La Piazza

Twitter allows you to be in touch with your circle of friends and to express your opinion on a specific subject, publish a piece of news, send out a warning…

There are many tweeters at Panda Security: Juan Santana , Enrique Aguilera, Yolanda Ruiz, Paula Quiros, Eduardo D’Antona,  Frank Mulder, Daniel Nyström, Marco Puszina, Kelly Crabbe, Darragh Kelly, Ana Etxebarria, Luis Corrons…

Today I would like to present some of the twitters in Panda Security’s Technical Support area:

PandaTechSup http://twitter.com/PandaTechSup, Tech Support profile. If you follow this profile, you will be up-to-date on tech support news, articles published in the support blogs and technical tips.

Ana Etxebarria: http://twitter.com/anae , Global Director of Services and Technical Support at Panda Security. If you subscribe to her tweets you will find everything from new emerging malware and computer security article links, to interesting comments.

Frank Mulder http://twitter.com/fpmulder, Technical Support Manager from Panda Security Benelux. With the links published by Frank, you will have technological news and the latest information on Panda’s demos, new versions, etc. at hand. In order to be Frank’s follower and access the information he publishes, you must be previously accepted by him.

Daniel Nyström http://twitter.com/dnystrom, Tecnical Support Manager from Panda Security Sweden. Become Daniel’s follower, and you will be able to access the news published in this area, as well as the news published by Panda Security.

If you want to know the scope of some of our twitters worldwide, their profile position or the number of followers they have, you can do so by accessing Twitterholic (http://twitterholic.com/, not Twitter) or Twittercounter (http://twittercounter.com/pages/100, powered by Twitter)

So, if you want to stay up-to-date on technical and technological issues, follow any of our colleagues at Panda Security.

Published by Cristina

The World Wide Web has become a new member of the family for most of the countries worldwide growing day by day and turning into a creature who speaks its own particular language. Technical language, or better said, the words that are used when talking about technical matters, have changed so much in the last 15 years that sometimes it is hard to keep up with the new trends.

Besides, if you are not a digital native, or have not adapted to the technological era, you are at risk of becoming an outcast in the community. Let’s give an example.

If you don’t know what Twitter is, how it works or why it is relevant, chances are it has been a hard year for you or that you are part of this unlucky group mentioned above .  Even if you are not a great fan of social networking sites or computers, being aware of technology is necessary nowadays. On the other hand, the average user sometimes has trouble understanding technical jargon. To top it all, technology industries tend to make up new tech buzzwords to define specific services or name certain products, making matters even worse.

To illustrate this, would you know what the terms ‘hotfix’, ‘service pack’, ‘solutions’, ‘feeds’ mean? These are only a few instances, but surely these kind of terms are not familiar to everybody, as referred to in The Global Language Monitor. If dealing with technical instructions can be tedious and complicated – remember your parents asking how to play a video tape? – add a couple of new wave tech words and there you have recipe for disaster.

Just a reflexion… what is your view on this matter?

Published by Rafa, January 7th, 2010

Before going deep into the matter, let me first of all introduce myself: I am Rafael Balzategui and I am leading the TechSupport team in Panda for the corporate products.

In the corporate market, where systems and infrastructure are becoming more and more complex, customers do expect problems. No matter if they outsource the maintenance and administration of their IT environments or they handle it by themselves, problems will show up. It is the way that we at TechSupport respond to these problems (customer angry) that can turn a problem into a business opportunity (customer happy). And let’s keep in mind that a happy customer tend to pay more, recommend your company and your products and is tolerant to other problems … at least, you get some initial credit with them. Moreover, it is said that more than five times more expensive to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one!

Ok then, at this point, we can agree that TechSupport is necessary and it returns value to our company, by keeping the customer happy. How to do this? In my opinion, the key point is to build trust with the customer and meet his expectations. But his expectations need to be aligned with what he has paid for. Easy to understand: if you buy a Fiat Cinquecento, you cannot expect to have the performance of a Ferrari F-50 and speed over 300 km/h. If you buy a product with standard support do not expect to get the response time or onsite support of a Premium or Platinum Support contract.

It is just a matter of being clear and honest with the customer. He has to know from the beginning, when he buys the product, the level of support he is getting jointly with the product itself. Some customers, due to the business they are running, might want to get stricter response times or a dedicated support engineer for example. That is fair and easy to understand. But these “gold expectations” must be paid services as skilled resources are expensive and limited. A Ferrari is more expensive than a Fiat, isn’t it?

And always from TechSupport we need to focus on meeting the agreed expectations with your customer. We need to be honest and communicate clearly, even if the customer is unrealistic or is sending out menaces. As long as we meet the agreement we have with the customer and he is aware of the service level agreement we have between him and us, he will end up being happy.

And as Albert Schweitzer said, “Happiness is the key to success”…