Download the 2008 Service Excellence Nomination Form

The STAR Awards for Service Excellence

The STAR Awards for Service Excellence go to companies that demonstrate an ongoing high-level commitment to delivering world-class results in nine categories of software and technical support. Companies seeking this award undergo a rigorous evaluation process, with the winners selected by SSPA’s Advisory Board members.

STAR Award for Service Excellence finalists and winners will be announced at the SSPA Conference October 20-22 , 2008 in Las Vegas.

Important dates and deadlines are as follows:

• Call for Nominations: March 27, 2008
• Nomination submission deadline: June 6, 2008
• Closing date for submitting applications: July 18, 2008
• Finalists notified: September 2008
• STAR Awards Luncheon: October 22, 2008

Categories for the 2008 STAR Awards for Service Excellence are:

• Service Excellence in Outstanding Improvement
• Service Excellence in Partner Management
• Service Excellence in Mission Critical Support – Hardware
• Service Excellence in Mission Critical Support – Software
• Service Excellence in Consumer Support
• Service Excellence in Innovative Support
• Service Excellence in Continual Improvement
• Service Excellence in Complex Application Support
• Service Excellence in Integrated Services
• Service Excellence in Emerging Business Support

How Do I Apply?

You must be a member of the SSPA to apply for a Star Award.

First nominate your support center in one or more categories by completing the Nomination Form at the top of this page. The Nomination Form is due by June 6, 2008. Once the Nomination has been accepted and the fee paid, a PowerPoint Application Form for the category(s) of your choice will be sent to you. All completed PowerPoint applications must be returned no later than July 18, 2008

Past winners for STAR Awards for Service Excellence may be found here.

Service Excellence STAR Award:  Outstanding Improvement

2007 Winner: Symantec Corporation
 
This award is presented to the company that effectively demonstrates the greatest increase in support quality within an underperforming operation. Key supporting data include multi-quarter improvement in customer satisfaction scores and support productivity performance metrics.

Criteria:
Companies with outstanding support improvement initiatives must reflect and provide evidence of the following:

• Problem area:  The applicant must describe a known issue or set of issues that illustrate the existence of a problem and the need for improvement.  This must include baseline metrics around the targeted improvement area to provide clear evidence of “before” and “after” performance gains.  Applicants must select one of the following areas for the focus of their application:
1. Web Self-Service
2. Knowledge Management
3. Call Center Support
4. Mission-Critical Support
5. Field Support
6. Depot Repair
7. Other – please specify
• Improvement action plan:  The applicant must present an overview of the action plan that was developed to improve the problematic area/s.   Be sure to provide a detailed description of the scope of the effort (e.g. people, process and/or technology) and the specific improvement measures that were undertaken, e.g. did it involve a new technology deployment, a staff training initiative, process reengineering, etc., including the project timeline with key milestones.


• Quality Improvement Programs:  Describe the tools, programs or methodologies you used to improve support quality.  This may include programs such as Six Sigma, Total Support Quality from the SSPA, ISO 9000 or similar programs.   Please cite any current accreditation or certification credentials you have.


• Best Practices:  Describe the steps you took to ensure that your improvement initiatives would get your support operations to the level of current industry best practices.  Describe the benchmarks, industry standards or other sources that you referenced as part of your improvement efforts.


• Customer Impacts:  Metrics should be documented that illustrate actual customer impacts of your support improvement efforts. At a minimum, you must provide metrics that demonstrate clear improvement to customer satisfaction by providing a minimum of 6 quarters of trended CSAT data covering the relevant time period.  Other customer-impacting metrics may include incident volume, resolution time, system downtime, escalations, etc., with commentary linking customer-facing improvements to your support improvement actions.  For any metrics provided, the data must show a clear before and after improvement supporting a trend improvement as opposed to a single point in time improvement.  Applicants are encouraged to provide data for any and all metrics that demonstrate a clear positive customer impact. 


• Business Impacts: Applicants should detail cost savings, efficiency gains or other measurable operational improvements resulting from improvement initiatives such as reduced escalations or reduced resolution time.  The metrics should be provided for no less than a 12 month period and show a clear before and after impact during the relevant time period.   

Service Excellence STAR Award:  Partner Management

2007 Winners:
Consumer Support: Hewlett Packard
Enterprise Support: Cisco Systems, Inc.

Many companies outsource service delivery to qualified partners, including outsourcers and channel partners, to reduce costs and extend or augment their own direct service delivery operations.  This award is presented to a company who excels at leveraging third party providers for the delivery of service and support.  This could apply to onshore or offshore outsourced partners, or a combination therein.  In all cases, partners must be comprised of non-badged/indirect company employees.

