Increasingly network andIT infrastructures are becoming critical for business operations.As this reality matures, customers are looking to buy network and IT solutions that include both products and proactive support services. For providers to meet these expectations, they need to develop not only new services model but also new sets of tools, methodologies and systems that enable proactive engagement and predictive performance setting. Doing so will create a partnership that is both profitable and palatable to customers.

While the past decade saw an effective use of the break-fix support services model, the next decade’s philosophy is likely to view every customer request for support as a failure.For, if we had done everything right, there would be no need to call tech support.Every customer incident is an indication that the service provider failed to prevent a certain level of disruption to the customer. There a positive aspect to this view.Information received as a result of the customer request for support represents an opportunity for improvement and a learning that can be used to avoid similar failures in the future. Leveraging such information on a systemic basis can be the difference between those who will succeed in the increasingly profitable service business and those who will fade away by trying grow revenue from a rapidly commoditized break-fix support service.

There is a plethora of challenges to providing quality service and support to customers. The activities are labor-intensive and require highly qualified staff.The combination can add up to an expensive proposition. As a result, services and supports organizations are compelled to focus on efficient contact handling and issue resolution. In doing so, they fail to invest in eliminating the reasons that cause customers to call them in the first place.

In order to break out this cycle and ride the wave of the highly profitable services business, companies need to do more than just optimizing call handling and resolving issues.After building a systemic foundation for efficient issue resolution, the focus should shift to proactive and preemptive interventions that eliminate the need for customers to call.This obviously elevates the nature of the relationship between provider and customer from transactional technical support to an interactive consultative type of engagement.The value of this shift is far-reaching from a continuous improvement and customer experience standpoint.

One approach in enabling this transition is for services organization to aggregate data from all customer contacts and service incident (CRM), put them through intelligent analytics, and build key performance indicators (leading and lagging). The trending analysis from these macro indices should allow support and services engineers to proactively consult with the customer; and influence the underlying causes that negatively affect customer’s operations. The end result of this approach should be a noticeable reduction in impacting customer calls.Viewed by some in the telecom and networking field as unconventional, this strategy is hardly new. It has been used successfully in other industries.Indeed, visionary and forward-thinking organizations have embarked on such transformation with successes quantified by numbers like 65% margin contribution coupled with increased top line growth.As a result, thought leaders are establishing new performance benchmarks for their industry. They are deriving more than 30% of their revenue and 50% to 60% of their margin contribution from services. These are indeed unconventional numbers.

To begin on the path to build proactive and predictive services portfolio, it is imperative to have data; enough customer data to be able to programmatically represent your customer’s operations. For that, a good implementation of CRM systems is a must.The following 5 broad and basic steps leverage your CRM service incident databases to develop a proactive service offering:

Step 1 – Focus on customer operational effectiveness
Most services and support organizations use metrics that are mostly focus on internal effectiveness.They measure the number of incidents resolved, the average time to resolution, the number incident resolved per person, and sometimes a customer rating of the effectiveness of the support staff. I suggest an additional customer centric view that is a combination of internal effectiveness and customer impact.To do so, you need to evolve key traditional support and services metrics from internal focus to customer operational effectiveness.

Step 2 – Develop Performance Indicators to gauge your product performance during field operations by customers
By using the high level indicator developed in step one; you may develop some composite metrics that will serve as leading and lagging indicators. Find a way to identify the few attributes that influence the trend of the indicator (you may need the assistance of some statisticians).

Step 3 – Take Proactive Actions based on your macro indicators (step 2)
The indicators should serve as the critical piece of your proactive services offering.They are the thermostat that tells you whether things are cooling, heating up and staying at constant temperature.Use the indicators to:

• Lead customer interactions
• Develop comparative benchmarks across product, customer and verticals

Take proactive actions to correct trends of the macro indicators

Step 4 – Alignment and/or Compliance with Industry Standards
Your metrics and operational performance indicators must allow the customer to quantitatively show progress within the framework of applicable standards (ITIL, eTOM, ISO, etc).For example, they should enable you to classify the customers operations on the scale of 1 to 5 of the IT Service Capability Maturity Level (ITSCMM) and suggest recommendations to move to a higher maturity level.

Step 5 – Operational Indicators and value of services
The assessment of the composite indicators should be used to demonstrate benefits and ROI of making suggested improvements recommended by proactive services.This can also be used broadly to make the case that differentiated services have tangible benefits for customer operations.

In today’s competitive services business; optimizing delivery of the same old- fashion service alone will not do it.Services organizations must continuously find a way to augment optimization of existing assets while building greater and greater capability to resolve issues before they become disruptive to operations. They must provide a framework to leverage customer service data to measure operational performance, suggest best practices, and actively engaged in enhancing the quality of the customer’s operations.In the current and future services and support business, you need business operations processes and practices that are proactive and interactive. This is the new way of looking at customer assurance and loyalty.

The current state of support and services hastwo converging paths. Fromthe product or device view point, support and services are evolving towards predictive and preemptive offerings. From the customer interaction stand point, support and services are being led by proactive assessment of the customer’s operations. Hence, the future belongs to the innovative leaders with the vision to embark on new approaches that proactively engage the customer to improve operations and solve the same old support problems.

About Mack Coulibaly……………………………………………………….
Mack M. Coulibaly is Director of Technical Services at Cisco Systems, Inc. He is an experienced though leader developing innovative technical services. Mr. Coulibaly is also a published author with more than 16 years of experience in various technical fields ranging from software, hardware, and network engineering. He spent the last 5 years leading the foundational buildup for the next generation of innovative technical services.