Nowadays, most trouble ticketing tools, including those from FrontRange and UniPress, factor in the time the support center is open when calculating resolution times.
Flexible reporting is a common feature among a number of new support tools.
UniPress' FootPrints 6.0, for instance, lets you generate graphical reports on any fields, including fields you add that are unique to your center.
Another characteristic of the latest support tools, such as Genticity's (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada) Customer1, is that they offer a combination of historical and real-time reporting. The next version of Customer1 will let you display persistent metrics for individual agents.
Customer1 also allows you to choose from among some other options, like reverse phone number lookups.
Pricing for the standard version of Customer1 starts at $1,500 per named user and $2,500 per concurrent user. Annual maintenance is an additional 18% above the price of the software if you purchase it.
Genticity also offers a hosted implementation of the software where maintenance is part of the cost. Monthly pricing per concurrent user begins at $150, and accommodates a minimum of three users. For named users, monthly pricing begins at $75. Although the monthly pricing assumes you use the software for at least a year, Genticity lets you change the number of named and concurrent users every three months.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT GOES ON-LINE
Workflow and reporting represent the latest enhancements to trouble ticketing tools, but it's the Internet that's had the greatest impact on customer support. Since the end of the last decade, the Internet has all but eliminated the need to install trouble ticketing software on agents' computers. Most of the latest customer support tools run within Web browsers.
But as we pointed out in our cover story last September, some customer support centers have found that on-line trouble ticketing software doesn't scale as well or run as quickly as software you install on a support rep's computer.
To deal with the issue of speed, vendors such as Genticity place the bulk of their software's functionality on a server. This tactic reduces the likelihood that support reps have to wait for plug-ins or applets to download every time they use on-line trouble ticketing tools.
Vendors are also working to improve scalability. "We have installations able to run hundreds of users with iHEAT," says FrontRange's Blice in reference to the company's on-line version of its customer support software.
Some trouble ticketing tools allow customers to reach support reps over the Internet. Applied Innovation Management (AIM; Las Vegas, NV) offers its own text chat tool, Chat4Help, as an optional addition to its customer support software, HelpDesk Expert for Customer Service (HDECS). HDECS costs $2,000 per seat. Chat4Help costs $65 per seat, and automatically generates trouble tickets when customers use the software to contact support reps.
FootPrints comes with software from Somerset, NJ-based Atinav that enables up to two concurrent support reps to respond to text chat messages from customers.
Several customer support tools, including those from FrontRange, Remedy and UniPress, enable you to set up rules to launch and update trouble tickets when your customers direct e-mail messages to your support center.
If you want to allow customers to create their own trouble tickets on-line, this capability usually entails an additional cost. Genticity, for instance, offers automated on-line trouble ticketing with Customer1 for $15,000 per server.
Like customer support, customer service involves unique challenges when you provide it on-line. We'll explore the Internet's true impact on customer care in case studies in our November issue.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT RESOURCES
There's a lot more to customer support than trouble tickets. As Harold Goldberg, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing with Remedy (Mountain View, CA), says, "The customer support industry has reached a level of maturity such that there are known best practices."
You have plenty of resources to help you find out more about these best practices. These include membership organizations like the Help Desk Institute (HDI) and the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA). Both offer certification to and share best practices with customer support reps, managers and entire centers.
Call Center Magazine regularly features case studies in customer support and in related areas like knowledge management. A valuable complement to this magazine is The Complete Guide to Customer Support, which I co-authored with Services Editor Brendan B. Read. If you want to stay current on technologies and trends in internal support, you can also turn to magazines such as Network Computing and Optimize.
ADDING ON
Trouble ticketing rarely occurs in a vacuum.
For instance, a number of developers of customer relationship management (CRM) software offer modules for tracking support requests. We'll cover the latest products from these vendors in a feature article in our December issue.
Among these vendors, FrontRange Solutions is unique in that its trouble ticketing component, HEAT, is actually a full-fledged product rather than a module.
In keeping with the trend among trouble ticketing tools, HEAT allows you to create templates for the most common procedures at your center. The templates, in turn, enable the software to generate tickets automatically for each task the template comprises. HEAT also informs support reps if they leave out any fields that are necessary to create valid trouble tickets.
Like CRM, knowledge management is an area that frequently dovetails with trouble ticketing.
Several vendors, such as Genticity, GWI and UniPress, include software for building knowledge bases to complement their trouble ticketing tools. Others rely on third-party knowledge management systems. FrontRange's HEAT, for example, lets you create on-line knowledge bases using software from NextPage.
Quite a few trouble ticketing tools, like those from FrontRange, GWI, Remedy and UniPress, also integrate with RightAnswers' Knowledge-Paks, off-the-shelf knowledge bases that contain answers to questions about software that businesses tend to use most often. RightAnswers is a spinoff of ServiceWare, the company that originally developed Knowledge-Paks.
Don't be surprised to see some unusual add-ons from trouble ticketing software vendors. With the help of Acxiom, Genticity offers an optional reverse phone number lookup service to help support reps locate missing information in customers' records. Genticity also offers scheduling and forecasting software from Portage Communications. And with HEAT Plus Call Center, an add-on module from FrontRange, you have the option of running HEAT with a communications server from Interactive Intelligence.
No Problem
The companies we mention in this article offer software that makes it easy to document customers' requests for support.
Applied Innovation Management (AIM)
800-942-7754/702-617-8140
www.innovate.com
FrontRange Solutions
800-776-7889/719-531-5007
www.frontrange.com
Genticity
866-552-8781/905-510-3627
www.genticity.com
GWI Software
360-397-1000
www.gwi.com
Remedy (owned by BMC Software)
650-903-5200
www.remedy.com
UniPress Software
800-222-0550/732-287-2100
www.unipress.com
