For the Spring 2008 Recognized Innovator Awards, SSPA Research selected three categories that embodied the SSPA Best Practices 2008 Conference theme of “Essential Elements of Support.” Usability is at the root of many technology project successes and failures: If an application is not simple and intuitive, employees and customers will never adopt at the desired levels. Technology to enable voice-of-the-customer initiatives streamlines the capture of customer feedback as well as delivering actionable customer intelligence. Root cause analysis should be a core part of every technical support operation, making sure you aren’t treating just the symptoms of a larger issue. Companies should stay abreast of innovations to customer support products and services and integrate these new approaches into their technology roadmap.

Five SSPA Partners Recognized for Innovation
Identifying the Essential Elements of Support requires a deep of understanding of best practices to identify the core enablers of customer success. The SSPA’s Spring 2008 Recognized Innovator Awards address these key member business problems:

• How do we eliminate roadblocks to adoption of support technology by both employees and customers in order to achieve the largest and fastest return on investment?
• How so we capture customer feedback and analyze all customer points to identify current and future customer requirements and trends?
• How can we more quickly and easily identify the underlying problems impacting customers to speed resolution and reduce incident volumes?

SSPA Research is looking to innovation as a solution, and the SSPA Recognized Innovator program identifies key technology from SSPA partners that will help you reach your goal of value-added support. For the Spring 2008 awards, the categories were:

• Innovation in Usability. One of the primary reasons new technology implementations fail to achieve the desired return on investment is lack of employee and/or customer adoption, and application usability is key to high user adoption. As support applications have evolved from green screens to client/server to Web applications, usability often appears to be an afterthought. The best support applications are highly intuitive, so little training is required to master the software, with visual cues provided so that agents, or customers performing self-service, can quickly complete a process without having to think about the next sequential step. This award recognizes an SSPA partner that consistently delivers extremely usable applications, leveraging innovative technology and controls to offer a differentiating user experience.
• Innovation in Voice of the Customer. Customer-focused organizations succeed by listening to customer input at every stage of the customer life cycle, producing products, services, and support offerings that exactly fit the needs of consumer or business customers. Many SSPA members have Voice-of-the-customer initiatives underway that focus on proactively capturing customer feedback and integrating the input into product planning and the creation of support and training programs. This award recognizes an SSPA partner that enables member companies to better solicit, capture, and analyze customer feedback, ideas, and experiences, and present the findings in an actionable way to the support organization, as well as across the enterprise.
• Innovation in Root Cause Analysis. Identifying the root cause of a hardware or software problem not only shortcuts downtime for the customer, but it can eliminate reoccurrences of the problem. Historically, root cause analysis required manual detective work on the part of agents and support management, and often happened only after multiple reoccurrences in order for enough information to be available for analysis. Today, with more structured and unstructured data captured and more intelligent analytic tools available, companies can identify patterns in customer incidents faster and streamline root cause analysis. This award recognizes an SSPA partner that helps member companies more quickly identify the true failing component at the heart of one or a series of support incidents so a fix or workaround can be crafted.

SSPA Research identified a panel of judges for the Spring 2008 Recognized Innovator Awards, including industry experts and technology-savvy SSPA members. Judges rated the applications using three criteria:

• Is it innovative? SSPA Research defines innovation as “the successful exploitation of new ideas,” and judges rated the application on how well the solution embodies this spirit.
• Is it unique? With technology evolving within our industry at a rapid rate, every new invention has copycats very quickly, and judges rated the application on how unique and differentiating the innovation is.
• Is the innovation exemplary of the category? Judges rated each application on how well the innovation adheres to the category description provided.

One winner and one finalist were selected for each category. Winners were announced during the SSPA Best Practices Conference in Santa Clara, CA on May 5, 2008.

Recognized Innovators for Usability
Look at any list of reasons for failed CRM projects, and lack of user adoption is typically in the top three. For employees that spend their days working in software applications, productivity suffers—and stress increases—when users struggle to remember how to complete confusing tasks. When customer-facing applications, like Web self-service, are not intuitive, fewer issues are resolved via self-service, driving up assisted incident volumes and operational cost. As technology quickly evolves, best-practice user interface (UI) design is a moving target, and companies must take the initiative to try new technologies and controls, working closely with customers to deliver the most usable applications possible. The Recognized Innovators for Usability are:

• Microsoft. Anyone who has ever become frustrated when attempting to search a knowledgebase only to receive long lists of unrelated content matches will appreciate why Microsoft’s Automated Service Agent (ASA) is the winner in this category. Keyword searches, the most common form of Web and knowledgebase searching, are not intuitive, as it is impossible to know what exact terminology the knowledge author used. Microsoft ASA instead uses natural language to understand the concept behind the customer or agent question and deliver the one correct answer—not a laundry list of possible matches. With high-profile customers including Intuit, British Telecom, Time Warner Cable, Vonage, and Microsoft’s own Xbox, Microsoft ASA makes self-service simple and intuitive for both customers and agents.
• InQuira. The finalist in this category is the Intelligent Forms application from InQuira, which automates any step-by-step task or process, such as an online loan application for customers or an agent filing an insurance claim. InQuira’s Intelligent Forms allows application owners to easily embed contextual information for users completing a form or process, such as tool tips and pop-up help, and this help content is managed separately from the application to avoid any programming changes. Intelligent search options are also included, enabling the user to search for additional information without leaving the form. A particularly innovative twist is capturing user click streams including minute details such as hovering over a tool tip, with analytic-based reporting to pinpoint where users struggle with a process or which fields on a form are confusing.

