What if the accounting software support doesn’t understand my business and can’t help me?

Dec 9, 2021

If your software company support doesn’t understand your business, it’s going to be hard for them to help you.

Most of us have experienced this in some capacity or another. We’ve called a customer support hotline and our experience was less than stellar. Or worse, they truly didn’t know how to help us.

How can a company that sold you their product or service not know how to help you?

There are many reasons for this including:

  • The software vendor was acquired. Now the product or support team is being phased out.
  • The support team is inexperienced, mostly made up of new hires, or were not sufficiently trained.
  • The helpdesk has a high turnover. Staff doesn’t stick around long enough to learn their position.
  • The onboarding process was brief, meaning they didn’t invest the time to truly learn the ins and outs of your business and its needs.

How do you figure out whether an accounting software partner will invest the time to know you and your business so that they can help you when you run into issues?

First, find out how long their support staff has been on this product or service. The longer they’ve been there, the better. For example, our employees have been with us for an average of 15.5 years. We invest a lot of time and energy into creating a great work culture and good relationships with our clients, who have been with us an average of 16 years.

Secondly, ask them about their onboarding process. Learn how much time they spend asking questions and getting to know your company. What types of questions will they ask you? Do they have other clients with needs similar to yours? Ask about the type of cross-training that they provide for their support staff.

Over our 50+ years of serving wholesale petroleum distributors with industry-specific accounting software, we’ve realized that it’s essential to learn everything we can about their business. This is why we invest heavily in getting to know our customers during our onboarding process.

Thirdly, quiz them on how they prepare their support staff. Find out how they update their staff to best support you on your software. Do they document your unique configurations, customizations, and other operational needs? At AIMS, as soon as the trainer is finished onboarding a client, they create a briefing document. Then, our entire support staff reviews the brief enabling them to provide efficient and accurate assistance to each client.

We cross-train our support staff so that in addition to providing support for our existing users, they can also teach new users how to use our accounting software. This allows them to acquire a deep knowledge of our software giving them the ability to resolve both simple and complex issues.

The best strategy to make sure that your next accounting software partner is properly investing in learning the ins and outs of your business to better serve you is to ask about their onboarding process and their support team.

Lastly, if you have any questions while searching for your next accounting software, please don’t hesitate to call or email Annette at 318.807.9313 or akesler@aims1.com. She’s a wealth of information and would love to share it with you!

We’re glad you’re here,

Robert Canterbury

AIMS
rcanterbury@aims1.com

Let us help you start saving time and money today.

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