ICMI - <h4>Customer Support Software</h4>Keep Your Support Team On The Right Track

What kind of work should your customer support operation focus on? The way to answer this question is to think about when support reps are most helpful to customers. Support reps are most productive when they use their knowledge to assist customers; they're less productive when they assign and track requests for this assistance.

The appeal of the tools we describe in this article is that they enable support reps to devote more time to answering customers' questions and less time to tracking whether they've done so. These tools can also save customers the trouble of having to call, and perhaps having to wait on hold, to find out the status of their support requests. Although this article focuses on software specifically for support operations that assist customers, these tools can be useful within support operations that assist internal employees as well.

One of the most significant trends with customer support software tools is that they allow companies to be more precise in how they define service level agreements, or SLAs. SLAs refer to the timeframes in which support organizations agree to respond to or resolve requests for support.

For organizations that charge customers for support, the ability of the organization to meet SLAs can have an effect on revenue. Many support organizations offer tiers of pricing so that customers pay more for quicker responsiveness, and for the availability of support over a greater number of hours. Among customers who are willing to pay for support, the highest tier, for instance, could entail an SLA that requires a response from a support rep within an hour of a request for help. The SLA could also stipulate that customers who receive the highest tier of support have to be able to get in touch with a support rep 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

By contrast, a lower tier of support could stipulate that customers should be willing to wait up to four hours to receive responses to their requests, and that support only has to be available eight hours per day on weekdays.

Although companies often determine SLAs based on categories of products, and according to tiers of support, they may not necessarily be able to account for all scenarios concerning these products. Issues with products that have lots of components made by multiple manufacturers can require more time and a wider range of expertise to resolve than products with components from a single manufacturer.

Likewise, support organizations may have to adapt SLAs for certain products to reflect how quickly they can reasonably expect their particular teams of support reps to attend to or resolve customers' requests for assistance. For this reason, when developers of customer support software expand the variety of ways their tools can define and report on SLAs, they allow support organizations to be more accurate about setting expectations about how promptly they can respond to customers.

As Paul Unterberg, a product manager with TechExcel (Lafayette, CA), a developer of customer support software, puts it, "definable service level agreements have allowed teams to prioritize calls."

Adds Unterberg: "By directing higher-level resources to more visible calls, [support] teams are able to utilize their top talent more efficiently."

Another trend, which we touch on briefly in a sidebar within this article, is that more developers of customer support software are offering routing, interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition systems to complement tools that track requests for support.

In our next issue of this magazine, we will highlight another aspect of customer support, knowledge management, which refers to how companies enable support reps, and, increasingly, customers, to locate answers to questions on their own.

Small Changes, Big Impact

Some of the enhancements that customer support software companies have recently introduced are subtle, but they can make a difference.

A case in point is the latest version of Genticity's (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada) Customer1, which now enables you to organize SLAs in the context of specific types of issues, as well as set up workflows that correspond to these issues.

Workflows are crucial components of SLAs because they document the tasks that are necessary to fulfill SLAs; they also indicate the timeframes for completing these tasks. Some workflows refer to circumstances that automatically trigger certain actions before customers become aware of them. In response to a network outage, for example, a workflow can simply entail generating automated e-mail messages or calls to update customers about how long the network will be unavailable. An example of a proactive workflow is one that generates automated e-mail messages or calls to let customers know how they can gain access to new releases of products for which they currently receive support.

One way that developers of support software are making their tools easier to use is by streamlining how they report on support requests. The newest version of FootPrints from UniPress Software (Edison, NJ), version 7.5, now includes a report wizard that lets you drill down on the status of requests that involve individual support reps, groups of reps, products or time periods. These reports also enable you to color-code requests based on their status, so that, for instance, the reports highlight requests whose SLAs your support team has not fulfilled. In addition, FootPrints allows you to schedule these reports in advance.

Chances are that support reps, like other employees within your company, rely on different types of software, like Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, to maintain their calendars. To minimize the need for support reps to reconcile various calendars, UniPress offers an optional module, FootPrints Synch. As the name suggests, the module lets support reps synchronize calendars that reside within FootPrints with calendars associated with other types of software that support reps frequently use.

Given that timing is everything in support, it's essential that support organizations, especially those that span multiple locations, be consistent in measuring how quickly support reps respond to customers' support requests and how much time they devote to their efforts to resolve them. FootPrints 7.5, for example, automatically translates dates and times, such as those for SLAs, to the dates and times of the sites where support reps are located.