Criteria:
Companies with exceptional partner management capabilities should provide evidence of many of the following attributes:

• Partner-centric culture:  Demonstrate how you integrate partners into your daily operations.  Describe the tools, processes, governance model and/or other enabling programs you provide to maximize the success of your partners in service delivery.


• Business drivers:.  Describe the primary business drivers or conditions that led to the use of partners for service and support delivery.


• Partner selection:  Identifying the right partners is a key success factor.  Please describe the process you use to evaluate and select service delivery partners.


• Partner training and certification:  Describe any training and certification programs you provide to your partners.  Be sure to indicate if you have any mandatory training and certification requirements and specify in which areas.  


• Incentives:  Describe your approach to providing incentives (or disincentives) to partners to ensure they perform to specified standards.  Please specify which metrics or KPIs have an incentive or penalty associated with them.


• Communications:   Describe how you communicate with your partners to ensure they stay abreast of changing business conditions, new programs, new product releases, etc.


• Seamless customer experience:  Describe how you ensure the end customer has a completely seamless experience when receiving support through a partner entity.  What process or other steps do you take to ensure the customer receives high quality support.


• Knowledge sharing:  Describe your approach to sharing knowledge with your partners, including how you enable access to your knowledge base and how partners contribute to your knowledge base.


• Support infrastructure:  Please describe your approach to integrating partners into your core support infrastructure and workflows (e.g. IVR, case management system, support web site, call flows, etc.)


• Performance metrics:  Describe the set of metrics you use to track the ongoing performance of your delivery partners.   Please provide an example of the metrics dashboard you use to track partner performance, including evidence that your partners are performing at acceptable levels.


• Customer Impacts:  Demonstrate how you are tracking the satisfaction of customers who receive service through your delivery partners.  Applicants must provide trended actual CSAT data for your partner-delivered support for the most recent 6 quarters.    


• Business Impacts:  Metrics should be provided that document cost savings or efficiency gains from having a leveraged partner delivery strategy, such as reduced costs per case.  Please provide a minimum of 4 quarters of trended data. 

Service Excellence STAR Award: Mission Critical Support – Hardware
Service Excellence STAR Award: Mission Critical Support – Software

2007 Winners:
Software: SAP AG
Hardware: Dell, Inc.

Applicants in this category provide technical support in mission-critical environments where “system up-time” is imperative, typically for enterprise customers.  Technical support from these support organizations is a critical part of keeping customers “up and running” 24/7.  Applicants should demonstrate how their technical support effectively maintains their customers’ mission critical systems in continuous operation.

For software companies these would typically be large ERP/CRM application implementations, or core systems infrastructure offerings.  For hardware companies these would typically be servers, network components, etc.

Criteria:

• Customer Support Center Responsiveness: To demonstrate how your support organization meets and exceeds customer requirements for responsiveness, describe processes for issue capture and resolution, including escalation, with emphasis on proactive systems and processes.  Include goals and actual performance for key responsiveness metrics such as average and median response and resolution time.  For onsite repair, include average and median time to onsite, first time fix, average fix time, etc. 


• Web Self-Service, Knowledge base:  Both customers and agents should have direct access to log incidents, search incident history, and research relevant resolution information.  Describe the technology and processes used to capture, publish and maintain a searchable knowledge base and diagnostic aids for agents and customers, as well as metrics that demonstrate how Web self-service and knowledge base technology is streamlining support processes and deflecting live agent interactions.


• Product Supportability:  Products should increasingly contain features that improve their supportability.  This may include features that enable products to self-diagnose or self-heal, allow products to be serviced remotely, simplify the troubleshooting process, or enable products to provide proactive notification of a possible system problem before it occurs.  Describe the processes or initiatives undertaken by your support team to influence your development organization to engineer supportability features into your products.  Include metrics that demonstrate the impact of improved product supportability features such as case avoidance metrics or metrics on the number of remote support cases trended over time.


• Proactive Service Offerings:  Today it is imperative for support organizations to offer proactive support whose purpose is to prevent problems from ever occurring.  Describe the support offerings or support features you provide that are specifically focused on problem prevention.  Examples may include periodic health checks, monitoring services, etc. Provide metrics that demonstrate the impact of your proactive service offerings such as improved availability statistics or reduced instances of unplanned outages or downtime.


