Executive

insight
Top 5 Initiatives for
Achieving Breakthrough
Customer Support
SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 2

January 1, 2008

Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough

Customer Support
EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW
Through member conversations, conference presentations and Webcast Q&A, the SSPA
has identified the top 5 initiatives technical support centers should pursue in order to
deliver breakthrough customer support and enable customer success. These are:
 Increase employee retention and satisfaction
 Improve the customer experience
 Leverage customer feedback with business intelligence
 Evolve from cost center to profit center
 Adopt innovative tools and technology
This white paper will provide a roadmap for companies looking to improve all aspects of
their support operation, addressing people, process and technology issues, with special
attention paid to the role of remote support technology as a key enabler of success.

ENABLING CUSTOMER SUCCESS SHOULD BE THE MISSION OF SUPPORT

Today‟s technical support operations are hampered by their history as „break-fix‟
centers—someone you call when something breaks. While resolving technical problems
for customers remains a key role for support, service management must also have a
higher level goal of helping their customers succeed. Companies buy technology to solve
business problems, and support‟s more strategic role is making sure their customers are
solving those business problems as quickly and effectively as possible.

The SSPA has analyzed conversations with members, conference presentations, and Q&A
and feedback received during member Webcasts. Based on what we‟ve heard, we have
identified the top five initiatives for technical support operations to tackle in order to
deliver breakthrough customer support and ultimately enable customer success. The five
initiatives are:

 Increase employee retention and satisfaction

 Improve customer experience
 Leverage customer feedback with Business Intelligence
 Evolve from cost center to profit center
 Adopt innovative tools and technology

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 3

In this white paper, each of these initiatives will be discussed, as well as the role remote
support technology plays in successfully achieving each initiative.

Increase Employee Retention and Satisfaction

Simply put, unhappy employees lead to unhappy customers. When support
representatives are not satisfied with their jobs, they are not invested in delivering
exceptional support, and the level of service suffers. And when job dissatisfaction leads
to high support rep turnover, supervisors spend disproportionate amounts of time
recruiting and training new employees, not mentoring existing support reps. Again,
service levels suffer as the general skill level of support reps declines due to a lack of
long time, experienced support professionals.

Though attrition rates are definitely lower today than during the technology boom, when
many companies saw annual turnover of 30% or higher, rates are still in double digits.
Figure 1 shows the average annual attrition rates for enterprise support (B2B), consumer
support (B2C), small and medium businesses (SMB), and IT service desk.

Figure 1 SSPA Benchmark Data Showing Average Annual Attrition Rates

What is your average annual attrition rate?

B2B 11.3%

B2C 16.7%

SMB 12.0%

Service Desk 10.5%

0.0% 2.0% 4.0% 6.0% 8.0% 10.0% 12.0% 14.0% 16.0% 18.0%

Source: 2007 SSPA Benchmark

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 4

To enhance employee satisfaction and reduce turnover, companies need to develop a

culture of performance within the support organization. The SSPA has an active
committee devoted to talent management, and according to committee research, some
vital issues for companies to consider in order to reduce turnover are:

 Succession planning—taking proactive steps to ensure that you have a plan for
replacing key employees as they move on to new roles
 Career growth—ensuring that every employee has the opportunity to grow with
your company
 Motivation—providing the “carrots” that will keep employees performing at the top
of their game
 Recognition—providing a means to reward and recognize your top performers
 Employee satisfaction—taking deliberate actions to address key sources of
employee satisfaction
 Leadership development—growing your future generation of company leaders and
influencers
 Customer satisfaction—maximizing your impact on overall customer satisfaction
by ensuring that you have satisfied employees
 Organizational knowledge—having a mechanism to retain the knowledge and
institutional learning that accumulates from having folks spend long periods of
time in your organization1

The SSPA has identified three trends emerging in Talent Management, as follows:

 Role of support reps evolving. Today‟s technical support reps are finding their
roles evolving from „break fix specialist‟ to „relationship manager.‟ With more
attention being paid to the customer experience, and personalized support
experiences based on customer value, even complex technical support reps are
receiving more training and incentives based on customer service skills, not just
technical ability.
 Emerging markets require different approaches. With global support
operations becoming common, companies are realizing that support reps in
emerging markets, whether India, China, Eastern Europe, or elsewhere, require
different processes and training than support reps in North America.
 Support technology plays key role in employee job satisfaction. The
complexity of the agent desktop continues to rise, and support reps forced to use
outdated support technology, or poorly implemented new technology, have lower
job satisfaction ratings.

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 5

Case studies show that implementing remote support technology has a direct impact on
employee satisfaction. By giving support reps tools to more quickly and easily solve
customer problems, and increase first contact resolution rates, agents feel they are
making a bigger impact and have more control over support interactions.

Improve Customer Experience

When customers are surveyed for what they most want in a support experience, having a
smart, efficient support rep that solves their problem on the first interaction is at the top
of the list. First call (for phone support) or first contact (for multi-channel support)
resolution, then, is a great indicator of the health of a support organization. Besides
being a major contributor to customer satisfaction, increasing first call resolution creates
significant cost savings for the support organization through:

 Decreasing interactions. When issues can be resolved on the first interaction

with the customer, subsequent phone calls and emails are eliminated. Multiple
callbacks or email interactions drive up incident handling time, and subsequently
incident cost.

