Does Free Technical Support Make Software Better?

“Please contact support.” Makes you cringe, doesn’t it? At Newton we encourage people to contact support—by email or phone. No, I’m not kidding.

We call it “Support Driven Design”.  I’ll explain this concept in just a bit, but first I’d like to give you some background on how we came to believe that free technical support results in better recruiting software: it makes it easier to use, faster to deploy, and paradoxically, makes supporting your customers cost less (which in our case means we can sell our hiring software for less money).

In the beginning providing free technical support, like we do at Newton, appeared to be purely a business decision: giving away support makes the buying decision easier for people. We also didn’t have the time to build a big FAQ on our site, so we were pretty much required to do this personally anyway. On top of this, we also don’t like paying for support, or reading online help, and felt that we shouldn’t make our clients do something we don’t like to do. Today we think it was a good business decision, and an even better product one.

Of course we were warned.  The “old-school” software folks, whose advice we openly take and whose success we jealously admire, told us that providing free technical support was a bad idea. “You’re going to have to charge for it sooner or later because it will eat your margins,” “support is a profit center,” they’d say. We’ve always had a problem with authority…

Design the Question Out of the System

One of the first things we tell any customer at Newton is, “If you don’t understand something, no matter how small, it’s our fault, not yours. Let us know.” We ENCOURAGE technical support emails and phone calls. Again yes, I am being serious.

As a result, and contrary to what you might think, we are hardly ever asked to provide support. The net result of Support Driven Design has been that today we get less than 1 support question per year per customer, or about .01 questions for each user per year, a group of business users can be trained in 5 minutes, and a recruiter in a mind-numbing 30.

In the beginning, and still today, our product managers, i.e. the people responsible for designing Newton’s applicant tracking software, did all the walkthroughs, customer training, and provided all support. Without knowing it, we had started a “Support Driven” design shop. When we’d get a question from someone, we didn’t add it to the user manual, we’d think about how we could redesign Newton in such a way so that we didn’t have to answer the question again.

I think this has been more than a modest breakthrough for us. Instead of teaching people how to conform to our recruiting software, instead of an online hiring FAQ, we take each question and “design the question out of the system”.

For example, early on we had this bad “More Info” button that people overlooked. Since all support email came through my desk, as it does today, I answered the same question three times in one week, “Where do I find this <something>?” One of our customers actually apologized for asking me a “silly question”! Have we come this far? Do software users really think that it’s their fault for not understanding something? Clearly, it didn’t look like a button, and clearly it was our fault.  That week spelled the end of that button. Support questions: 0. Easier to use: 1.

The Tail Wags the Dog

Since we’ve never charged for support we’ve learned to appreciate that if we design a confusing feature we’re going to pay for it later. Since we don’t force people to an FAQ page, we know immediately when something isn’t working. The tail of support wags the dog of design: if you can’t charge for it, you better make it work right out of the box.

As a result, we often design a feature and say to ourselves, “we can’t do this, it will create support tickets.” This approach is not for everyone (especially for companies that get paid for making confusing software). It puts tremendous strain on our design process, and is the single greatest reason why it takes us 4 times longer to design (i.e. mockup, whiteboard, wireframe, etc.) a new feature than it does for our development team to build it.

The output of this also means that we can provide free training. We don’t like losing money any more than anyone else and if it took us 4 hours to train our customers, or 40 emails to answer their questions, we’d never be profitable. Free support: design the question out of the system + design rigor = easy training.

Maybe paid support is why one of the more common questions asked in an RFP is if we have an online FAQ. Think about that. Buyers are actually asking if you have a way NOT to help them. Our answer is simple, “just call us.” You might counter with, “well, I would like to just figure it out myself, without contacting support.” Tail wags the dog: you need an FAQ because the software is confusing, it is confusing because instead of designing your question out of the software, it was built into a support guide.

I think it is worth noting that people aren’t accustomed to this business model.  People actually apologize for “bothering me”.  One of the things we try hard for at Newton is to change this behavior, to “re-train” people (in 5 minutes or less, 30 minutes for recruiters <wink>) into believing that we aren’t doing them a favor for answering their questions, they’re doing us a favor by asking one. I think it speaks to just how far software has moved away from the user, and how far it has yet to go towards providing real productivity.

