October 2002 Meeting Recap

HDI – NE Chapter – October 2002 Meeting – Waltham location: Topic: The Evolving Role of Customer Support Organizations Speaker: Chris Martins, Independent Consultant Chris Martins gave an enlightening presentation on the Evolving Role of Customer Support. Some of the driving factors are the need to expand capacity (afterall, your competition is just a click away); and the fact that the cost of getting a new customer is 6 to 10 times greater than keeping existing customers. It is important that we keep up with technology and innovations, however, if we do that and forget about the importance of the customer, then it’s a lose-lose situation. The Fundamentals Still Apply: The basis for customer support is being able to support the existing customers you have. Customer service is not just an investment in a future relationship, but rather an obligation of the existing one. The Relationship View: A problem with the Relationship View is that commercial relationships are measured in dollars and cents. Your investments need to have a Return on Investment (ROI). Unfortunately, the ROI for services and support are not tangible things. Calculating the service ROI is challenging and you cannot always expect the investment will generate a strong ROI. It will help to guarantee you keep up with technology and it will better position you to keep your present customer base. The Whole Product View: This includes a core commitment to product quality as well as appropriate training and documentation. It is very important to recognize the solving of “how to” issues and break/fix support. Integrated in the whole product view is also the importance of listening to the customer when they discuss their needs for new features or improvement. Whole product providers must include the following dreaded “ilities” as part of their shipping the product out the door. They are: Reliability; Administrability; Supportability; Recoverability; and Usability. The economy is moving us towards a service model for ongoing deliverables. You need to have a strong customer support solution and ongoing interactions with your customer. It is important to view service and support as a part of the line of business solutions and not some post sale afterthought. Whole product from an IT Service standpoint is important to review. IT needs to transform from a reactive to a proactive service center. It’s no longer just a call management and trouble ticket line of defense. It needs to evolve into a more active and proactive line of service management. There are many products out there like eSupport, Control F1 and others which help with online diagnosis of problems and repair of them. Asset management tools and tracking versions of software are equally important to the evolving support center. In today’s business, everything requires some type of systems support. Thus, there is an increased role of IT in the business environment today. If a server goes down, a printer can’t print that report or proposal, or the telephone lines are down, all this impact the bottom line of an organization. Employee Support Portal Because of this evolution in IT and Business, it is increasingly important to have a focal point of contact for the many technical areas of the organization. Chris feels that the future trend for IT support will look like a one stop employee support portal. The Help Desk would provide a broader expanse of things from the employee healthcare plan or payroll questions to a change in a PC asset. These calls would then go be ported from the help desk number to the appropriate area of expertise. With the changes that Chris foresees coming in to IT industry, it will be important for IT Managers to work on this opportunity to incorporate and end to end solution from needs assessment, procurement, financial management, adds, moves and changes, as well as retirement and disposal of equipment. The IT Manager needs to encompass the complete technical, business and financial areas of the IT industry. Customer Support Customer Support as a strategy should focus on consolidation of Helpdesk activities to identify trends and create a common repository for all related questions. Self-service for your customer comes into play for both internal and externals service desks. When looking into self service you really need to target the user, the experience level they are at (novice or experienced) and change the way the information is given from a more data centric to process centric model. By doing this you can then have self service available to the customer 7 x 24, and you can also combine eSupport features to your self support model for diagnostics and repair of repeat issues. As always, you need to keep the customers needs and capabilities in mind when self support and eSupport tools are utilized. Self-service is a tool to accomplish a business purpose and not all customers will like this approach. Chris mentioned 3 classes of users: 1) they can take charge and manage the fix; 2) they can be scared of technology, and that fear can create a block to finding the fix or making the fix; 3) Fear of technology – the logic and organization is out to get us. Unfortunately, we tend to design our self-help systems for the #1 personality above. We need to focus more on the #2, and #3 users above when looking at electronic customer support channels. If you create a self-help tool that only helps out a few, then there is no return on the investment for the business or the customer since the frustration levels grow and the customer goes back to old habits. Properly building self-help and eSupport solutions will enable the organization to increase their ability to provide service to the customer and improve the customer relationship within the organization. In conclusion, support is part of the central offering. It is best viewed as a whole product view line of business. The role of customer service can be expanded. They can become the front line for not only break fix, but a complete customer service solution (all employee questions answered) through the evolution of a portal (central point of contact for the employees) and a strong self-service capability which takes all levels of the customer into account. HDI-NE Home Page Underwritten by GroupSoft Systems, Inc. HDI-NE Chapter is solely responsible for the content of this site.