We see it all the time. Customers call for help after they’ve wrestled with a software snag for an hour or sometimes more. They preface the call with “I should know how to do this” and “sorry for the stupid question.”

They are usually exasperated, and often embarrassed. Who wants to admit lack of knowledge, especially if they believe their job is on the line?

The employers themselves, the ones chanting “do more with less, do more with less” at every all-hands and in every company-wide e-memo, are partially to blame. If a corporation doesn’t offer software support, workers must find their own solutions — which usually cost dearly in downtime and lost productivity. If a company does offer how-to support, it’s considered a luxury and its use may be frowned upon. (This recent Dilbert cartoon, sent to me by a colleague, captures it precisely.)

In sour financial times, desktop application support usually is the first to go when budgets are cut. It’s hard to tally its return on investment, and the demand for such support is often hidden.

But the need is there, and even more so now when many companies are operating with fewer employees and the same workload. (See a post I wrote in October titled “Basic Training: Why Workers Need Software Support.”)

The reports and surveys tell a compelling story. Actual customer feedback is even more powerful.

Below is a letter that was sent to us by one of our customers, who was given the job of automating several departmental reports using Access. In her words, the task was “dropped on my plate.”

She and her colleagues were completing monthly updates in PowerPoint, Excel and Access. The updates were tied together but each had its own piece of information, whether it was typing in a completion date or color-coding a text box to show if something was completed on time or was running behind.

She knew there was a way to update more efficiently using Access, but explains, “What I was asking Access to do was far beyond what I could get out of the simple commands and toolbars available.”

Here’s how she solved the problem:

“Not being a guru of Access and needing functionality far beyond the basic options that are built in, I called the help desk. Quickly, I was connected with a pure genius of Access coding and he was able to not only help me build out several nuances, but actually through multiple calls over several months taught me how to do my own coding in Access. The end result was several reports that were exactly what the customer required, even better in both content and visual appeal, that were all generated with a click of the button!”

Her company offers software support, so she was able to find a solution that saved several hundred hours of time in development, plus at least 30 minutes per person per month in update time.

She was given the tools to do more with less, without sacrificing productivity.

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