Technical Support v's Application Support

I have been in my current role for almost 12 months now (Technical Director for C2C Systems). During this time I have refocused the support group from being Application Support people to Technical Support people.
So, what does this mean and why did I do it…

Application Support – adj
The process of helping customers install, configure, operate and maintain an application by having a detailed knowledge of that application.

Technical Support – adj
The process of helping customers install, configure, operate and maintain an application / system by having a knowledge of that application and skills / knowledge in the surrounding technologies.

Basically, I view Application Support as helping by telling customers what buttons to press to achieve XXX, and Technical Support as understanding the actual technologies involved, so when something doesn’t work they know what areas to probe / test / configure.

We have been through a lot of knowledge sharing (within support and with development), improved (immensely) the level and text of log file tracing in our products so that problems do not automatically have to go to the development team for investigation. Now there are more technology / area messages in the log files the support folks can do considerably more troubleshooting of the technology areas to find the issue without involving the development team (letting them focus their energies on coding !!).

My reasoning behind this is two fold. Firstly it means the Support team can now add significantly more value. Secondly it’ better for the Support folks, they are typical techies and much prefer solving the issues themselves (if they can), learning more about the product and technologies and ultimately improving customer satisfaction.