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Improving product supportability happens only when an organization decides to make customer satisfaction and loyalty a priority. This article describes how to get and maintain senior management support for product supportability initiatives, how to include specific goals for improvements in product supportability in cross-functional performance objectives, and develop a business process with metrics that convince product teams to improve supportability. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty – A Cross-Functional Priority During the goals setting process for 2007, individual goals at the VP level across various functions including development, product management and support, were aligned to incorporate customer loyalty as a shared objective. In turn, these goals were cascaded down to the individual level across all groups. From a support perspective, the Senior VP of Global Customer Support focused the 2007 strategy on improving products and driving customer satisfaction and loyalty leading to increased revenue. A Global Support Strategy placemat was distributed to all support employees, including specific objectives of ‘improving products’, focusing on 100% ‘customer retention’ and driving revenue through ‘increased loyalty’. Goals of all Support staff at all levels were redefined to align with this vision. Prior to the alignment of objectives across functions at VeriSign, there was a lack of common accountability and shared vision throughout the various teams which did not provide an effective environment to focus on the customer and the resulting customer loyalty. Achieving customer loyalty requires that goals, processes and organizational structures are aligned companywide. When employees are measured and evaluated on factors contributing to customer loyalty and the structure of the organization equips them to instill supportability into the organization, they will remain focused on this goal. Structure – A Customer Focused and Proactive Organization This structure has allowed VeriSign to drive efficiencies and reduce costs by reducing time to resolve defects and increasing development productivity – this is achieved by the escalation team’s technical ability to recreate customer issues prior to passing the defects to development (i.e. ‘translating’ the defect into a developer’s language) as well as effectively representing customer requirements. This Escalation Engineering team reports into the Support organization and is in direct contact with customers, and hears their requirements first hand. The new structure ensures the focus remains on proactive issue management for the customer versus having a reactive defect-and-maintenance approach. Driving Supportability - A Consistent Approach To ensure adequate representation throughout the new product development process, the support team assigned specific individuals with key areas of responsibility as standing members of the cross-functional project team. This included a dedicated technical support, customer support and escalation engineering representative as well as a product usability specialist. Senior management oversight was included from each functional area as well as on demand front-line subject matter experts (SMEs) to ensure functional expertise was included early in the product lifecycle. Attendance at these weekly lifecycle meetings enabled Support to proactively manage issues and drive supportability into new product development from the inception phase, right through to the retirement phase. During the inception phase, Support is a key contributor in the feature prioritization process. To address all product supportability requirements, a “Support Readiness Planning Checklist” was developed and referenced by Support team members. This checklist is being used during the planning, construction and transition phases of the product lifecycle and includes the following key areas of product supportability:
After the product launch a post implementation review is held, which includes support representation. This review is to conduct a post mortem evaluation of the release and incorporates supportability related issues to mitigate these in future releases. With the support team included throughout the product lifecycle we have realized a marked reduction in post release contact volume. In a similar product launch, prior to the new product development process change, call volumes doubled for a four month period after the launch. Involve the Customer - Usability Testing By integrating the customer into the design process you can understand user behavior and translate this into innovative design. To create an effective user experience for a new product rollout, we conducted usability testing. Usability testing is a qualitative versus quantitative methodology for collecting feedback. It is an iterative process, and by testing with customers we were able to collect impartial customer feedback and implement key customer interface enhancements. Prior to this we did not include Support in product usability testing – typically product management would work directly with the development usability team. Key Usability Findings
Internal SMEs were interviewed to obtain their input into the new product design. A design based on this feedback was tested with customers, resulting in further design enhancements. It is important to test and retest various designs with customers and not to rely solely on internal recommendations.
Prior to this product change, Customer Support provided detailed information to the customer on their order status, where they were in the overall process and where they needed to provide information. Customers did not always respond to notifications from Support, which caused delays in product delivery to the customer. We learned from the testing that customers did not read paragraphs longer than two sentences and had no interest in understanding the overall process. We therefore reduced order status information to a simple, actionable comment including a specific response required by the customer in order to proceed with their order.
Previously, we did not provide customers with an expected delivery date for their product which resulted in customer calls/contacts. Estimated delivery dates were difficult to provide since the process is variable and dependent on customer response. Even though we cannot provide exact delivery dates, we can estimate the time of delivery based on averages for the product purchased and set customer expectations. This estimated delivery date has been included in the customer interface and has resulted in fewer contacts into the support center and increased customer satisfaction. Other high-level interface changes resulting from the Usability Findings included:
In addition to key usability enhancements, our focus on web self-service is constantly incorporated into the new product development process. Flash demos and knowledge base content have been created and published for our customers prior to the product rollout. Defect Tracking Process A standard, proactive defect management process was introduced to positively impact the perceived value of the product and customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. Prior to this process, defects were not reviewed in a timely manner; there was no systematic method for assigning defects to releases and no standard and proactive customer communication process. Development, Product Management and the Support team are now engaged on a monthly basis to review and prioritize defects. This effort is led and managed by the Escalation Engineering team. Standard procedures for processing Change Requests (CRs) with established SLA’s based on severity level, from time of creation to closure have been implemented, including:
Automation has been leveraged in all available tools to increase efficiencies and facilitate the process flow. This standardized defect review process has increased our defect fix rate from 20% to 45%. Driving Supportability - Continuous Quantifiable Feedback
The above measures ensure that product feedback is consistently delivered to product owners in a quantified format. Explicit financial impact and customer satisfaction status is highlighted and driven through established processes and feature prioritization activity. It is imperative that this ‘feedback loop’ is persistently maintained to effectively drive supportability into products. About Lori Harmon…………………………………………………………. Prior to VeriSign, Lori held senior management positions at Interwoven, Brio, and Network General leading inside sales, product marketing and professional services organizations. She holds a BS degree in Information Systems from Appalachian State University.
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