The Rose Top 5 List of Things that Keep You up at Night
by Bill Rose, SSPA Founder/Executive Director

I constantly think about the future, taking the pulse of our members at events like our recent SSPA Conference @ Savannah, and trying to see what support industry trends are just beginning to appear on the horizon. I do that to develop SSPA programs that meet or lead our members to a successful future. From talking with SSPA community members, the top five issues that keep support managers and executives awake at night are:

• Customer Loyalty
• Support Margin Pressure
• Outsourcing
• Web-based Self-service
• Knowledge Management

For most members, these issues make the top five in most cases, though the order may change by company or time.

It’s probably not a surprise that customer loyalty tops my list. Not to be confused with customer satisfaction (the cases where customers are happy with us), customer loyalty means customers are more than just satisfied, they’re loyal and wouldn’t consider going to another company or product. A great example of loyalty is Harley-Davidson. Their customers order products, pay too much for them, wait for weeks or months to get them, and finally tattoo the company logo on their bodies. You can’t get much more loyal than that and we all wish we had that kind of customer commitment.

Moving beyond customer satisfaction to customer loyalty is the focus of SSPA members and you can see it in the changes in how we measure customer satisfaction scores. Members are starting to pay much more attention to “top-box” scoring, where they’re much more interested in the satisfied and very satisfied scores than scores that are neutral. We don’t want to lose any customers but we need to go beyond that and make sure customers are dedicated to the company. I think that’s the future when it comes to measuring our relationships with customers.

Support marketing pressure is intense, and it won’t ease in the foreseeable future. Whether you run your support center as a cost center or a profit center, support margins are an important part of your business. Our recent research involving thousands of customers and hundreds of CIOs shows immense pressure coming to support and maintenance contracts and the total cost of support and maintenance (TCSM).

Many members have ridden the emotional roller coaster of outsourcing, wondering if outsourcing initiatives would eliminate their jobs, or how they’re going to manage their new partners from thousands of miles away. While that’s true, we’ve come to realize that outsourcing is here to stay with more focus on “right-sourcing” – outsourcing the right responsibilities to the right organizations and people. Outsourcing will play a big role in cost containment and efficiencies. It won’t be the end of tech support. It’ll provide us with new and exciting opportunities.

Not long ago, only simple, level 1 functions were considered appropriate for outsourcing. Now, more and more complexity in product and services are being outsourced offshore and results show that this is a viable opportunity.

Over the past few years, companies have spent millions on web-based self-service but we’ve only seen customers find the answers they need only about 50% of the time. You may get a second chance to provide self-service but after that, customers will pick up the phone and get you on an expensive call to resolve their issues. We need to move more calls and help customers have more success on the web.

Finally, knowledge management is the essence of technical support. The more knowledge we have, the better. We have to develop fixes once and use it many times. It’s also essential to self-service success.

All this points to customers forcing technical support organizations to raise the bar. Not many years ago, the time to reach a support representative was an important issue. Today, the time to resolve an issue is a far more important metric to users. It isn’t enough to be able to talk with someone, that person has to have the answer. We all have to pay attention to the issues customers really care about, stay awake some nights thinking about them, and deliver solutions and create higher levels of customer loyalty.

If there are other issues that keep you, as a support manager, director, or executive, from sleeping well at night, I want to know about it, bill.rose@thesspa.com. That way, we can develop programs to help you get the rest you deserve.

Sincerely,

Bill Rose
SSPA Founder/Executive Director