 Cutting incident handling time. When issues can be resolved quickly, on the
first interaction, average incident handling time goes down, freeing up support
reps to handle more incidents per shift so agent productivity is increased.

 Reducing escalations. Issues resolved on the first interaction are not escalated
to Level 2 or beyond, cutting the number of incidents escalated to these more
expensive support tiers.

Remote support technology increases first contact resolution by allowing support reps to
take control of a customer desktop to quickly diagnose and resolve the issue, collecting
all needed information in the first interaction. Figure 2 shows the average first call
resolution rate for all SSPA members, as well as the average by industry segment.

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 6

Figure 2 SSPA Member Average First Call Resolution Rate

What percent of phone calls are resolved

during the first customer contact?
70%

60% 66%
60%
50%

40% 46%
42%
30%

20%

10%

0%
B2B B2C SMB Service Desk

Source: 2007 SSPA Benchmark

In addition to improving the customer experience through increased first contact

resolution rates, remote support technology also can play a key role in interaction quality
through agent monitoring. Supervisors can silently monitor in-progress remote control
sessions, helping to:

 Assist with complex problems. Using the supervisor dashboard, when remote
support sessions are extending longer than usual, managers can proactively join
the session to see if they can help streamline problem resolution. If necessary,
the supervisor can go beyond silent mode to collaborate with the agent via chat to
offer assistance.
 Identify training needs. Monitoring live support rep sessions is a good way to
determine when agents need additional training on certain products or problems.
Watching the support rep “in action” via silent monitoring gives an accurate
assessment of how a specific agent diagnoses and resolves particular issues.
 Ensure correct use of technology. As with any support automation technology,
a major step toward maximum return on investment for remote support software
is full adoption by agents. Monitoring how support reps use remote control tools

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 7

helps supervisors understand if support reps are leveraging all of the capabilities
of the platform to solve customer problems as quickly and accurately as possible.

Leverage Customer Feedback with Business Intelligence

With many companies launching „voice of the customer‟ initiatives, input from customers
is becoming more sought after than ever before. As support organization evolve to
become more customer focused, direct input from customers is critical to delivering
service offerings and products that not only fit customer needs, but help deliver more
business value and better enable customer success.

But capturing customer feedback isn‟t always easy, and relying on surveys as the only
mechanism to gather input will soon exhaust the patience of some customers. More
support organizations are now looking to business intelligence technology to analyze
captured customer information and distill the huge amounts of interaction data into
strategic customer requirements.

Approaches to reporting have quickly evolved from basic spreadsheets, to relying solely
on reports included in software applications, to cross-application reporting platforms such
as Crystal Reports, to true business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing. As seen in
Figure 3, adoption of business intelligence platforms is already high, with 29% of
members in a recent SSPA Webcast poll reporting that BI technology is in place.

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 8

Figure 3 Current Approaches to Reporting and BI

What is your current approach to reporting and

BI? Select the highest level achieved.

Spreadsheets 19%

Embedded app reporting 29%

Cross app reporting 23%

True BI/data warehousing 29%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35%

Source: SSPA Webcast Poll, August 2007

However, for analytics software to be able to derive the most reliable and actionable
business intelligence, the right amount and level of data must be captured. Relying
solely on support rep-authored case notes, for example, is inadequate for BI tools to
perform true root cause analysis, because all relevant data points are unlikely to be
manually captured in today‟s productivity-focused technical support centers.

Automatically capturing more detailed session information, then, is an important first

step toward better business intelligence, and this is an area where remote support
technology provides a big leap forward. By capturing full asset information, diagnostic
system logs, and remote procedures performed by support reps, and automatically
writing this into case history, business intelligence software will more accurately be able
to determine:

 Root cause analysis. With enough details about an error and the environment
in which it occurs, faster and more accurate root cause analysis can be performed.
 Resolution procedures. Understanding what recovery or diagnostic steps were
the most useful in resolving specific issues will help determine how support reps
should be trained to handle these problems in the future.

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 9

 Failure trends. Identifying product error, defect or failure trends across

customer demographics, geographic areas and/or technology environments will
help support provide more accurate information to development to speed delivery
of accurate patches in maintenance releases.

Evolve from Cost Center to Profit Center

Traditionally, technical support has been viewed as “insurance” support. Like insurance
on your home or car, you hope you never need it, but are glad it is there for emergencies.
The problem with this view of support becomes clear when companies better understand
support‟s role in the customer loyalty cycle.

Figure 4 Accelerating the Value Cycle Leads to Larger and Faster Repurchase

Value-Added Support: Addressing a

Critical Gap in the Loyalty Cycle

Purchase
Repurchase

Consume Implement

As seen in Figure 4, the following three macro-processes compose the Customer Loyalty
Cycle:

 Purchase/Repurchase. The responsibility of sales, customers purchase

products, and in order to maximize long term profitability, repurchase more
products in regular cycles.