• Multi-Vendor Support:  Describe your approach to engaging and working with third party vendors to resolve multi-vendor issues.  


• Quality Improvement Programs:  Quality is a never-ending pursuit.  Describe the tools, programs and methodologies you use to continuously improve support quality.  Be sure to address how they are used to improve the quality of your mission-critical support.  This may include programs such as Six Sigma, Total Support Quality from the SSPA, ISO 9000 or similar programs.  Please provide metrics that demonstrate the impact of a specific quality improvement initiative undertaken by your organization.  Please cite any current accreditation or certification credentials you have.


• Customer Impacts:  Metrics should be documented that illustrate actual customer impacts of mission critical support. Include metrics showing improvements to customer satisfaction, incident volume, resolution time, system downtown, escalations, etc., with commentary linking customer-facing improvements to mission critical support processes and technology.  Applicants must, at a minimum, provide actual trended CSAT data for the most recent 6 quarters.  Applicants are encouraged to provide any and all metrics that demonstrate a clear positive customer impact. 


• Business Impacts:  Delivering high quality, cost effective and profitable mission critical support is definitely a challenge.  Applications should detail how changes to people, processes and/or technology have produced any cost savings or efficiency gains.  In addition, applicants should document revenue increases from mission critical support programs, in particular any revenues generated from agent upsell/cross-sell.

Service Excellence STAR Award:  Consumer Support

2007 Winner: StoresOnline

Presented to a company whose consumer-facing contact center or technical support operation effectively handles high volumes of inbound and outbound customer interactions, with an emphasis on problem avoidance, Web and voice self-service, and streamlined incident handling.

Criteria:
Companies with exceptional Consumer Support should reflect the following attributes:

• Customer Support Center Responsiveness: To demonstrate how your support organization meets and exceeds customer requirements for responsiveness, describe processes for issue capture through to resolution. Agents should handle interactions via all supported channels in a highly productive way, demonstrating innovative technology and processes such as consolidated agent desktop applications and process Wizards.  Operational metrics such as hold time, abandon rates, incident handling time, time to resolve, first call resolution rate and incidents per shift should all demonstrate above average performance as compared to industry benchmarks.  For all metrics reported, please provide average and median data.
• Web Self-Service, Knowledge base:  With consumer facing support organizations receiving high volumes of interactions, applicants should provide metrics demonstrating successful deployments of voice and Web self-service.  Best of breed technology for self-service should be in place, with a technology roadmap showing how self-service initiatives will continue to address a larger range of issues moving forward.  Also, include metrics that show how knowledge base tools streamline capturing and publishing content to improve agent productivity and increase self-service effectiveness. 
• Product Supportability:  Products should increasingly contain features that improve their supportability, such as features enabling products to self-diagnose or self-heal, or to be serviced remotely.  Describe the processes or initiatives undertaken by your support team to influence your development organization to engineer supportability features into your products.  Include metrics that demonstrate the impact of improved product supportability features such as case avoidance metrics or metrics on the number of remote support cases trended over time.
• Proactive Service Offerings:  Today it is imperative for support organizations to offer pre-emptive support whose purpose is to prevent problems from ever occurring, or to avoid customer impact of problems.  Describe the support offerings or support features you provide that are specifically focused on problem prevention.  Examples may include periodic health checks, monitoring services, etc. Provide metrics that demonstrate the impact of your proactive service offerings such as improved availability or reduced instances of unplanned outages.
• Quality Improvement Programs:  Quality is a never-ending pursuit.  Describe the tools (call recording, screen capture), programs and methodologies, detailing how interactions across channels are monitored and scored, and how results drive agent coaching and training. 
• Customer Impacts:  Customer impacts should be documented, as well as metrics that illustrate actual customer satisfaction with both assisted and unassisted service, such as customer satisfaction methodology and scores.  Express impacts from the customer perspective, such as decreased average calls per customer, less downtime, greater adoption of products/services, etc.  Applicants must, at a minimum, provide actual trended CSAT data for the most recent 6 quarters.  Applicants are encouraged to provide any and all metrics that demonstrate a clear positive customer impact. 
• Business Impacts: Planned and actual business impacts should be documented, as well as metrics illustrating actual cost savings or efficiency gains from self-service, process improvements, and other initiatives such as knowledge bases or remote support tools.  Applicants should also include departmental goals for offer extensions, and metrics showing how upsell/cross-sell revenue meets or exceeds departmental goals.

