Industrial

A day at Digi-Key tech support

31st August 2020
Alex Lynn
0

At Digi-Key Tech Support, our days are always busy serving people by answering questions, providing advice and confirming orders. We provide tech support to all of our customers through four different mediums: our online forums, customer chat, email and phone calls.

By Jason Starren, Senior Applications Engineering Manager at Digi-Key Electronics

By and large, the most popular form of tech support is our Digi-Key TechForum - where we support more than twice the number of people compared to the other mediums combined. Any time a customer posts a question on the TechForum, our next available technician responds with an answer right away. Of course, a lot of customers are able to answer questions for one another, which we love to see as well.

In addition to operating these four tech support mediums, our team regularly writes blogs, articles, and other rich technical content for our eeWiki, and participates in our Maker.io site. Our goal is to proactively solve our customers’ problems before they even know they have them. Analysing these different online tech support mediums allows us to do that. We’re regularly searching our records to find trends, what types of products people are using, what they’re asking, etc., in order to prioritise the information our customers need the most.

Some of our customers might not realise that our tech support team also dedicates a significant amount of time to providing customers with advice – whether it’s product selection and appropriateness, or other technical knowledge, people often call our team for advice and rich technical expertise. 

For example, we recently consulted with a physician who was developing prototypes for emergency ventilators to help mitigate the COVID-19 crisis. The physician called on our team, and we worked with him to determine what was needed for the prototypes, and then shipped the parts next-day.

Helping innovators like that physician is the most rewarding part about working in Tech Support at Digi-Key. It’s very satisfying learning about all of these projects, and then seeing them come to fruition. Every day here is different because we get a variety of questions from hobbyists, makers, engineers, brand-name companies, etc., and all of them are working on very different types of important projects.

Ultimately, a day at Digi-Key Tech Support is fun. We love learning about what different makers are working on – whether it's a customer building a bar top that can sense when somebody's drink is empty, to developing a light blinker for a deer stand. The people who call into Digi-Key Tech Support are changing the world today to make tomorrow better for everyone.

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