Accounting software - What are the various after-sales services available?

After you had signed the paper on the dotted line, honeymoon is almost immediately over. No, I am not talking about marriage in life, but a marriage in business(not much difference anyway).

When you are in the service line , managing your customers (users) expectation can be a challenge. You have very little time to explain to them that we worked on an optimum resources to handle all support at the same time, but to prioritize the urgent ones first and you will be the last in our lists.

Some put you through a list of automated options before you can speak to the customer service officers (banks), Some leads you to their online help resources by keying in some keyword search. Others do not even have a person to speak to at all.

So, before you embark on any software subscription, find out what are the after-sales service options they provide and each plan comes with what options of support.

Below are the commonly available support services provided by vendors
1. Online help resources
2. Video help resources
3. Forum discussion
4. WhatsApp chat
5. Email support
6. Helpdesks call in support
7. Remote access support

While some vendors have a mix of one or more options, but you hardly have one that have all the available options. Here are some skills to access each options.

1. Online help resources – find out how regular the resources are being updated. Monthly is best, half a year is good but once a year is bad. Big screenshots with step by step buttons is a plus.
2. Video help resources – Voice over is a challenge for user if the speaker has a strong accent. Text guide is a better option.
3. Forum discussion – This is when users have exhausted all avenues and no reply from the vendors that ussers seek help from the forum.
4. WhatsApp chat – When your situation is from urgent to not so urgent. You send in your videos or snapshot of your screen of your issue(s).
This is less formal where you want a quick clarification only or avoid the formality of an email.
Check out the response time, but let us be fair, if you send a query at 2am in the morning when it is their sleeping time. But if you do get a response, they are doing a good job.
5. Email support – Usually this is when immediate response is not required or some official notice or some serious commitment from each other,
when WhatsApp takes over the bulk of the support requests.
6. Help-desks call-in is less common, now that WhatsApp support provide a better picture of the issues at hand. Likely that you will be advised to take a picture and send via WhatsApp
7. Remote access is when all the above still unable to solve the problem that you allow remote access to your system.

We at Realtimme Cloud, provide all the options available to our users and the most popular is WhatsApp support (+65 8376 2989) , which we also encourage, for a picture speaks a thousand words and video speaks millions.
While we keep our online help-desk resources updated regularly upon any release of new features and functions, user can also find out when were the new features of functions were added and if it Is of relevance to them, and if it is, how to apply to their company use. We also enhance and update our screen capture with how-to videos for those that do not like to read.

Our email support, we ensure that our user will get a reply on the same day for any mail on or before 4 pm. We leave an uninterrupted stretch of time from 9 to 10 am and 5 to 6 pm to deliver quality work for you.

Our email reply does not mean an immediate solution to your questions, but to acknowledged that we have received your email. But we sometimes do, if they are commonly asked questions and we have a solution to it.
For those that requires more investigation or less urgent, we have the discretion of setting the response as urgent to low priorities, because we want to let our users know that not all cases are urgent. This is to enhance our user’s communication and manage user’s expectation. We do hear our user’s out if they can convince us that their case is urgent.

By committing and subscribing to an accounting software as a service (Saas), is like going into a long term business relationship, just like any other relationship, must be based on respect and trust, understanding and keep all communication open, because we start with you…we grow with you.

Writer : Choo Hong Peng,
Chartered Accountant, Singapore