General Philosophy

• Customers are our best source of continuing business and new referrals. They are to be treated with courtesy and respect at all times.
• All clients are to be treated as equal and will get complete detailed explanations. This is to avoid the cases where some clients who are friendly get chatty responses; some clients get terse responses; some clients get no responses.
• Have the client assist in duplicating problems that they bring to our attention. Once a problem can be duplicated, or we have received the steps to create the problem, a resolution can be determined.

Time Consuming Issues

Some issues will consume an inordinate amount of time and may or may not be chargeable back to the customers if they are asking us to do something that ordinarily they should be doing. Since the primary purpose of support is provide 'how to' answers, and most of these fall into 'do it for them', you may have to confirm with sales if is it to be charged back or not.

In all cases, time consuming issues are to be done after primary support items are dealt with unless given as a special project.

Examples are:

• Ticket face coding will be completed during non-busy support times.
• System balancing will be completed during non-busy support times.
• Building a new venue map is generally a special project
• Season subscription setup/training will be completed during non-busy support times. This process may take 1 to 2 hours, so a block of time needs to be set aside.
• Web support will be completed during non-busy support times - unless it is an emergency and sales will not work

• Training and demo sessions are all to be pre-arrange and handled through the Sales & Marketing Department.
• Telephone training/demo sessions will be completed during a scheduled time when there is secondary support available to handle the calls or during a non-busy support time. This process may take 1 to 2 hours, so a block of time needs to be set aside. Between the hours of 8:00AM to 10:00AM if possible.
• Limit the number of training, demos or setup sessions scheduled for Wednesday’s. This is the support’s heaviest day of the week.
• Always check to see who else is available to provide primary support when a phone training session is planned and keep the team informed of status via iChat 'status' (eg 'training customer' or 'phone demo', etc.)

Prior to leaving the office, there is to be a turn-over process.

• Examine all your existing cases that are in progress.
• Discuss them with a team member and assign a case to somebody else with their permission.
• Repeat for all cases currently in your bailiwick prior to departure.
• the expectation is that all cases can be reassigned to someone else
• If there is a complicated case and you choose to keep it, then you are expected to follow that case until it is done. That means, while at a customer site, to complete that case after hours. Or, if on vacation, to deal with the case on an ongoing basis to continue to provide excellent customer service.

Remember: complete or turn over all cases prior to going on a protracted leave and advise your team of any peculiarities on the case

• Ask the customer to activate the remote access session
• Ask them to provide you the number and password for remote access the session
• Connect to their work station
• Ask the customer to confirm our identity by providing them their customer number and having them look it up in 'about Theatre Manager' or providing the case number that they received from us that initiated the need for report support session (PCI requirement for authentication)
• As part of the pre-amble, inform them how they can disconnect you immediately if there should be anything come on the screen that they feel you should not see or is private.
• Provide the appropriate support
• When the support all is finished, have the client disconnect you and have them acknowledge you are gone
• Do not leave a session active when you are done. If need be, close the session on their end to force you out.