in this issue

SSPA Programs & Events

Services Leadership Conference | Breakout Session Presentations Now Available

Conference Keynote Presentation | Ten Things We Need to Change to Empower Support’s Future

Enable Your Partners | New Program Focuses on Service Delivery Partner Performance and Profitability. Contact us to find out more.

Service Research & Innovation (SRI) Initiative | IBM Research and Oracle have joined forces with the SSPA and TPSA to increase the amount of focused research and development for technology service innovation.

Wharton Program
Feb. 19 – 23 | Technology Support Services Management

Certification | J.D. Power and Associates and the SSPA Announce Two Levels of Certification—Total Support Quality and High Customer Support Satisfaction

On-Demand Webcast | "Simplify Service Delivery in Today’s Complex Support Environments" Sponsored by Citrix

SSPA’s Interactive Program Calendar | Custom Views & Subscriptions, Updated Daily...

Training and Certification | Reduce Call Times, Achieve Higher Resolution Rates, Decrease Call Escalations and More…

Sponsored White Papers | “Ten Principles for Knowledge Management Success”, More...

Creating Leadership in Every Cubicle: Critical-Path Skills for Transforming Support Performance
By Rich Gallagher, R.S. Gallagher and Associates
How do you fundamentally change the performance of a support team, in ways that make a real, measurable impact on customer satisfaction levels, productivity and turnover? The answer is to create a leader in every cubicle of your support operation, and watch what happens when you have a team of “owners” who are stakeholders in the support process.
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Best Practices to Increase Offer Accept Rates for Upsell/Cross-Sell
A Member Choice Topic
By John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA
The SSPA Research Topic of the Month for November is offer management, an increasingly hot topic as revenue generation becomes a goal for more inbound contact and technical support centers. In this article, I will highlight what I have learned researching successful selling for inbound support in the consumer world, and make some recommendations for how this can apply to the B2B world.
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From Red to Green: Turning Critical Client Situations into Revenue Opportunities
By Steven Godfrey, Manager, Advanced Technical Services, IBM’s WebSphere Commerce
Mobilizing everyone and everything to respond to a client situation is time consuming and costly. Have you thought about what drives clients into these situations and how you could help them avoid it? What if you had a targeted set of value-added offerings to present to customers once you have moved the situation out of the critical stage? What should you consider in building those offerings? In this article written exclusively for the SSPA News, read about the key areas to focus on and start generating additional revenue for your support center.
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Moving from “Customer Support” to “Customer Success”
By Becky Carroll, President and Founder, Petra Consulting Group
As the support industry makes the shift from break-fix service and support to providing value to customers beyond the product purchase price, there is a need to shift support organizations from “customer support” to “customer success”. This shift requires support organizations to focus on customer needs instead of products. Customers want to see that shift as well. This article written for the SSPA News discusses the six steps support organizations should take to make that shift, as well as the four key customer expectations of support.
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Benefits Analysis of Proactive Support Services
By Mack M. Coulibaly, Director of Technical Services, Cisco Systems, Inc
Support services are departing from the transactional break-fix model to an interactive process of preventing incidents that impact businesses. The implications of this evolution create a dilemma from an ROI perspective: it is much easier to value the effect of an incident (via the ensuing support) than it is to value its absence. In this article written for the SSPA News, I will demonstrate how to use measures of network disruption to create a relative cost benefit analysis.
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How Customer Service Can Help Global Companies Win the Race to Innovate
By Jackie Bassett, CEO, BT Industrials, Inc.
The integration of customer service and support with other functional groups is the key to closing the collaboration gap that can win the race to innovate—simply because they are closest to customers. In this article for the SSPA News, learn how over 750 CEOs agree that ongoing communications with this plethora of information benefits everyone from Sales to Marketing to Finance to Security!
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