Maria G. Anzini is the director of worldwide customer service & product support for Speedware Corp. and a member of the SSPA Advisory Board. During her 15-year career with Speedware, she has used her customer-centric leadership approach and vision to achieve a level of support excellence that fosters invaluable customer and employee loyalty.

She recently took the time to talk with SSPA about her rise to management.

SSPA: You started out supporting customers and have progressed to director of worldwide customer support. What’s made the biggest difference and what advice can you provide to new support managers?

Anzini: When I look back over my 15 years with Speedware, my role has evolved a lot and the best advice I can give to new support managers is to know your numbers.

Early in my career, Bill Rose (SSPA founder and executive director) came to Speedware and shared with us his three basic rules of excellent customer service: Pick up the phone, get the call to the right person and count the beans. Those basic rules still stand today. In fact, counting the beans has been very important in my career.

Like a lot of companies in this industry, we’ve changed a lot over the years with new management and new funding, new operating dynamics, we became a public company, and so on. Certainly, for me, one of the most key / strategic characteristics that Support Centers have acquired, as it did at Speedware, has been it’s evolution into a profit center, a real business unit, a key contributor to overall company revenue and financial stability.

So, as a manager you must always be aware and conscientious about the revenue, Customer (ie. support revenue) attrition and direct & indirect support costs, profit margin contributions, and always look for the most effective ways to get things done.

I believe that some Managers do a good job at reporting the past, but the real value support managers could bring to their company, to their executives, is their ability to provide a realistic and confident forward-looking view (ie. forecast) of the business. You want to make support strategic to the company and managing it this way will get you there.

With the help of SCP certification requirements and the use of my customized Speedware dashboards, I changed my perspective to view support as a strategic profit center, and, that’s when I got a seat at the corporate table and became a part of the corporate team. Executive management realized I was managing by the numbers and not just by customer satisfaction figures. You have to realize there are things like over-investing when it comes to customer satisfaction for example. If you’re consistently pulling 9.5 out of 10, how much more do you need to invest? That’s an example of managing by the numbers.

SSPA: So Maria, is it just about money, revenue, costs and profits ?

Anzini: No, not at all. Counting beans isn’t just about financials, it’s more than that. I believe that managing a support organization successfully requires an awareness of a broad set of metrics. Performance metrics would include financials at the core but would also span a wide variety of operating metrics as well – Customer sat, response times, employee sat, web site effectiveness, etc, etc. In our business, it is important to set expectations, deliver against those expectations, and then remind everyone (Customers, staff, management, shareholders) that you met those expectations.

If you don’t know, someone else in the company is likely managing those numbers for you and they don’t need you sitting at the table.

Managing your support center as a business, making it strategic, and making a big contribution to the company’s overall success is what you’re looking to do.

SSPA : Has support management evolved to a “manage by the numbers” only ?

Anzini: Not really. Like anything else, there’s a question of balance. If you don’t know what your customers are thinking, you’re making a big mistake. As a manager, you must balance business fundamentals, management practices, and the need to talk directly with customers. You have to regularly take the pulse of your customers and realize that it’s more about having a relationship with customers than providing support to them. And, to me, the fact that I love doing this, validates that I’m in the right business.

SSPA: How has the SSPA helped you to achieve your goals?

Anzini: Aside from the obvious invaluable community sharing benefits, being SSPA members and having our support center SCP certified for five consecutive years now, gives me industry knowledge, and a louder voice when I talk about the programs we need to implement for continuous improvement throughout the company. It also helps retention rates because we also know that in order to be competitive we have to meet/exceed industry standards like profit sharing initiatives, training, people programs and so on. That’s what I get from SSPA conferences and the outside world. All that helps me manage our people more effectively and in the end, if you keep your people happy, they’ll keep your customers happy.