Service Excellence STAR Award:  Innovative Support

2007 Winner: Xerox Corporation

Presented to a company who has embraced innovation in people, process and technology to increase agent productivity, service levels and customer satisfaction; increase problem avoidance, and effectively handle more interactions using unassisted channels.

Criteria:
Companies with exceptional Innovative Support should reflect the following attributes:

• Innovation in people: Unique practices for hiring, training, scheduling, monitoring and coaching should be documented, with accompanying metrics demonstrating success.  Examples can include hard metrics, such as revenue generated and employee productivity improvements, and softer metrics, such as increased employee satisfaction and lower agent turnover.
• Innovation in process:  How have processes been overhauled to revolutionize support?  Provide before and after process flows to document changes, including how change management issues were planned for and successfully overcome.  Process changes could involve problem detection and resolution, incident handling and escalation, knowledge capture and publishing, or incorporating offer extensions into inbound interactions.
• Innovation in technology:  An overview of innovative technology implemented to improve the customer experience, and the bottom line, should be included, addressing elements such as Web 2.0 Communities, new support channels, personalized interactions across channels, intelligent searching, agent and self-service diagnostics, proactive alerting and problem resolution, etc.
• Customer Impacts:  Provide metrics that illustrate actual customer impacts of innovation. Include metrics showing improvements to customer satisfaction, incident volume, resolution time, etc., with commentary linking improvements to innovations. Also, express impacts from the customer perspective, such as decreased average calls per customer, less downtime, greater adoption of products/services, etc.  Applicants must, at a minimum, provide actual trended CSAT data for the most recent 6 quarters.  Applicants are encouraged to provide any and all metrics that demonstrate a clear positive customer impact. 
• Business Impacts: Planned and actual business impacts should be documented, including metrics that show actual cost savings or efficiency gains from innovative initiatives.  Applicants should also include details for additional product and/or service revenue generated, especially revenues generated from agent upsell/cross-sell.

Service Excellence STAR Award:  Continual Improvement

2007 Winner: IBM System X, Blade Center & Intellistation (xBCI) Client Support

Presented to a company that has demonstrated exceptional service levels and customer satisfaction for three or more years, with year over year improvements and a plan in place for continual improvement in the future.

Criteria:
Companies with exceptional Continual Improvement should reflect the following attributes:

• Customer Support Center Responsiveness: What initiatives have targeted improvements to customer responsiveness? Performance for service levels, including resolution time, first call resolution, agent productivity, hold times, self-service success, etc., demonstrate how the applicant compares favorably to industry benchmarks, with marked improvement each year for three or more years.
• Web Self-Service, Knowledge base:  Knowledge base and self-service technology plays an ever larger role in today’s support organizations as interaction volumes continue to rise.  How have your processes and technologies for capturing and publishing knowledge, and enabling multi-channel self-service, continually improved each year for three or more years?  Provide metrics showing adoption and success of self-service, and improved capture and reuse of knowledge.
• Product Supportability:  To continually improve, companies must not only target support processes, but must also dedicate resources to eliminating issues from occurring in the first place. Products should contain features that improve their supportability, such as self-diagnostics or self-healing, or enable remote access and resolution.  Describe the processes or initiatives undertaken by your support team to influence additional supportability features for your products.  Include metrics that demonstrate the impact of improved product supportability features such as case avoidance metrics or metrics on the number of remote support cases trended over time.
• Proactive Service Offerings:  Today it is imperative for support organizations to offer proactive support whose purpose is to prevent problems from ever occurring, or to avoid customer impact of problems.  Describe the support offerings or support features you provide that are specifically focused on problem prevention, and how this has continually improved service levels.  Examples may include periodic health checks, monitoring services, etc. Provide metrics that demonstrate the impact of your proactive service offerings such as improved availability or reduced instances of unplanned outages during the last three or more years.
• Quality Improvement Programs:  Quality is a never-ending pursuit.  Describe the tools (call recording, screen capture), programs and methodologies, detailing how interactions across channels are monitored and scored, and how results drive agent coaching and training.  How has quality improved over the last 3 or more years as a result of these programs?  Please cite any current accreditation or certification credentials you have.
• Customer Impacts:  Metrics that illustrate actual customer impacts of the continual improvements should be documented.  In addition to metrics for customer satisfaction, include information on increased market share, customer loyalty, repurchase, or additional purchases of products or services attributed to your continual improvement.  Applicants must, at a minimum, provide actual trended CSAT data for the most recent 6 quarters.  Applicants are encouraged to provide any and all metrics that demonstrate a clear positive customer impact. 
• Business Impacts: Planned and actual business impacts should be documented, including metrics illustrating actual cost savings or efficiency gains from continual improvement initiatives.  Applicants should also include details for revenue generation resulting attributed to the continual improvement.

