you that we’ve seen and what is happening around it. If you saw an issue, you could call the hotline for a report of any incidents have been reported, so you know status.

Other ideas, or examples of where companies have done this well?

I also want your thoughts on "want" too, but "need" as higher priority, as I think you would agree.

P.S. I’d feel remiss if I didn’t point you to some suggestions in case you feel like you are having an access/performance problem. Check out: https://www.quickbase.com/db/8emtadvk?a=dr&r=yyz&rl=bedc