Tackling the Multi-Vendor Support Challenge
By Trisha Bright — VP, SSPA Member Programs

Just when you thought you had cracked the code on operational efficiency, along comes another trend that threatens to wreak havoc on your highly scalable and repeatable service operation you’ve so carefully fine tuned. It was a relatively straightforward endeavor when your focus was on supporting your own company’s products. But times have changed.

In the race to gain competitive advantage through information technology, today’s computing environments have become a complex web of highly integrated products and technologies from a myriad of suppliers who collectively are fueling the fire through their R&D efforts. Every year, IT companies invest billions of research dollars to engineer interoperability into their products. They then spend even more to market and sell highly innovative, frequently custom business solutions that artfully (and sometimes not) combine the products and technologies from a plethora of IT providers. And along with the promise that customers will enjoy seamless product integration come expectations that support and maintenance providers can field technical issues that arise around these highly integrated technology stacks.

So it is that multi-vendor support is driving complexity into support operations and putting support efficiency – and margins – at risk. As enterprise customers continue to build elaborate computing environments, the folks managing the support and maintenance relationship need to devise the means to profitably service these complex environments.

If you think this is an issue that’s exclusive to the commercial computing world, think again. Today’s consumer computing landscape has become increasingly complex and multi-vendor in nature as more and more products for the home office worker and technology hobbyist interconnect and hang off a shared network. And the similarities don’t stop there. Consumer expectations of support and maintenance providers are as high as those of their commercial counterparts and come with the added challenge that consumers frequently lack the technical skills that are commonplace in enterprise computing environments.

Still think this doesn’t apply to you? Again, we respectfully suggest you reconsider. Data from the SSPA Benchmark Survey database points to several alarming trends. First, the number of total cases requiring multi-vendor expertise across our industry is 29.36%, and 31.11% when we segment out enterprise computing providers. That means nearly one third of all cases now involve dealing with issues outside your core technical capabilities. Additionally, SSPA Benchmark data reveals that these cases on average take 4.25 times longer to resolve. With every extra minute costing you profit dollars, the risk becomes clear.

And the costs don’t stop there. An amazing 46.45% of support staff are receiving formal training on other vendors’ products. That in itself is taking a huge bite out of your staff training budget, not to mention additional staff time spent away from their primary job of supporting customers.

Other key indicators that point to this phenomenon include statistics around product complexity in the chart below:

The data clearly shows the dramatic shift in cases from standard to high complexity. Still not convinced? Take a look at the trend for first contact case closure rates which shows a reduction in performance, yet another by-product of the complexity issue.

Finally, SSPA Benchmark data clearly shows that the average duration of inbound calls has increased significantly in the last 24 months:

One factor contributing to increased call durations can be linked to Knowledge Management systems. While many vendors have sophisticated KM solutions in place that are adept at weeding out single-vendor issues at the front end, most are not yet well equipped to handle multi-vendor cases, thus making them more difficult and time-consuming to resolve.

Finally, we cannot fail to mention that customer satisfaction frequently takes a hit when multi-vendor cases are encountered. This is typically due to each vendor having to start the problem resolution cycle over when the case is handed to them. Once it’s confirmed that a particular multi-vendor issue is not their fault, the support team sends the case onto the next suspected vendor causing the problem, wherein the problem resolution process starts from scratch again. Often the handoffs are not clean between vendors, and occasionally the customer has to bounce the problem between multiple vendors for a resolution. This results in longer total resolution times and very high customer dissatisfaction, regardless of a successful resolution outcome.

Taken together, these factors all add up to escalating support costs of one form or another.

Recommendations

So how should you deal with this issue? First, get a clear and accurate picture of how much multi-vendor support is really costing your organization. You’ll need to dig deep to determine how many of these cases you’re fielding each month, how much time they’re taking to resolve, how much training is taking place on other vendors’ products, and which of your support resources are being used to resolve these cases (you can bet it’s not your Tier 1 folks) to fully quantify the costs.

Second, don’t wait until the solution is deployed at your customer’s site to gain an understanding of what it is you’ll end up having to support on the back end. Get involved in the up-front consulting engagements where these complex solutions are getting designed and piloted before they go into production. Clearly this model doesn’t work for all sizes of customers and deployments, so you need to pick your spots and invest in those accounts where you have the most at stake.

Next, make sure your internal business processes and IT strategy support the unique requirements of servicing these highly custom, multi-vendor environments. Here are some things to consider:

• Can your existing business systems track and entitle multi-vendor cases?
• Have you created a standard process for documenting the components of these custom solutions?
• Have you created and documented case handling procedures for dealing with multi-vendor support cases?
• Can your configuration management system collect and process all the information required to facilitate rapid problem diagnosis across the entire technology stack?
• Have you created and tested standard multi-vendor technology stacks that are certified for your product set, and that engineering constantly tests patches and upgrades against? 
• Can you accurately capture and account for the costs of supporting multi-vendor incidents?
• Does your knowledge capture strategy encompass multi-vendor support?
• Do you have effective collaboration tools that allow you to dynamically assemble the right players to solve complex heterogeneous computing problems?
• Do you have the right Cooperative Service Agreements (CSAs) in place to enable you to engage with other technology and product companies to jointly resolve issues? (The SSPA Benchmark Survey shows that the average number of CSAs held by companies across our industry is 7.)

At an industry level, we also strongly advocate that the broader support and maintenance community come together to collaborate around multi-vendor support to create industry standards for telemetry data that can be easily shared, devise a secure and efficient way to document and share knowledge amongst technology service providers and to collectively tackle the highly challenging support entitlement issue.

The SSPA has identified the trend towards increased support complexity as a top services business issue and is committed to getting involved in addressing this issue. You can expect to hear more from us in the first half of 2006 about driving a committee process to tackle this issue.

Comments or feedback about this article? Please contact us at insight@thesspa.com.