The most unexpected support call…

What our office used to look like in the Mojang days...we don't have any oil-paintings of our team

One guiding idea for Hiotlabs, like many other tech start-ups, is to achieve zero-touch support for our solutions. However, in reality there are always unexpected situations that occur and that you have to deal with. That’s in particularly true when you’re breaking new ground.

 

In the early stages of our operations we were focused to run 1st line support ourselves for several reasons. When a customer failed to install our sensors we called them directly and provided guidance. Besides getting to really know the root cause of the problem we also got to know our end-customers really well. Being a team with engineering type of backgrounds and with social networks primarily in the tech-scene it’s easy to think that your end-users are like your peers, but the reality is obviously more diverse. As an example we have in our pilots come across end-customers who haven’t downloaded an app before, or run very old versions of Android, etc. However, with few exceptions the majority of support cases is due to people typing wrong WiFi-password or connecting the wrong WiFi-network. All this adds up to the insight that you can never take anything for granted and you always need to have a strategy in place for how to onboard all kind of users. Because at the end of the day we really want our prevention service to be easy, intuitive and attractive to any homeowner.

 

Talking about unexpected challenges in customer support. Last night our support-line got one of the more unexpected phone-calls to date. Someone called from the US and asked for troubleshooting help to install Minecraft. A bit unexpected, our only connection to Mojang (the company behind Minecraft) is that we’re located in their previous office, which nowadays is transformed into a co-working space. Unfortunately we were not able to support the troubleshooting gamer 🙂