Understanding scientific informatics support

First Rule of Customer Support: Be responsive.

Second Rule: Do not talk (much) to your customers!

Sounds ironic? Not actually.

We’ve been preaching this rule to our scientific application support analysts and it’s starting to work wonders with our user experience.

We are supporting 25000 scientists/statisticians/analysts and over 110 applications across the spectrum of discovery, R&D and clinical studies, and this rule holds good for every request/issue we resolve.

Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them. – Kevin Stirtz, marketing expert and author. But how?

We’ve come to realise that scientific application support is characterized by 3 distinct attributes. We fondly call it the trichotomy of 3 Ps.