support KashFlow Accounting Software

We’re hiring – Customer Support Manager required

May 20th, 2010 by Duane Jackson

We’re looking for another bright spark to join our ever growing team. The job title is “Customer Support Manager”. The role will involve liaising between our small support team and “Big” Tim, our CTO.

NOTE: This role has now been filled.

As well as managing the existing team and ensuring they’re delivering the highest possible standard of support to our customers, you will also be:

Providing email support to SME users and Accountants
Providing telephone support, as required, to Accountant partners
Identifying when support is not performing as required and taking such steps as are necessary to rectify that state
Mentoring and supporting junior staff
Assisting the CTO in implementing and refining the support procedure
Driving the initiative to provide our customers with better levels of self-service support by:
- Maintaining and continually adding to the knowledgebase
- Recommending improvements to the support process
- Identifying gaps in team knowledge and addressing them
- Identifying weaknesses in the current support resources and addressing them
Designing, creating and maintaining a set of reports to give board visibility about the performance of the customer support function

The ideal candidate will come from a customer facing background, ideally from within the accounting/bookkeeping industry. The ability to learn quickly is imperative but, more important than anything else, the applicant must be enthusiastic and have the bags of energy required to work in a busy, entrepreneurial environment. A technical aptitude is also essential.

Must-haves include:

Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Familiarity with the use of a PC
A good level of numeracy
Over 2 year’s commercial, office-based experience
Previous responsibility for supervising and mentoring other staff, or a clear aptitude to do so
A passion for providing an exceptional level of customer service
Ability to use Microsoft Office suite of products to a good standard
Ability to communicate effectively at technical and business levels
Thorough and accurate with good attention to detail
Able to work effectively and to tight deadlines
Excellent written and verbal communication skills (so important, I’ve included it twice!)
Qualified to “A” level or equivalent (some degree of Further Education)

Does it sound like something you or someone you know would be interested in? If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Applictions should be by email. Send your CV, covering letter and salary expectations to careers@kashflow.com

NOTE: This role has now been filled.

No agencies.
Our usual notice applies: If you are an agency and you call/email about this role anyway, then I reserve the right to include you in a future blog post about recruitment agencies who can’t read and can’t be any good anyway or they wouldn’t have to phone people who explicitly said “No Agencies”.

Tags: careers, hiring, jobs, support
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Reviewing from the wrong perspective

April 19th, 2010 by Duane Jackson

Through a combination of bad planning on my part and staff holidays, I ended up covering support this weekend.

It was interesting to see an old chestnut come up in the form of this email from an accountant.

Not impressed at all! Having been in practice over 20 years I can only say I won’t be recommending to ANY of my clients!

Further questioning on my part revealed

Not at all user friendly in setting up additional nominal ledger codes! Sage far more useful and better instructions

I’ve seen these kinds of comments from accountants before. What usually happens is that they hear the hype about KashFlow, often from a client, and decide to investigate for themselves.

Rather than looking at the software via our Accountants interface, they dive straight in to the end user software. They usually concede that Sage is too confusing for their clients, but they like Sage themselves.

As we deliberately set out to be different from Sage (why replicate the problem you’re trying to solve?) they find the way KashFlow does things to be counter-intuitive and deduce from that that their clients (the ones who don’t like and wont use Sage, remember) wont like it.

Spot the flaw in that logic?

Sure, an accountant needs to do some due diligence on a piece of software before they recommend it to their clients, but still too many make the mistake of reviewing the software from their highly-trained perspective, rather than from the perspective of the people they’re reviewing it for.

Although often when they’re given a guided tour of our Partner Programme software and see the benefits to them of their clients using the software, they start to change their mind.

Then when they get their clients to look at the software for themselves, they’re sold.

And to finish things off, here’s another email we received on support this weekend from a web hosting company.There’s nothing exceptional about it, we get emails like this on just about a daily basis but we never tire of receiving them!

From: Jim McDonald
Subject: 1st Class Product

Dear KashFlow, I just wanted to drop you a email to say how fantastic your product is.

There are loads of great features on KashFlow and aside from a great price and ease of use and first class support from the KashFlow team the main one for us is the plug in for the billing system we use WHMCS, being able to update our accounts program when we make a sale is a great help and allows us to streamline our business.

Our only regret about KashFlow is we did not find this sooner!!

Kind Regards

Jim McDonald
Webhost 4 Less

Tags: accountants, Partner Programme, support
Posted in Accounting, Technology | 7 Comments »

The 10 Rules of Software Support

March 8th, 2010 by Duane Jackson

10 Commandements I’ve commented before that support is the one side of the business I have trouble letting go of and letting others take full responsibility for. It’s just so important that we get it right as it’s essential to encouraging those taking our free trial to become paying customers and to keep existing customers happy (and therefore continue to recommend us).

Whilst we have a procedure document detailing how support requests should be dealt with, I thought it might also be useful to distill this into to 10 golden rules. I’m publishing them here so that customers and trialists know what they have the right to expect from the support team.

Perhaps if you’re starting a business where there’s an element of support then you could take and adapt these for your own uses too.

1) Be Responsive – Keep the Customer Informed

We’re well known for being very quick to answer support emails, whatever the time of day or day of the week. We need to keep it that way. If when you first look at a support request you can’t answer it right away -perhaps because you need to do some investigation or you need to speak to someone – let the customer know. It’s not ideal that you can’t give them a solution straight away, but at least they know they’re not being ignored.

2) Be Honest

Don’t try to fob off a customer. If they’ve found a bug or we’ve cocked up, acknowledge it and deal with it. Trying to pull the wool over their eyes wont work and breaks Rule #3.

3) Show Respect

Yes, we sometimes get asked what seem like a silly question. But if we’re not making the process intuitive enough or the solution easy enough to find, that’s our fault – not the customers. So don’t patronise customers.

Occasionally we might get someone be rude or hostile on a support ticket. Help them and they’ll calm down – and usually apologise.

4) Don’t Doubt What the Customer Tells You

I know that what the customer is saying has happened is technically impossible, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a problem. No one is going to send us a support ticket and lie for the sake of it. Don’t assume it’s a PEBCAK issue. Work with the customer to get to the root of the issue.

5) Answer ALL Questions

It’s so frustrating when you email a support desk with 3 questions and their reply answers 2 of the questions and totally ignores the 3rd.

Yes, we’re busy. But not taking the time to deal with things properly in the first place is going to make us even busier. Check and double check you’ve answered all questions asked of you before you send the reply.

6) Be Sure about the Question and the Answer

Don’t guess. If you don’t understand what you’re being asked then ask for clarification. An answer to a question they didn’t ask helps no one.

Don’t guess the answer either. If you’re not 100% sure that the information you’re giving is accurate then check with someone or test your solution.

7) Be Clear in your Response

If you’re telling someone they need to activate the laser guided missile function to resolve their problem, tell them HOW to activate it. It’s better to not assume anything and give a comprehensive answer than to be vague.

8) Keep Your Promises

If you tell a user you’ll let them know when a feature is available or that you’ll get back to them tomorrow after checking with someone – make damn sure you do it.

9) Be Human

Your mother didn’t give you the name “Support”, so don’t sign off as “Support”. Use your real name, be friendly and own the problem. People prefer to deal with real people rather than someone that sounds like a computer.

10) ?

I’m leaving 10 open for you, the reader, to suggest. Based on your experience of our support desk and other support systems, what really frustrates you? Use the comment form below to submit Rule #10.

I’ll update this post in a week or so with one of the suggestions

Tags: rules, support
Posted in Ramblings, Small Business | 12 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘support’