The STAR Awards for Best Practices - Past Winners

Best Customer Commitment (New for 2007)
2008 Winner: Cisco-Linksys
2007 Winners:
Consumer Support: Intuit
Enterprise Support: Cisco
Presented to a company who successfully demonstrates organizational commitment, alignment and focus around gathering and responding to customer feedback, issues and requests, including using Voice of the Customer (VOC) input to improve support operations and offerings.

Best Knowledge Management Practices (New for 2007)
2008 Winner: NetApp
2007 Winners:
Consumer Support: McAfee
Enterprise Support: Oracle
Presented to a company whose knowledge management strategy includes repeatable, effective processes for capturing, publishing and maintaining content in order to solve customer problems in a consistent and efficient manner.

Best Online Support (New for 2007)
2008 Winner: Symantec
2007 Winner: Aspen Technology
Recognition for a company who is leveraging web-based technologies and Knowledge Management processes to provide an effective web self-service experience for their customer, including raising awareness and driving customer adoption of online support, personalizing the experience, using customer feedback for improvement, and measuring customer success through usage metrics for ongoing improvement.

Best On-Site Support (New for 2007)
2008 Winner: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
2007 Winner: Sun Microsystems
Presented to a company whose field installation and repair operations for either consumer or enterprise customers offers a highly streamlined and automated process for capturing customer requests, dispatching the right individual with all necessary parts, and tracking of the issue through to a successful resolution. (Note: This category is intended primarily for hardware companies. Software companies may elect to participate. The SSPA reserves the right to judge hardware and software applications separately.)

Best Service Delivery Optimization (New for 2007)
2008 Winner: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
2007 Winners:
Consumer Support: HP Consumer
Enterprise Support - Cisco
Presented to a company who has successfully improved its support delivery operations through the use of outsourcing, consistent global processes, service technology development or deployment, and/or a quality improvement methodology such as Six Sigma, ISO 9000 to optimize and improve efficiency.

Best Support Staff Practices (New for 2007)
2008 Winner: EMC Corporation
2007 Winners:
Consumer Support: Intuit
Enterprise Support: Network Appliance
Presented to a company who successfully demonstrates commitment to and best practices in the area of developing, motivating and retaining support staff.

Best Practices in Value-Added SupportTM (New for 2007)
2008 Winner: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
2007 Winners:
Consumer Support: HP Consumer
Enterprise Support: Oracle
Presented to a company who successfully demonstrates its commitment and focus on developing and delivering support offerings designed to help customers increase or accelerate the ROI on their product or technology investment or to help the company increase overall product sales.

Best Embedded Product Support – Software NEW! (New for 2008)
2008 Winner: Oracle Corporation
Presented to the software company that demonstrates leadership in implementing diagnostic and “self-healing” functionality within the product to reduce or eliminate the need for a customer to contact support.

Best Embedded Product Support – Hardware NEW! (New for 2008)
2008 Winner: Cisco Systems, Inc.
This award provides recognition of the company that has established the best practice for product monitoring and detection of failing or potentially failing hardware components and has processes in place for fast response and replacement of failing components.

Best Emerging Company Support (New for 2008)
2008 Winner: Approva Corporation
Applicants in this category provide technical support within emerging businesses (defined as companies with under $500M in total annual revenue) for which exemplary customer support is important for company growth and is typically provided with constrained resources. Applicants should demonstrate how their technical support effectively maintains their customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, and helps drive new business.
For software companies these would typically be application implementations, or core systems infrastructure offerings. For hardware companies these would typically be servers, network components, etc.

 Best Use of Metrics & Business Intelligence (Discontinued in 2007)
2007 Winner: IBM Rochester
Presented to a company whose metrics and benchmarking program gathers data on all aspects of the operation to ensure that SLAs are met and that work is flowing according to internal objectives and targets.  In addition to core operational metrics, business intelligence is derived from captured data, enabling decision-oriented analytics.

Best Practices in Customer Success (Discontinued in 2006)
2006 Winner – Cisco
Presented to the company that excels at integrating programs and processes to make customers successful, including all aspect of a company’s involvement and touch points with the customer to make them successful.

Best Practices in Growing the Business (Discontinued in 2006)
2006 Winner – HP Consumer Service and Support
2005 Winner – Trend Micro
Presented to the company that excels in detecting customer needs for additional services, recognizing sales opportunities, defining new product features, and strengthening customer relationships.

Best Practices in Leveraging Customer Feedback (Discontinued in 2006)
2006 Winner – Symantec
2005 Winner – HP-Consumer
Presented to the company that best uses customer feedback throughout the support and product development processes. Key performance metrics include: capturing and communicating customer feedback throughout the organization, efficient escalation processes, and customer advocacy.

Best Practices in Managing People (Discontinued in 2006)
2006 Winner – Ultimate Software
2005 Winner – Intuit
Presented to the company with the most effective management process and training programs for building employee satisfaction, reducing attrition rates and other metrics

Best Practices in Outsourcing (Discontinued in 2006)
2006 Winner – Quantum Corporation
No Winner in 2005
Presented to the company that brings the most benefit to customers and shareholders by outsourcing all or part of support operations.

Best Practices in Self-Service (Discontinued in 2006)
2006 Winner – HP Consumer Service and Support
2005 Winner – Cisco Systems
Presented to the company that creates the most significant advances in customer self-service use, success rates, or other areas. Key performance metrics include case/call reduction and customer satisfaction.

Best Practices in Support Technology (Discontinued in 2006)
2006 Winner – ADP Dealer Services
2005 Winner – ADP Dealer Services
Presented to the company that delivers the best results in technology selection and deployment, including integration with other applications and other parts of the organization.