A few weeks ago, we received an email from one of our clients expressing their satisfaction with the support they had received. They compared their experience with their Cityworks Customer Support representative to other companies explaining how great he was at explaining and working through their concerns. The email stated, “I don’t think I have ever written any other company about their support staff but I felt I needed to because I felt that I learned more and also was spoken to in a clear and concise manner in the few hours that I spent on the phone with him than I have at some training classes I attended.” Because our goal is to provide the best possible support, we are pleased when we receive emails from clients sharing their feedback. I encourage you to share your experience with our support staff.
Full-time Programmer
In May, we brought on a full-time programmer, Alan Thomas, as part of our Customer Support Team. Alan is readily available to assist our Customer Support Representatives, researching code and/or debugging against client databases to replicate and pinpoint specific issues. Immediate accessibility to Alan allows us to find resolutions quicker without diverting our core development staff.
Alan also develops various support tools for our clients, such as the Project 2010 Update Tool, which converts the existing Desktop project hierarchy to the new method of managing projects in Cityworks 2010 (highlighted on page 25). Three other tools are being developed to help clients prepare additional domain configurations and move from a test environment to the production environment, give new clients a method to quickly create a Cityworks configuration against their GIS database, and make changes to their work order and service request template descriptions.
Enhancement Requests
In our Cityworks customer support database, we track all reported software bugs, problems, and, since June, all enhancement requests. We closely evaluate these enhancement requests to understand their viability and determine how best to incorporate them into our Cityworks development roadmap. More complex suggestions often require changes to long-established protocols, requiring thorough vetting before proceeding with the development. At the same time, our development roadmap must weave in support for new Esri software releases, database releases, operating system and browser upgrades, and other changes to peripheral software and processes. Above all, our primary goal is to provide a stable software platform. With over 400 licensed organizations, we receive many great ideas for enhancements. Since June 2010, we have entered 136 enhancement requests into our system. We appreciate our clients and value your input, and hope it shows through our responsiveness to your requests.
By Steve Thomas, Executive Manager, Customer Support, Azteca Systems, Inc.
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