The Hotline Magazine
The Redefinition of Customer Support
The SaaS & Success Project

Thursday September 9, 2010




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Staffing Levels & Center Responsiveness

A company's customer contact center should be designed, built and managed as a profitable knowledge inventory and distribution operation. One of the first strategic decisions senior management must make is: How fast does the center need to be in order to retain customers and maintain profitability? The decision on Responsiveness will be expressed in a target Service Level that will in turn dictate the staffing level required to consistently achieve that target. Here's a simplified illustration o

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SaaS/Cloud & Support: Showing the Proof

At every SaaS industry event, I am certain to hear some enthusiastic proponent of the On Demand / Software as a Service model telling the audience that "customer support necessarily must be better in the SaaS ecosystem because the customer is free to switch to a different vendor at any time. Therefore, we have to constantly re-earn our customers' loyalty month after month." I'll discuss the deceptive illusion of "switchability" in a subsequent briefing. For now, let's take a closer look at that

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The Customer Contact Center Training Inventory Costs

Traditionally, technology companies have often used their customer contact centers as an entry-level proving ground. The operational pattern is to hire young people as cheaply as possible, toss them to the phone lions and then transfer those that manage to survive and show some promise into "real" jobs elsewhere in the company. There are two costly effects of this strategy that don't appear on the financial statements, but are nonetheless damaging to the company's long term profitability. The fi

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SaaS/Cloud & Support: The DNA of Success

There has been a lot of talk over the past couple of years about corporate DNA in the SaaS ecosystem. In various ways, the point has been made that in order to truly succeed in the new model, you have to have SaaS-thinking embedded in the very DNA of everyone at all levels throughout the company. But what does SaaS-DNA look like? Under the traditional model, a company selling perpetual licenses to use a software application at a customer's own premises is a software company. The employees descri

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Mikael’s koan for Customer Support

In the Zen Buddhist tradition, a koan is a question that is used to open the door to intuition and insight, to break out of old ways of thinking. In the course of doing industry conference presentations over the years, I came up with a koan for customer support/service professionals and C-level executives alike: What is the sound of no customers calling? More than a few in those audiences have blurted out a succinct answer: Trouble. "I'm out of a job" has been another common response from the su

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By Mikael Blaisdell
Part of Series

A customer support contact center is a knowledge inventory operation, and its process is very mathematical. The speed of response to incoming requests is determined by the average duration of the interaction, the volume of requests and the number of available, trained staff members. Customers want fast, courteous response and complete resolution, while the provider struggles to meet those expectations and the cost of the required resources. In a previous Briefing, I outlined some of the standard options available to senior management when the Support budget won’t balance. You can reduce the incoming direct volume by diverting service requests into more efficient automated channels, or by improving the application product so that it no longer generates as many requests. If the duration of the transactions can be shortened by use of better tools or training, then the staffing requirement will be lower. But if you can’t shrink the volume or the handle time, then you either have to disappoint the customers, or you have to increase the staff. Invariably, the decision is both to disappoint some customers and incur increased costs for some level of additional staff.

There is Another Path

For companies willing to think strategically, however, there is another path to better responsiveness without the increased cost for additional staff members. The answer is to get better value from the ones you already have. But in order to take the first step on that alternate path and gain the enhanced profitability, you have to accept that Support is not a separate entity or accessory, it’s necessarily a core aspect of the ongoing relationship you are selling to your customers.

The basic problem is the perception that Support, Documentation, Training, Professional Services, Sales-Support and Quality Assurance are completely separate functions. The truth, for companies who are oriented towards relationship-thinking, is otherwise. What looks like separate operational entities is actually different aspects of the same relationship product. They are all different expressions of the same essential skills and knowledge of technology and customers.

Once a company commits to the SaaS model, where the product is a long-term relationship, holding on to obsolete organizational constructs is a proven recipe for failure. The profits-realization strategy based on managed income streams provides no excess margin for inefficiencies.

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