Call For Nominations- SSPA 2003 STAR Awards

May 15, 2003

(San Diego, CA May 15, 2003) – The Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), the leading industry Association for IT support professionals, announced today that it has released the Call For Nominations for the 2003 STAR Awards. The SSPA STAR Awards are presented annually to SSPA Member support centers that demonstrate outstanding performance in selected categories. The STAR awards have become the most prestigious IT Services and Support award in the industry. Winning a STAR award clearly demonstrates that your support center is an industry leader in delivering support and services to customers. The SSPA will be making the announcements and presenting the 2003 STAR Awards to the Support Centers chosen as this year’s recipients at the SSPA Conference@Savannah, September 29-October 1, 2003, in Savannah, Georgia.

“Each year since its inauguration in 1990, the STAR Awards have grown in record numbers of applications and awards presented,” said Bill Rose, SSPA Founder/Executive Director. “They have become a true indication of world-class service and competitive edge for the support centers that have participated.”

All SSPA Member support centers are eligible to nominate themselves in any number of the nine categories:

COMPLEX SUPPORT APPLICATIONS
The winner in this category delivers extremely complex technical support for extremely complex applications in extremely complex environments. The typical applicant support center can be identified by senior level technical support representatives that hold advanced degrees and interface with senior level customers in the engineering and scientific fields. Customer call volume is very low due to the complexity of each support request and the time it takes to identify and resolve each issue.

HIGH CALL VOLUME
This category is designed specifically for support centers that field thousands of technical assistance/customer support requests per day in support of multiple products. Typically these support centers have hundreds of support reps and a wide range of products to support. In order to compete, your support center would typically handle over 10,000 requests per week. To win, you must be able to demonstrate a high level of customer satisfaction while handling this high volume of requests.

INNOVATIVE SUPPORT
Support Centers that apply in this category need to display innovation, creativity and uniqueness in the methods used to deliver technical support. These are “cutting edge” support centers that have developed new and exciting ways to deliver exceptional technical support to their customers. Their innovation can clearly be seen through the use of new and exciting technology, tools and systems that advance the technical support experience for all customers.

MISSION CRITICAL SUPPORT
Applicants in this category provide technical support in mission critical environments where “system down time” creates major customer problems. Technical support for these companies becomes a critical part of keeping customers “up and running” at all times. Applicants should clearly show how important their technical support is to the overall operation of mission critical systems or services.

MOST IMPROVED
This STAR Award is given to the support center that illustrates the greatest increase in the quality of their software support over the prior 12-month period. The winning support center must illustrate a dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction along with overall gains in support productivity. In order to compete, you must show your support metrics and customer satisfaction results for both the current and prior year.

OUTSOURCE SUPPORT PROVIDER
The winner in this category successfully delivers technical support as their business. To compete you must be able to demonstrate high levels of ongoing customer satisfaction, world-class service offerings, effective customer relationship management, performance measurements and staff retention programs resulting in an overall outstanding service operation.

EMERGING COMPANY
This category has been specifically created to recognize those companies with emerging support centers who deliver exceptional technical support. If your technical support team has less than 20 people then you are applying in the right category. Emphasis will be placed on demonstrating excellence and high customer satisfaction rates and not necessarily on requirements for high-powered tools and large budgets. We have determined that emerging support centers need to compete for a STAR award against other emerging support centers, so here is your category.

SUPPORT TECHNOLOGY VENDOR
The winner in this category is a vendor that sells products and services into the software support community. We will recognize those vendors that have provided innovative products and services that make life easier for technical support managers. In addition, vendors will need to show their uniqueness, creativity and presence in marketing their products and creating new deliverables for service managers.

SUSTAINED PERFORMANCE
The winner in this category demonstrates an ongoing level of outstanding overall software support, with high levels of customer satisfaction for at least three consecutive years. To compete you must be able to present 3 years of data, demonstrating sustained performance and how it attributed to high levels of ongoing customer satisfaction.

SPECIAL RECOGNITION
SSPA has established a STAR Awards Hall of Fame, Life Time Achievement Award. This is awarded to Companies that have won 5 STAR Awards since the inception of the Awards in 1990.
Thus far, five Companies have been the recipients of this Award:
*Stream International
*Sykes Enterprises
*Best Software
*Mentor Graphics
*Software AG

SSPA provides each Applicant with an electronic application as a benchmark/guideline. The STAR Award Applicants take this task very seriously and spend a considerable amount of time on this arduous, but rewarding process. Many non-winners have said that, even though they did not win an Award, the whole process was well worth the time and effort. They indicate they learned a lot from the process and were able to discover in what areas they can use improvement.

Upon receipt of the completed application, the SSPA's Advisory Board -- comprised of senior support executives from some of the world's leading software companies -- thoroughly reviews each submission, benchmarks it against a set of fixed criteria for that category, and selects a winner.

For the past 14 years, the SSPA has led the industry by providing industry recognized Awards Programs, content rich conferences and executive forums. For more information on the SSPA 2003 STAR Awards, send an email to rjohnson@thesspa.com.

About SSPA
Founded in 1989, the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA) was formed to focus on the specific needs of service executives who are responsible for support centers and overall customer relations. Today, the SSPA represents nearly 21,500 service professionals at 2,500 support centers worldwide. These executives look to SSPA to provide insight into the future of support services, a road map of best practices within our industry and access to the best service and support vendors. SSPA has become the center of support providing a reliable and comprehensive resource for news, research, benchmarking, standards and collaboration.

SSPA was created for professionals, managers and executives that make their living in the IT support services community. It is not a generic, one-size-fits all website where nobody ever feels like they belong. SSPA is dynamic, interactive, living resource specifically designed for the unique needs of support professionals. This exciting virtual community creates a forum for constant interaction with peers, industry experts, technology vendors and much more. For more information regarding the SSPA and other related divisions, log on to www.thesspa.com or send an email to info@thesspa.com.