Can an IT services company afford to run its operations the same way today as it did ten years ago? Given the popularity of service level agreements and IT firms’ growing dependence on recurring revenue, few organizations can afford to coast when it comes to support personnel and processes. Managed services, cloud solutions and mobility offerings add a complexity that few solution providers envisioned a decade ago, compelling many to alter, if not completely re-engineer the way they manage client issues and help desk operations.
While portfolio and service complexity is responsible for making some organizations rethink the way their run their support operations, there are a few other drivers in the equation, including:
- Shifting customer needs and desires.
- Marketplace pressure (direct competition and demand).
- Staffing difficulties and increasing labor costs.
The technologies offered by IT providers in the past have now become the business solutions that many organizations depend on to manage their own customers and operations. From email and VoIP systems to CRM and other office applications, each plays a vital role in their success. When part of their critical business infrastructure fails or is not performing well, it can severely impede their operations, productivity and results. That’s why many IT service companies have to be quicker at resolving their customers’ issues and work harder to keep recurrences to a minimum.
With larger providers and direct sales vendors moving down market, targeting SMBs, VARs and MSPs are facing more competition than ever before. Many of those adversaries do not have local offices or representation and, unless the solution provider’s team uncovers details in conversations with the client, can be hard to identify until after the account has been lost. Support can be a true differentiator when securing and retaining customers and the providers who offer significantly better service are more likely to get the business.
Perhaps the most critical concern here for solution providers is staffing and labor costs. In the IT industry, finding quality engineers and related support personnel is hard enough, but the premium wages required to recruit and retain those experienced individuals continues to climb. Most companies simply have to work harder to balance the need for maximum productivity with each employee’s career goals. Job satisfaction is often more crucial than salary, so any changes in the work routine of support team engineers have to take their goals into consideration.
Play Catch, Not Ping-Pong
As the keynote speaker at the latest IT Services and Support Community meeting in Dallas, Steve Young, senior director and chief architect of customer experience with Cisco Systems, shared details of the process his team followed in re-engineering their support center services. After completing a comprehensive review of its procedures, customer needs and feedback, and employee strengths and goals, the organization charted a two-year makeover of its operations.
The change was quite radical for such a large and well-established organization, but the goal came into focus rather quickly. Young said Cisco considered these questions: “What if we operated support centers as a network and flattened the organization, eliminating the tiered system we had in place? Instead of support escalation, what if we operated like small collaborative teams sitting in a room listening to an issue, with one employee accepting the problem based on their ability to tackle it?”
That’s exactly what Cisco did, retooling its processes and building a collaborative online platform to enable its support team to become one single network. It came up with the phrase “play catch, not ping-pong” to describe its goal of quickly getting customers together with the engineers who could resolve their problems, eliminating the need to retell the issue and escalate across the support community. The phrase also allowed Cisco to drive adoption throughout the organization, from the newest support personnel all the way to the offices of CEO John Chambers.
Two years later, the Cisco support team has the tools and processes in place to better address the needs of its clients and employees. The platform combines Salesforce with the company’s unified contact center system, file sharing infrastructure, business rules engine and specialized social media site. The support team quickly connects customers to the proper experts for their issue and allows the engineers to network globally to research and collaborate on the most effective resolution. As problems are addressed, the processes are fully documented so they can refine and expedite similar requests in the future.
In order to re-engineer a support team, incentive programs may also require major modifications. Cisco now rewards its engineers based on the number of collaboration requests they accept, so as their knowledge grows, their inducements increase proportionately. That incentivizes employees to collaborate more with their peers and take on new challenges to receive greater recognition, building their professional reputation.
The changes Cisco made may not be right for every solution provider business, especially those with a small support team or no escalation process, but their findings are still valuable for any organization. Collaboration is an effective method for expediting customer issues, leveraging the power of peers and shared information to accomplish their goals.
Brian Sherman is founder of Tech Success Communications, specializing in editorial content and consulting for the IT channel. His previous roles include chief editor at Business Solutions magazine and senior director of industry alliances with Autotask. Contact Brian at [email protected].
