If you've called our technical support lines in the last few weeks you may have encountered longer wait times on the phone and it may have taken longer to diagnose and solve your problem. As frustrating as this is to you, it was equally frustrating to us. That's why we've taken bold steps to improve our level of support service, and our callers are already seeing the benefits.

Of course, keep in mind what your colleagues who don't use WinTOTAL have to go through to get "customer support." When they call for help, they get a machine and are asked to leave a callback number. Sometimes, they get a callback when they're available to work on the problem (no appraiser, especially as busy as it's been, sits around waiting for the call). Sometimes, they don't. In the meantime, their productivity suffers. Or worse, they're out of business altogether — at least temporarily.

A couple years ago we installed a new phone system that made it possible to take tech calls more quickly and resolve issues faster. It's "low to the ground" issues like that — not spiffy features, slick interfaces, Net.X backends, or the like — that directly differentiates us from other (dwindling) options for formfilling and order management software and technology.

When wait times and time from call to resolution became so unacceptable to us that we were no longer proud of our tech support, we did something about it. We made significant leadership and staff changes, number one. This, unfortunately, made the problem worse in the short run as we reassigned our best techs and trained new ones. But that's mostly out of the way, and the result is more qualified support personnel trained to deal with your specific problem right now.

We've also, for the first time, trained our techs to specialize in certain product lines. Previously, our techs were trained in everything we developed and sold. As we branch out into new products and markets, we needed to specialize so that techs could deliver better, more expert service.

This shift in focus has accomplished a couple important things. Training time for new techs will be shorter, since they won't have to "learn everything" right away but rather their particular area of expertise. We're hiring more techs, not just shuffling around our best ones, and we're seeing this already. You will too, next time you call.

Techs will know what to expect from the next call. They won't have to spend time helping an appraiser with an EDI problem, and then take the next call from an agent needing help setting up their XSite. Techs will be trained as experts in one product line, and then that training and expertise will be naturally reinforced and built upon as he or she works in that area.

Finally, if for some reason one of our product lines is taking a disproportionate number of calls, it won't bog everyone down. That is, if Mortgage XSites is originating a high volume of tech calls, you as an appraiser are less likely to be affected when you're trying to get your comps database back online after a computer crash.

Forget the fact that even with our recent issues we still have the industry's best tech support. We don't measure ourselves by that, we measure how well we serve our customers. In fact, even though the company was closed Friday for the Thanksgiving holiday, some of our tech department came in to catch up on some outstanding issues to help our customers.

We hadn't been serving the customers who have called us for help as well as we could and should, so we took a number of steps to improve. You'll see the results immediately and see even more improvement in the coming weeks.

Want to see a sample? (Sure you do!) Click here.

What's even cooler is that we've heard from some appraisers that this feature is not just beneficial to FSBOs. Lender clients have also stated that they would use the feature. Possibly for REOs, but just as likely FSBOs who come to a mortgage broker first for help with buying the new home or a bridge loan.

It's really a new case of integration of XSites and WinTOTAL, where both products are needed in order for the feature to work and get the full benefit. And we'll be doing a lot more of things like this in the future.

We were the only company at the conference providing such technology, normally reserved for the largest IT departments at the largest banks, to mass markets. But we think of it as just another service that will help our customers run their businesses more efficiently. We've led the market in EDI, Web-based order/management/report production, and marketing tools, among other things. We're doing the same thing by getting digital signing capability in the hands of small businesses and sole proprietorships.

As Sides puts it: "In keeping with a la mode’s business objective of providing our customers (mortgage brokers, appraisers, agents and home inspectors) value-added services consisting of best of breed technologies, E-signatures was at the top of the list to maintain our commitment to lead, not follow, as it relates to emerging technologies."