So the net result is that free support has led to less support. Like I mentioned before, we get about 1 support email per year, per client. I can’t imagine that Newton will ever have a technical support department that’s not run by our design team. Unfortunately, it’s gotten rather lonely over here in the support department. Can someone please contact support? Have I mentioned it’s free?

When will Applicant Tracking Software Get the Message?

"We were not able to identify your contact e-mail address. Your login e-mail address will be used as your contact e-mail address instead. Please be aware that this contact e-mail address will be used to contact you."

The message above was sent to a prospective candidate from an applicant tracking system -not ours. This system is managing a fortune 500 company’s careers site.  Yikes! It can hardly be debated that enterprise software is way too complicated and for the most part, pretty thoughtless when it comes to user experience. The message above is a perfect example.  The expensive applications that businesses use to run their human resources are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code. If you work at a company that uses buinsess software or you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like apply to a job — or, heck, even look at a job on a corporate careers site — then you’ve probably encountered some really annoying user experiences.

How did we get here? Part of the problem may be that the people using enterprise software just don’t demand anything better. They think all business software has to be complicated - it’s all they’ve ever known. People have just been dealing with poorly-designed technology for so long that they internalize the flaws.  Maybe it’s that a lot of these systems, applicant tracking software particularly, are built for “power” users so thoughtful, consumer-like, usability concerns are sacrificed for massive amounts of options that ultimately “sell” the technology.  In the end, buyers do compare features and typically the software with the most features wins.  But, the question that constantly nags us is - Does the user win?  We think not.

Clearly, the real topic here, the usability of enterprise software, is a huge can of worms and I’m only scratching the surface of an increasingly incendiary topic.  I can tell you this though; the “error” message above actually encourages us. It’s evident that a majority of our peers that develop recruiting software ignore design / usability. We don’t. It’s also clear that buyers of software are increasingly eager to find well designed software that improves usability and ultimately makes their lives easier. We like this trend, it plays to our strengths.

Finally, we want to make a public promise.  We will NEVER send another human a message that doesn’t make any sense.  It’s the least we can do.

Newton Software Releases Next-Gen Business Intelligence for Recruiting

Newton is fully featured applicant tracking software designed to be intuitive and powerful.  A new release improves Newton’s real-time performance monitoring capabilities to give users access to answers in real-time.

Human resource and recruiting professionals are always looking for answers to fundamental questions that arise in corporate recruiting, questions like:

Are we getting applicants to interview for our open positions?

Are we acting on applicants?

What are our best sources of applicants?

How long does it take us to hire?

Are there places that we can make improvements?

Everyone wants to run a high-performance hiring program. Newton’s performance management dashboard is designed to give you information in real-time so you will get the most out of your resources. With easy-to-read interactive charts and graphs, you will zoom into areas that interest you to surface information and drive conversations. Use Newton’s online dashboard to provide status updates or to run interactive staffing meetings. Your business partners will love how easy it is to log in and get an update.  And, best yet, giving access to your stakeholders is 100% free!

With Newton, real-time performance monitoring is now a reality allowing people to detect events or even patterns of events as interactions from all users are collected in the system. Newton gives you the power to develop insights and make evidence based decisions about your recruiting program. Now you can be proactive by pinpointing bottlenecks and identifying issues before they become larger issues. With Newton, you’ll always be prepared to answer the tough questions about your recruiting program.

See Newton’s performance management capabilities in action.

Joel Passen of Newton Software Interviewed by Top Recruiting Industry Influencer Bill Vick

Joel Passen, interviewed by Bill Vick, one of the recruiting industry’s top influencers, talks about Newton Software and emerging trends like social recruiting and mobile. Joel also discusses the trend towards enhanced usability and some of the issues that are catching his attention in the applicant tracking software space.

Joel Passen of Newton Software Interviewed by the Nerdstalker

Joel Passen interviewed by the Nerdstalker, Adolfo Foronda backstage at Mighty following a presentation at SF New Tech. Joel and Adolfo talk about how Newton’s applicant tracking system works, about the easy-to-use design and about the no-hassle business model.