Recognized Innovators for Voice of the Customer
How do you know what your customers want? Just ask them, right? If only it were that easy. While surveying customers about their requirements is a direct approach to gather information, you can also “hear” the voice of the customer by analyzing customer behavior. How did they navigate your Web site, and which tools did they try? How many service incidents have they had, and how did those interactions contribute to satisfaction and long-term loyalty? What makes one customer happier than another, and is there a formula for satisfaction that can be replicated? The winners in this category streamline the collection and analysis of customer information to derive critical customer intelligence. The Recognized Innovators for Voice of the Customer are:

• IBM. The winner in this category is IBM’s OmniFind Analytics Edition, an advanced analytics and mining platform that uses an open standards-based platform to extract meaningful information from text , and to identify patterns, trends, issues, and sentiment that can be used to construct or enhance critical business initiatives, such as improving customer care, delivering quality insight reporting, corporate brand reputation monitoring, and enhancing research and intelligence. In addition, the text analytics component can integrate structured data commonly found in records and surveys, such as dates, model numbers, or part numbers, for combined analysis with relevant extracted text. A rich, interactive user interface provides capabilities to search and filter the information to a manageable size, delivering actionable insight for business advantage and enabling better decisions faster.
• Clarabridge. The finalist in this category, Clarabridge’s Content Mining Platform™ (CMP) brings support organizations the ability to harvest multiple, disparate, multi-channel “voices of the customer” and transform the raw information into actionable insight . The interface, reports, and dashboards adjust to the specific role of the viewer. For example, the support organization can analyze and make decisions based on the entire body of customer feedback, but look at it from how to prioritize support responses. Alternately, product development would analyze the customer feedback for insight into how customers purchase, use, and abandon products. Gathering the insight, analyzing for clues into the customer experience and presenting it in an actionable way, gears up the support organization for those Eureka! moments that can make the difference in the competitiveness of a company.

Recognized Innovators for Root Cause Analysis
With an eye toward returning customers to a working state as quickly as possible, support organizations may continually fix the symptoms of a larger problem without realizing the root cause. Though isolating the failing component is always a goal, with today’s complex Web of interrelated, multi-vendor technology, the root cause of a problem may be a system change to another application or a conflict with a seemingly unrelated piece of infrastructure. When the number of variables seems infinite, technology for root cause analysis may be the answer, analyzing multiple data points across any number of customer issues to identify commonalities and ultimately uncover the root cause. The Recognized Innovators for Root Cause Analysis are:

• InQuira. The winner in this category is InQuira, whose unique approach to root cause analysis involves leveraging information from across the enterprise to help support technicians and management make the most informed decisions and quickly respond to customer problems. Assisted support incidents do not reflect the overall user experience, and attempting to identify a root cause using only information from a single interaction can be challenging at best. InQuira not only enables intelligent searching for existing resolution information, but it also facilitates root cause analysis by providing an overall assessment of the products, topics, and user sentiment from a variety of sources, including search questions from internal and external users, forum threads and discussions, survey feedback, or other customer data, in order to identify patterns and uncover the true root cause.
• NextNine. The finalist in this category is NextNine, a leader in proactive support technology. Unlike reactive methods in which the resolution process begins only after the problem has manifested itself in the system and generated a customer call to support, NextNine’s Virtual Support Engineer proactively monitors systems and diagnoses issues at the symptom stage. Advanced alerts inform technical support of the problem symptoms, automatically sending formatted, pre-analyzed information that allows the support engineers to immediately begin resolving the issue at its root--before customers are ever impacted by the problem.

The SSPA Recommends
When shopping for innovative technology, weigh your appetite for risk. Some of the most innovative solutions may be from small vendors with questionable long-term viability, or are new products with few production implementations. Partnering with a vendor to try a new solution has advantages: lower-cost software, influence on the final released version, and usually dedicated support from the vendor. But you will likely encounter unexpected problems and face some downtime, so limit the implementation to a small number of users as part of a pilot before committing to rolling out further.

With much consolidation activity within the service and support industry, you can increasingly find “best of breed” technology available from larger companies, though not necessarily integrated to their core platform…yet. In these situations, push for details on the product roadmap to understand when tighter integration will be available, and what your upgrade path would be. If the product is about to undergo a major platform migration, you should hold off on implementing until the new platform is available, or have professional services resources to migrate your implementation included for free if you go live on the current version.

To view photos of the Recognized Innovators accepting their awards at the SSPA Best Practices 2008 Conference, visit the SSPA event blog spot.

About John Ragsdale…………………………………….……….……….…

John Ragsdale is Vice President of Research for the SSPA. Ragsdale spent 10 years managing tech support operations before moving to Silicon Valley where he held product management and marketing positions at eService and CRM vendors. He spent 5 years at Forrester Research as VP and Research Director before joining the SSPA.