Satisfied, But Not Dazzled by Technology
Preliminary Results from 2006 SSPA Support Technology Survey
Author: John Ragsdale, Vice President of Research, SSPA

Download as a PDF

Survey shows satisfaction across 21 functional areas

The SSPA conducted a survey asking members to provide information on technology used in their service and support environments, and how satisfied they were with each.  The survey remained open at the time this research went to press; this report will highlight preliminary findings from the 126 companies that have responded so far.  Respondents were asked to indicate which products they were using in 21 categories, and their satisfaction with those products.  Table 1 below shows the individual product areas included in the survey, organized by eService, CRM, Contact Center and Field Service solutions.

This report will focus on the percentages of internally developed versus packaged software in the various product categories, and member satisfaction with technology.  Subsequent reports will delve into member adoption of technology; vendor satisfaction ratings will be incorporated into the 2006 SSPA Buyers Guide, planned to launch as an online tool in Q4.

Internal Development Continues to Supplement Packaged Applications

Though packaged software is reaching maturing in many areas of eService, CRM, Contact Center and Field Service, a full 35% of the 880 individual product responses were for internally developed software.  As seen in Figure 1 below, Field Service had the highest percentage of responses using internally developed technology, with 42%, and eService and CRM tied for the lowest percentage, each with 28%.

In Figure 2, the product areas with more than 40% internally developed technology are listed.  Some areas, such as diagnostic tools (with 60% internal development on the agent side, 50% on the self-service side), are no surprise, as companies supporting complex technology began creating decision support or ‘expert systems’ a decade before most scalable, referenceable packaged solutions were available.  In the recommendations section, the SSPA will provide some guidelines to innovations in packaged technology for these categories.

Satisfaction Ratings Are Good, But Not Great

Satisfaction ratings on individual product modules range from a high of 3.76 for Web Collaboration to a low of 2.65 for Field Service Scheduling/Dispatch, as illustrated in Table 2. Interestingly, some core areas such as case management and entitlement received less than a 3.0 average rating, indicating many companies are saddled with unsatisfactory software for some common, repetitive tasks¹.

The SSPA Recommends

The most successful contact and technical support centers are constantly evolving, trying new technologies, experimenting with new customer channels, testing different staffing approaches and agent profiles.  Some companies have not had success finding packaged solutions that fits their needs without significant customization and go the ‘home grown’ route.  But in the spirit of, “If it ain’t broke, fix it anyway,” even companies satisfied with an internally developed solution need to keep up with new technology in that area, and identify when an available packaged solution can supplement or replace existing technology to increase productivity or level of service.  In the following product categories with high percentages of internally developed solutions in the SSPA 2006 Technology Survey, pay attention to these innovations from ISVs:

• Problem diagnostics. Problem solving technology has come a long way since the early versions of case based reasoning and expert systems. Companies with ‘home grown’ systems likely have developed excellent content over the years, but consider adding in new search technology that can identify the needed content in fewer steps.  eService knowledgebase and search products can now index and retrieve content from any number of sources, including proprietary systems, so bringing in new tools to make searching or authoring new content easier doesn’t mean you have to abandon your old system, or migrate all of the data to a vendor’s content repository. Leading vendors include ATG, eGain, Inquira, Kana, Knova and Talisma.
  
  
• Forums. Basic forum capabilities (participant registration, moderating tools, user profiles) are similar across internally developed and freeware systems.  But what is missing are the tools to better integrate the forum into a self-service implementation and maximize deflection of live agent interactions.  When searching the knowledgebase, customers should receive matches not only for knowledgebase content, but from forum discussion threads as well.  When submitting a new forum posting, the system should search the knowledgebase for any matches to the submitted posting, and prompt the customer to review the knowledgebase entries before proceeding with the post.  Multiple eService and CRM vendors (Knova, ATG, Talisma, Kana, RightNow) now offer forums (their own or a partner’s technology) fully integrated with knowledgebase and search tools².
  
  
• Field service scheduling. Having field service agents not working hits the company’s bottom line, while overbooking appointments impacts customer satisfaction, not to mention violating service-level agreements (SLAs) if agents are late or miss appointments entirely. To maximize efficiency, robust field service scheduling products, such as those from ClickSoftware, Indus and ServicePower, incorporate analytics to factor in customer preferences, agent skill sets and parts inventory, and create dynamic schedules which accommodate emergencies or priority customers, as well as performing ongoing schedule optimization³.
  
  
• Email Response Management. Perhaps one of the most underutilized features in eService, email auto-response uses granular rule sets to identify common problems in incoming customer emails and automatically respond with an answer.  Rule creation and processing have matured greatly, and today’s email classification engines can factor in information about the account (products purchased, version numbers, model numbers) into rule processing.  Also, auto-suggest will prompt the agent with a suggested response when viewing a customer email, streamlining email processing.  Leading email response management vendors with strong rule engines include eGain, Kana, RightNow, Talisma and ATG.
  
  
• Upsell/Cross-sell. Five years ago upsell and cross-sell were rare in inbound customer contact and technical support centers.  Today, agents are often trained on appropriate offers as part of their ‘basic training.’  Early offer management tools required either hard coding an offer to a product or problem, or extending the same offer to all customers.  Today’s technology, often imbedded in CRM software (Siebel/Oracle/PeopleSoft, RightNow, SAP), uses analytics to identify the best offer for the customer, based on account value, products purchased, what they are calling about, etc. Offers that are personalized and highly contextual to the current interaction have much higher accept rates.
  
  
• Workforce management. As with field service scheduling, WFM software to schedule contact center and tech support agents now includes an analytics backbone for better reporting on historic volume and service level trends, and more accurate prediction of future peaks and the resulting staffing needs.  While overkill for smaller operations, companies with more than 30-50 agents should evaluate alternatives from Witness Systems, Genesys, Aspect and other vendors, benchmarking packaged capabilities against internal systems to see if improvements in workforce optimization warrant a move to a packaged system.

Endnotes

1. Functional modules that received less than 15 responses were excluded from the table.

2. For more information on effective use of forums, see “Effectively Incorporating Forums into Web Self-Service,” SSPA News, September 5, 2006.

If you have any questions about this article, please contact Shawn Santos at ssantos@thesspa.com or 858.674.5491.