My desire as a power user to get what I want from software is always tempered by my days in the early 2000s as an Internet trainer, the mid-2000s doing customer support at Bryght (the Drupal-powered hosted service, not the online furniture retailer), and, maybe to a lesser extent doing client work in the early 2010s at OpenRoad and Chapter Three. Those experiences gave me insight into the possibilities and limitations software companies face in delivering customer and client happiness.

As part of an effort to get back in the game of directly supporting an open source project, I've been reviewing the good and not-so-good support experiences I've had as a consumer of web-based software to see what lessons the project can apply. After that review, I came to the conclusion that in the last year or so, the online software industry, technical support as a profession seems to have leveled-up, as it were, with room for improvement.

Over the course of this week and next, I'll post my experiences as a consumer of technical support, the good and not-as-good, with the names of the innocent and guilty removed. I'll post lessons that support agents and customer care managers can learn from both the good and not-as-good experiences from the other side.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.