Notebook Makers: Step Up Your Web Support

As I was going through the final scorecard for our Tech Support Showdown a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a disturbing trend in the ratings. Not just that several companies are being a bit stingier with the help they’ll offer for free in the warranty period, but that many grades wouldn’t be so low if the manufacturers didn’t have such terrible web support. Just look at Phone vs. Web for MSI, Samsung, and ASUS. In each instance, the company in question could have earned a B+ or even an A- if their websites weren’t terrible resources for customers.

These days it’s easy to answer most tech support questions with a few minutes and decent Google-fu. But there are plenty of times when users need answers to issues that specifically relate to their laptop brand or model. Instead of going to Google first, why wouldn’t you want customers to come to your support website? Why wouldn’t you want to resolve their problem without making them wade through tons of irrelevant and useless search returns? Why wouldn’t you want them to associate your website and brand with a feeling of satisfaction and not frustration?

Most of the problems we encountered could be fixed if manufacturers took a few simple steps toward improvement. Here are my top 5 suggestions:

1. Employ better web design and structure. Bad web design is responsible for a lot of the Internet’s woes, and in a tech support scenario it’s even worse. Your customers want the structure, navigation, and search on your site to be simple, straightforward, uncluttered, and logical. Unfortunately for users, this isn’t always the case. ASUS‘ website seems straightforward, but gets more confusing and twisty the further you go looking for support answers. Acer’s US site we found many FAQs written in French or Spanish, but not English, which indicated they might have snuck in from the sites of other countries. Poor or sloppy web design and structure are really inexcusable at this stage of the Internet.

2. Give users ways to narrow their search criteria so they can quickly and easily find information relevant to their needs. For companies that make more than just computers, that means filtering search results so that users don’t end up with article relating to refrigerators when what they want is help with their laptop (I’m looking at you, Samsung). It also means giving users the ability to search just within help topics for desktops or notebooks, and even just topics that relate to their specific model or model family.
3. Give users a way to help each other. I know that setting up and babysitting a forum so that it doesn’t become a spam wasteland takes effort and time, but it’s worth it. Many problems are solved by forum members who’ve either encountered them before or at least know how to go about fixing them. Plus, giving your customers a place to create a community all centered around your brand is a good marketing practice, anyway. If you don’t want to go the full forum route, consider allowing comments on notebook mode-specific pages. It’s not as effective, but does allow some customer feedback to happen.
4. Keep on top of the questions people ask and the problems they often run in to. This is where having a forum is also helpful. You can keep track of the kinds of questions people ask over and over, what users search for, and which threads are most popular. When you find those frequent questions or problems, add the solution to your main support website. If a user on your forum posted a particularly helpful way to resolve the problem, repost it (with permission) and give them credit. Adopt a similar strategy for the wider internet as well. Keep track of search terms that involve specific model numbers to see if they include error messages or common problems. Again, add the solutions to your website. That way, when people search they’ll end up on your support site, which may encourage them to start there the next time they have a problem.
5. Ask Microsoft to help you out. Unlike Apple, PC notebook makers don’t create the OS their machines run on, but that doesn’t mean that customers (particularly less tech-savvy ones) won’t or shouldn’t go to the manufacturer’s website to look for answers to questions about Windows. Since the information they seek is likely in Microsoft’s tech support or knowledge database, why not devise some way to pull their content to your site for search results? Either direct users to Microsoft’s support site or syndicate the content on your site, but with their branding.

How about you, laptop owners — what else could manufacturers do to improve their web support?

Image Credit: “Stupid Computer!!!” by f1uffster (Jeanie) on Flickr