May 2007 - Posts

• TechEd 2007 - ANTS Profiler

  Next week my blog will probably be even quieter than usual as I'm going to be at TechEd 2007 in Orlando, Florida. I will be at the ANTS Profiler Booth #1433 and if you are interested to see how easy it is to use ANTS Profiler for profiling .net applications then it would be great to see you there. This will be my first TechEd and although it's going to be incredibly hard work but I can't wait to get out there and meet people and give some demos on how easy it is to use ANTS Profiler. Having been a developer in a previous life I have always considered performance and memory profiling to be time consuming and hard work but I love the fact that you can get immediate results using profiler. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted May 31 2007, 08:10 AM by Dave Mellors with no comments Filed under: Red Gate Software, ANTS Profiler, TechEd 2007

• What are we here for?

  This is not a theological question but a question of what is the role of Technical Support in a software company. The answer I guess depends on what you are providing technical support for and who your employers are but for me Technical Support isn't just about logging someones technical problem and resolving it. To be effective I think Technical Support should involve the following:- An involvement in the community Only by being involved in the community that uses your products can you understand where your customers are coming from and what they want. The community can provide valuable insight into your products and your support teams weaknesses and strengths and even provide suggestions on what can be done to improve things. Education, Education, Education This depends once again on the products you support but many problems are related to product documentation not being read, understood or just being plain poor. Your customers may be after a quick solution and don't have time for training and see support as a quick answer to getting things done in time. Maybe the customer has inherited the software and doesn't really understand it's benefits. If you can educate your customers then you should reduce the number of technical support calls and your customers opinion and return on their investment should increase. Customer Service Sometimes customers need to voice an issue that may not even be technical and frequently the customer will turn to the most accessible part of the company (without someone trying to sell them something!) in the hope that someone will listen and try to do something about it even if it's passing the information to the right people. Actually, I once had a customer phone up who didn't want me to do anything but just wanted to get something of his chest. Listening to your customers is a vital part of technical support. Problem solving Yes, sometimes you get to do something technical and investigate a technical problem. However, usually to get to the technical bit you actually have to understand the problem in hand and that isn't allways as easy as it sounds and once you've done the technical bit you will either end up doing some training to get the customer to understand whats going wrong and what they can do about it or maybe you have to employ your customer service skills to explain to the customer thats its a bug and you don't know when its going to be fixed. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted May 29 2007, 08:48 PM by Dave Mellors with no comments Filed under: Technical Support, customer service

• Technical support and customer service

  I have been working in the IT industry for more than 15 years and Red Gate Software is the first company to offer me customer service training and I think that says quite a bit about the company. Today I attended the customer service training course, which all of our technical support team (including the manager) are going on. The course was originally designed for sales people but it was easy to adapt some of the concepts to technical support and the instructor (Ron from FIRST touch) done a good job of providing relevant information and ideas relating to our own situation. In fact we work very closely with the sales team so learning some of things from a sales perspective was pretty useful as well. The level of support provided by our technical support team is in my opinion already superb and we are all very passionate about providing the best support possible but I'm not sure whether any of us fully appreciated how much we could improve our service just by using some simple techniques that we learnt on this course and I'm really looking forward to starting to use them in the next few weeks. I'll try and let you know how I get on through some of my blog posts. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted May 24 2007, 08:35 PM by Dave Mellors with no comments Filed under: Red Gate Software, Technical Support, customer service

• Profiling with ANTS Profiler and MSTest

  Had a question today from a customer interested in profiling his unit tests using MSTest which is part of the testing element of Visual Studio Team System. As I hadn't used MSTest before I decided to take a look and see if you could use it with ANTS Profiler. After my first attempt at profiling only produced results for MSTest, I suspected that my tests were being run in a seperate process. Luckily MSTest has a /noisolation argument and once I used this everything ran as expected. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted May 02 2007, 05:34 PM by Dave Mellors with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Red Gate Software, ANTS Profiler