 |
|
Not all customers have the same expectations and needs of support. By focusing on the evolution of support at Network Appliance—from Distributed, through Consolidated, to Personalized Support—this SSPA News article will help you begin to identify the types of customers in your install base and plan what type of support is best for each customer type. From Distributed to Consolidated Support At Network Appliance, we recently completed an effort to consolidate from a “Follow the Sun” support model to a 24x7 Consolidated Support Model. After we implemented the Consolidated Model, we then added a Personalized Support component for our strategic customers. I will use this experience to help explain the evolution. The most important thing to consider when embarking on a support model evolution is to identify when it is time to evolve and to know what type of evolution you want to achieve. In our example, we evolved from a Distributed to a Consolidated Support Center Model in order to better support our customers on complex, long duration cases. The legacy Distributed Support Model was sufficient for shorter duration cases, but as the complexity of our customers’ infrastructure increased, we needed to evolve our support center to be able to provide seamless case handovers and unified management oversight of cases. We achieved this by concentrating our support centers into a single flagship 24x7 support center complimented by several in region local language support centers. The Consolidated Flagship focuses on English speaking support and functions as an escalation center for the regional local language centers. During this effort we closed 2 locations while maintaining less than 5% attrition and significantly increased staffing through relocation and incremental growth at the Consolidated Flagship center. The step to Consolidated Support allowed us to remove the complexity of Distributed Support handovers and allowed for greater oversight of case management. This allowed us to improve support to our customers while increasing efficiency and decreasing case age. The support center realized the following improvements in our metrics during the first 6 months of moving from Distributed to Consolidated support:
As we moved to Consolidated Support, we implemented an infrastructure that would allow us to scale as our install base grows so we can continue to effectively and efficiently support our customers. We added three key functions to the Consolidated Model to help with ongoing growth and change:
The existence of the Technical Triage Team allows us to quickly triage customer cases and route them effectively to the best support engineer for resolution. This team ensures that our customer response remains high while we are still able to get access to the in-depth technical skills needed to resolve a customer issue. The Technical Triage Team also allows us to prioritize Service Contracted and Strategic Customers over Warranty Customers and allows us the flexibility to easily add new supported technologies or products to the Support Center in the future without having to take the time and expense needed to train all 300+ support engineers. The Emerging Products Group allows us to incubate new products before they are ready for mainstream support. Like the Technical Triage team, this function allows us the flexibility to easily add new supported technologies or products to the Support Center. In addition, this group also allows us to work closely with engineering as products are released to identify any early trends in supportability. The Emerging Products Group maintains responsibility for a product until it is ready for mainstream support. Once the product is ready for mainstream support it is moved into a specialty research function of the Consolidated Support Center and that research team is seeded with support engineers from the Emerging Products Group to ease transition. The third function, Critical Problem Resolution Escalations, serves as a safety net to ensure that there is always a senior level escalation engineer available for critical customer issues. This is especially important during times of evolution and high growth so that as your support center population improves in tenure there are senior resources who can aid both in real time customer troubleshooting as well as in support engineer training. The move to Consolidated Support was very successful as evidenced both by the support metrics listed above and by customer feedback. It also provided Network Appliance with a structure that can easily and efficiently change to meet the needs of increased growth or new products. However, the Consolidated Model did not allow for major differentiation for our Strategic Customers. At this point we evaluated our model and again decided that an evolution was necessary to personalize our support for Strategic Customers. Personalized Support The evolution to Personalized Support was made possible because we had already established the Consolidated Support Center. This center gave us the structure and a central core of employees to be able to establish a team focused on Personalized Support. This team was seeded with experienced support and escalation engineers and was aligned with account management resources (sales and Technical Global Advisors). The Personalized Support team was charted with the mission to: “Build strong relationships with our most valuable customers, to provide them with the highest level of service & support and drive the Network Appliance brand into every service event.” From this charter, our Personalized Support team has evolved as an extension of both the customer’s technical team and the sales teams. There is a designated Technical Support Engineer (TSE) assigned to each Strategic Customer, which services as their primary case sponsor. These TSEs have specialties aligned with customer’s environment, handle technical escalations and participate in daily case reviews to help drive down case age. The Personalized TSE has become the customers’ support advocate within the center. They are backed by other TSEs in the Personalized Support Center in order to ensure 24x7x365 coverage. As this team continues to grow and evolve over time, we will expand the model to have designated personalized TSEs on several shifts, creating mini support teams led by the primary designated TSE. Throughout this evolution we were cognizant of the amount of change that we were introducing into our support model and the importance of leading our employees through the transition. This was done by providing frequent, relevant communications addressing concerns and illustrating how the changes to the model would help improve how we support customers. In addition, we emphasized how the changes would be good for people within the center in regard to career growth. As when dealing with any major change, it is good to have open dialogue throughout the organization so that all employees feel supported and to make sure that you focus on retention so that you do not “run off” employees that you want to keep. It is also important not to neglect your team managers in this communication. They are the key to getting employees to embrace the change and therefore it is essential to include them in communication and planning. Ideally, the managers should be included as early in the process as possible and should help influence the evolution. If the managers believe in the change they will be able to get the employees to follow. Throughout this evolution, it is important to remember that not all customers have the same expectations and needs of support. Therefore it is often necessary to have more than one support model in place to meet the varying needs of your customer base. Most customers will fall into one of three groups:
It is also important to remember that an evolution takes time. It is much less disruptive to both employees and customers to gradually evolve. In a controlled, evolutionary approach it is possible to implement the infrastructure needed to ensure future scalability and adaptability. Attempting a change of this magnitude in a “big bang” approach could negatively impact customer satisfaction if the infrastructure was not properly in place or if any significant attrition occurred in the employee or manager base. A successful evolution from Distributed, through Consolidated to Personalized Support can be achieved if you know when it is time to evolve, properly analyze the goal of your support center’s evolution, and consider the following “10 Tips to a Successful Evolution:”
About Denise Cox…………………………………………………… Denise Cox is the vice president of technical support at Network Appliance, where she recently led an effort to consolidate from a “Follow the Sun” support to 24x7 support. She was also responsible for architecting and implementing innovative seating to maximize collaboration and reduce case hand-offs and for moving support strategy from transactional support to personalized support.
|
|
||
Comments? Suggestions? We would like to hear from you. Please email the editor at sspanews@thesspa.com. |
|||
©2006 SSPA