Like most leading customer support tools, FootPrints also calculates the duration that support reps spend on assisting customers based on your support team's hours of operation at each location. This way, you don't inadvertently include the time your support operation is closed when you track how long it takes a support rep to respond to or resolve a customer's request.

In terms of assigning support requests, one of the more straightforward ways to automate this process is by enabling customers to complete on-line forms to document their requests for help. If your support center receives completed on-line forms from customers as e-mail messages, then you can easily create rules to automatically identify most of the issues for which customers seek support. One way to do this is to define a list of possible issues within your on-line form. Another way to do this is to flag certain words and phrases that customers often use to describe certain kinds of requests.

After you identify the issue that a customer needs help with, you can create rules to automatically assign a support rep to respond to the issue. Given the immediacy of support requests, it makes sense to create rules for these assignments that are analogous to call routing rules. That means, for instance, that you would determine which support reps are sufficiently knowledgeable about a given issue. From this group, your routing rules determine which support reps are currently available, and who among them has been available longer than other similarly knowledgeable support reps.

Many support tools let you create e-mail routing rules to automatically assign customers' requests to support reps. These tools include the latest version of GWI Software's (Vancouver, WA) support tool, c.Support v4.5 for Microsoft Windows, which lets you set up rules to link a specific type of issue, and an appropriate workflow, with a given request. The software also allows you to maintain lists of colleagues whom you inform about the status of certain kinds of support requests, even if these colleagues are not part of your support team.

How helpful is customer support software in practice? In our case studies later this year, we will reveal the types of tools and approaches that companies find to be essential in the real world of supporting customers.

IP Telephony and Customer Support: Perfect Together

Most leading customer support tools allow customers to create trouble tickets on-line without first having to speak with agents. Some of them also let customers use an interactive voice response (IVR) system to automate the process of requesting support by phone.

A recent example of a company that offers this capability is FrontRange Solutions (Dublin, CA), which has developed trouble ticketing software, known as HEAT, and the latest version of its IP call routing and IVR software, known as IP Contact Center (IPCC) Version 5.0.

By combining HEAT with FrontRange's IPCC, support centers have the option of enabling customers to use an IVR system to create their own trouble tickets, as well as to find out the status of pending trouble tickets. FrontRange includes the IVR system, and also offers an optional speech recognition component, with IPCC.

Certain circumstances, such as a temporary shutdown of a network, can affect many customers at the same time. If many customers simultaneously encounter the same issue, then the resolution of that issue may also affect them at the same time. If you anticipate an issue in advance, and you also anticipate when the resolution of the issue will be, you can use IPCC and HEAT to broadcast a text-to-speech message by phone to the customers whom the issue affects.

HEAT also lets you maintain an automated ranking of the types of issues for which customers seek the most assistance. If customers call into the IVR component of IPCC, you can enable the IVR system to automatically indicate the status of the top overall issues, or issues within a given category, that your support center has documented using HEAT. HEAT updates the list of issues based on the number of requests associated with them.

Screen Pops for Customer Support

Back in the late 1990s, some developers of customer support software expanded the scope of their products - under the banner of customer relationship management (CRM) - to let companies track communication with customers in the context of sales and service, while continuing to offer tools specifically for support. Whether or not developers of customer support software have chosen to provide broader CRM suites, many of them continue to enable their tools to integrate with call routing software from phone switch manufacturers.

TechExcel (Lafayette, CA), for example, offers this option with its customer support software, ServiceWise 6.0. Through this integration, support reps can view screen pops as calls reach them. When a support rep receives a call from a customer, the rep's computer screen displays the customer's contact information and the current status of the customer's support requests.

Layers of Accountability

The more constituents a service level agreement (SLA) affects, the more intricate the workflow for that SLA can become. Within an organization such as an outsourcer, an SLA can comprise layers of accountability not only to each client, but also to each client's customers.

Referring to SLAs, Ken Jochims, senior solutions marketing manager with BMC Software (Houston, TX), acknowledges that "they get much more complex when you get into the service provider environment."

To address this complexity, BMC's Remedy for IT Service Providers enables outsourcers, as well as other organizations that support customers on behalf of multiple companies, to partition information about support requests that concern each company. This way, even if your clients happen to share some of the same customers, you ensure that you only present information to a client that directly relates to the particular type of support you provide to that client's customers.