I’ve always thought of our law firm as a user of tech support. We’ve got an IT guy we rely on. He and his minions run around rebooting our laptops, plugging in our cables, and generally fixing the things we’ve broken on our network.

Recently, we realized that we’ve got to start giving tech support rather than just receiving it. I guess we’ve been in the tech support game for a while but hadn’t realized it.

Our clients need tech support. We provide them with a bunch of technology, and sometimes they have issues with making it work properly. We’ve been handling the issues one at a time in an ad hoc way.

Now we’re getting organized and adding staff hours to help. We’re helping in a variety of situations:

Our clients have trouble with our client portal. Sometimes they can’t access a document or have questions about the interface. Frequently, they lose their passwords or their usernames. Someone calls or e-mails about these issues on most days.

Clients of our virtual service run into problems posting questions to our help desk. Sometimes they can’t find the forms they need. Sometimes they can’t make a video play. These folks are usually pretty tech savvy, but they can’t always solve their own problems.

Prospective clients have issues using our forum. They also lose passwords or have trouble posting questions or answers. They want to be part of our community and can’t always get the system to do what they expect it to do. We’re ready to help.

Subscribers to our e-mail auto-responders have problems as well. They miss an e-mail they really wanted and ask for a duplicate. Sometimes they can’t download a document they need. They often have issues playing videos.

We have mental health and financial professionals listed on our Stay Happily Married site. They have trouble changing or adding a photo. They sometimes struggle with updating their profiles, and they lose their passwords with amazing frequency.

In all these instances, we get calls and e-mails about the problem. We’ve had a variety of people responding, and they have all created their responses on a one-off basis. They haven’t thought of the problem from a systemic perspective. For instance, we haven’t developed standardized responses, comprehensive instructions, or employee procedure manuals.

That’s all changing. Now we’re reviewing the technical support we provide and consolidating all technical support in one person. We’re developing a system for dealing with the issues, and we’re hoping to provide a higher level of service than we have in the past.

We’re ready to start providing excellent technical support and to become givers rather than just takers.