Service Excellence STAR Award: Complex Application Support

2007 Winner: Tektronix, Inc.

This category recognizes support organizations that deliver sophisticated technical support for complex applications in mixed or otherwise complex environments. An applicant in this category is typically identified as having senior level technical support representatives with advanced degrees. These reps interface with senior level customers typically in engineering and/or scientific fields.

For software companies these would typically be product design application implementations, or complex medical or process monitoring/automation offerings.  For hardware companies these would typically be measurement and monitoring equipment, or complex medical diagnostic equipment.

Criteria:

• Customer Support Center Responsiveness: To demonstrate how your support organization meets and exceeds customer requirements for responsiveness, describe processes for issue capture and resolution, including escalation, with emphasis on proactive systems and processes.  Include goals and actual performance for key responsiveness metrics such as average response and resolution time.  For onsite repair, include average and median time to onsite, first time fix, average fix time, etc.  For depot repair, include depot response and resolution time.  For all metrics cited, please provide average and median data.
• Web Self-Service, Knowledge base:  Both customers and agents should have direct access to log incidents, search incident history, and research relevant resolution information.  Describe the technology and processes used to capture, publish and maintain a searchable knowledge base and diagnostic aids for agents and customers for servicing complex products/technologies, as well as metrics that demonstrate how Web self-service and knowledge base technology is streamlining support processes and deflecting live agent interactions.
• Product Supportability:  Products should increasingly contain features that improve their supportability.  This may include features that enable products to self-diagnose or self-heal, allow products to be serviced remotely, simplify the troubleshooting process for complex products/technologies, or enable products to provide proactive notification of a possible system problem before it occurs.  Describe the processes or initiatives undertaken by your support team to influence your development organization to engineer supportability features into your products.  Include metrics that demonstrate the impact of improved product supportability features such as case avoidance metrics or metrics on the number of remote support cases trended over time.
• Proactive Service Offerings:  Today it is imperative for support organizations to offer proactive support whose purpose is to prevent problems from ever occurring.  Describe the support offerings or support features you provide that are specifically focused on problem prevention.  Examples may include periodic health checks, monitoring services, calibration services, etc. Provide metrics that demonstrate the impact of your proactive service offerings such as improved availability statistics or reduced instances of unplanned outages or downtime.
• Multi-Vendor Support:  Describe your approach to engaging and working with third party vendors to resolve multi-vendor issues. 
• Quality Improvement Programs:  Quality is a never-ending pursuit.  Describe the tools, programs and methodologies you use to continuously improve support quality.  Be sure to address how they are used to improve the quality of your mission-critical support.  This may include programs such as Six Sigma, Total Support Quality from the SSPA, ISO 9000 or similar programs.  Please provide metrics that demonstrate the impact of a specific quality improvement initiative undertaken by your organization.  Please cite any current accreditation or certification credentials you have.
• Customer Impacts:  Metrics should be documented that illustrate actual customer impacts of complex application support. Include metrics showing improvements to customer satisfaction, incident volume, resolution time, system downtown, escalations, etc., with commentary linking customer-facing improvements to support processes and technology.  Applicants must, at a minimum, provide actual trended CSAT data for the most recent 6 quarters.   Applicants are encouraged to provide any and all metrics that demonstrate a clear positive customer impact. 
• Business Impacts: Delivering high quality, cost effective and profitable complex application support is a huge challenge.  STAR Awards applications should detail how changes to people, processes and/or technology have produced any cost savings or efficiency gains.  In addition, applicants should document revenue increases from complex application support programs, in particular any revenues generated from agent upsell/cross-sell.