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 10

 Implement. The responsibility of professional services, the products are

implemented in such a way as to maximize potential return on investment, with
projects focused on installation of the technology and integration to other systems
across the enterprise.
 Consume. This all important piece of the loyalty cycle is too often ignored. The
responsibility of support, customers must receive all the business value of the
technology, and ideally even more business value than anticipated. If customers
do not consume the product, making use of every feature and maximizing
adoption by all potential users, full business value will not be received and
repurchase will either not occur or be delayed.

It is critical that support organizations move beyond the break/fix mode of “insurance”
support, and find new ways to help customers consume products more quickly and easily.
One way of doing this is evolving the positioning of support from a place you call when
something breaks, to a place you call for tips, suggestions, and help with how to use any
feature or process inherent in the technology.

For this, remote support technology becomes an important tool to help customers better
consume products. Though remote support tools such as remote control are primarily
thought of as a way to quickly diagnose and fix a customer problem, they also allow
support reps to take control of a customer‟s desktop, walking them through a procedure,
demonstrating how to access and use different pieces of an application, and even to
show customers how to leverage help systems or tutorials built into the product.
Support reps can also watch as customers attempt the procedures on their own, to
confirm their understanding of the new information or processes.

Adopt Innovative Tools and Technology

Today more products and services are viewed as commodities: you can buy similar
technology from multiple providers. When companies find it more difficult to compete on
product or price, a key way to differentiate yourself from the competitors is by offering
better service. Particularly for technology companies, having a stellar reputation for
exceptional customer service helps drive new and repeat business. And one way for
support organizations to continue to raise the bar on delivering incomparable service is
by leveraging innovative tools and technology. Following are some innovations to look
for when evaluating remote support technology:

 Seamless escalation to assisted support. With success of self-service on the

decline according to SSPA benchmark data, offering seamless access to live
support is critical for an excellent customer experience. Look for the ability to use

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 11

rule based or customer initiated escalation from self-service to assisted service,

providing an excellent customer experience and keeping the customer in their
preferred channel—Web.

 Silent monitoring. Using silent monitoring, managers can “invisibly” view

sessions in progress without an agent‟s knowledge. Not only can supervisors
monitor in-progress sessions to help gage agent quality, but when a session
extends beyond the average talk time, supervisors are able to silently join the in-
progress session, offering help to the support rep as needed to speed up issue
resolution.

 Team collaboration. When a support rep is struggling to solve a customer

problem, they are sometimes forced to put the customer on hold while seeking
assistance, which drives up call time, or disconnect to follow up later, which drives
down first call resolution rate. Look for collaboration options, in which support
reps can request assistance from supervisors, other agents, or subject matter
experts via chat, without impacting call time or resolution.

THE SSPA RECOMMENDS

How do you get started? Embracing each of the Top 5 Initiatives may mean making
changes to legacy processes, and the SSPA recognizes that these strategic initiatives
cannot be completed overnight. To help member companies down the right path, SSPA
Research offers these suggestions on first steps for each initiative:

 Increase employee retention and satisfaction. If you don‟t already do so

regularly, start surveying employees for their major likes and dislikes about the
job. Compile a list of what you find out, along with planned action items based on
the results, and communicate back to the support reps. However vocal your
employees may be in team meetings and skip level interviews, anonymous
surveys are always a great way to uncover some new simmering issues.

 Improve the customer experience. The first step here is defining exactly what
the ideal customer experience should be. Forget performance benchmarks and
existing SLAs for a minute, and do some 1:1 interviews and hold a focus group at
your next user conference asking customers, “How do you define the ultimate
service experience? What are the attributes you expect?” You may be surprised
at the results.

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 12

 Leverage customer feedback with business intelligence. The best place to

start is by making an inventory of all available customer information, from both
direct feedback mechanisms (surveys, focus groups, account reviews) as well as
indirect sources of customer information (support incident notes, customer
environmental data retrieved through remote control sessions, self-service
content accessed). When this is complete, find out what BI tools exist within IT,
sales, marketing or other departments within the company that you may be able
to leverage.

 Evolve from cost center to profit center. At your next departmental meeting
or offsite, hold a brain storming session to identify ways to help customers better
consume products. Possibilities include more knowledgebase content on how to
use the system, sharing tips and tricks from other customers, promoting features
that may not have great visibility, periodic account reviews to determine
functional depth being levered.

 Adopt innovative tools and technology. With such diverse technologies now
available to streamline and automate customer support, knowing where to start
can be a challenge. One approach is to compare your current performance metrics
to the SSPA Benchmark for companies in your industry. Identify the operational
metrics you would most like to improve and investigate technologies that promise
the most impact for those metrics.

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SSPA Executive Insight | Top 5 Initiatives for Achieving Breakthrough Customer Support 13

ENDNOTES

1
For more information, refer to “Best Practices for Retaining Top Technical Talent in
Service & Support,” June, 2007.

1031 Via Frontera, Suite A | San Diego, CA 92127 | Tel. 858-674-5491 | Fax. 858 -674-6794

© 2007 SSPA | www.thesspa.com