Service Excellence STAR Award:  Integrated Services

2007 Winner: Xerox Corporation

The Integrated Services category recognizes support organizations that have effectively teamed with the Education Services (Training) and Professional Services Organizations to deliver seamless integrated support to their customers.  They offer blended services programs that ensure a positive customer experience with the adoption, implementation and usage of the company’s products

Key Criteria:

• Education Services:  A positive customer experience is dependent on having users who understand how to effectively leverage the product’s functionality.  Describe any specially developed training you offer for customers (e.g.  end users, system or network administrators) and how you have integrated these into your overall support delivery.  Be sure to explain any analysis of customer experiences or support case data you performed to determine overall training needs.
• Professional Services:  Today’s more complex products require collaborative Professional Services and Customer Support offerings to facilitate faster, smoother implementation success with your company’s products.  Describe joint offerings you are providing to improve your customer’s experience.  Examples of joint efforts might include post implementation evaluations or assessments to increase the effectiveness of customer utilization of your products, or Professional Services onsite resources in lieu of fly in support resources.
• Proactive Service Offerings:  Today it is imperative for support organizations to offer proactive support that includes Education Services and Professional Service whose purpose is to prevent problems from ever occurring.  Describe the joint/collaborative support offerings or support features you provide that are specifically focused on problem prevention.  Examples may include environmental assessment services, staff readiness assessments, monitoring services, etc. Provide metrics that demonstrate the impact of your proactive service offerings such as improved availability statistics or reduced instances of unplanned outages or downtime.
• Operational Improvement Impact:  Describe how the integrated services offerings positively impacted the operation in one or more of following areas.
1. Call Center Support
2. Knowledge Management
3. Field Support
4. Other – Please specify
• Integrated Services Adoption:  Describe the extent to which your company has embraced an integrated services approach.  What percentage of your total customer base or total contract base is currently receiving integrated services.  Discuss the actions you are taking to drive the adoption of integrated services by customers.  Describe the action being taken to drive the internal changes required to support an integrated services approach across the various stakeholder groups (sales, marketing, PS, Education Services, etc.).
• Customer Impacts:  Metrics should be documented that illustrate actual customer impacts of integrated services support. Include metrics showing improvements to customer satisfaction, incident volume, resolution time, system downtown, escalations, etc., with commentary linking customer-facing improvements to integrated service/support processes and technology.  Applicants must, at a minimum, provide actual trended CSAT data for the most recent 6 quarters.  Applicants are encouraged to provide any and all metrics that demonstrate a clear positive customer impact. 
• Business Impacts: Delivering high quality, cost effective and profitable integrated service/support is definitely a challenge.  Applications should detail how changes to people, processes and/or technology across the three organizations have produced any cost savings or efficiency gains.  In addition, applicants should document revenue increases.

Service Excellence STAR Award: Emerging Business Support

2007 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.

Criteria:

• Customer Support Center Responsiveness: To demonstrate how your support organization meets and exceeds customer requirements for responsiveness, describe processes for issue capture and resolution, including escalation, with emphasis on proactive systems and processes.  Include goals and actual performance for key responsiveness metrics such as average response and resolution time.  For onsite repair, include average time to onsite, first time fix, average fix time, etc. 
• Web Self-Service, Knowledgebase:  Both customers and agents should have direct access to log incidents, search incident history, and research relevant resolution information.  Describe initiatives to expand the use of technology and processes to capture, publish and maintain a searchable knowledgebase and diagnostic aids for agents and customers, as well as any metrics that demonstrate how Web self-service and knowledgebase technology is streamlining support processes and deflecting live agent interactions.
• Product Supportability:  Companies at this stage should have a close working relationship with the R&D organization.  Describe the processes or initiatives undertaken by your support team to influence your development organization to engineer supportability features into your products.  Include metrics that demonstrate the impact of improved product supportability features such as case avoidance metrics or metrics on the number of remote support cases trended over time.
• Proactive Service Offerings:  Describe initiatives to address the unique needs of your largest or most demanding customers.   This could include support offerings or support features you provide that are specifically focused on problem prevention.  Examples may include periodic health checks, monitoring services, etc. Provide metrics that demonstrate the impact of your proactive service offerings on improving the customer usage experience with your products.
• Customer Impacts.  Metrics should be documented that illustrate actual customer impacts of your technical support. Include metrics showing improvements to customer satisfaction, incident volume, resolution time, system downtown, escalations, etc., with commentary linking customer-facing improvements critical support processes and technology.  Applicants must, at a minimum, provide actual trended CSAT data for the most recent 6 quarters.
• Business Impacts.  Describe how the initiatives you have implemented have improved your business metrics such as license, support service revenue growth and support services gross margin improvements.

If you have any questions, please contact us us at StarAwards@thesspa.com or
858-674-5491.