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

Thursday September 9, 2010




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The Contact Center Management Technology Research Project

It's time for a change, for something new. Currently, there are at least 70 manufacturers of what might be called Case Management Systems for customer contact centers. The function of a CMS product is to capture and track the details of a customer interaction with the company, to record the specifics of a request or problem and to help the support or service rep find a satisfactory resolution. Obviously, a good CMS resource is key part of the standard contact center technology suite, a requireme

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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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SaaS & The Ghost of Computing Past

I was asked to speak on the topic: "10 Key Things to Look For in Customer Support With SaaS Vendors" at the SaaSCon 2008 event in San Jose. The invitation, the phrasing of the session topic, and the radically changing demographics for the event were and remain significant indicators of the gathering force of the SaaS/Cloud tsunami -- and of the speed of development of the sea change in the industry. But there's a haunting reminder at the edges of this brave new on-demand world, an unquiet Ghost

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Milestones and Portents

I recently visited Salesforce.com's annual event, the Dreamforce conference. The attendance was significantly larger than last year, which in turn had been noticeably larger than the year before. The Cloud/Software As A Service tsunami that Microsoft's Bill Gates described as a sea-change in the high technology industry is growing ever larger. Almost two years ago, Gates saw something gathering on the horizon that concerned him, as well it should. When all you need to access the business techno

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Contact Center Profitability: The Job You Save… Could Be Your Own.

A well-known major computer manufacturer just announced the closure of another one of its customer support contact centers. 1,100 more people will be out of a job, to join the 900 from the last such closure who are suddenly looking for new employment. The company spokesman said that "the decision to close the call centre was about cutting costs to stay competitive." That statement is an accurate indication of how Support is typically regarded by Senior Management teams across the industry, and i

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By Mikael Blaisdell
Part of Series

When I first heard of the SaaS/Cloud model, where the application and all the data reside on a server somewhere out on the internet instead of on the local PC, I immediately saw that it had some serious implications for Support as a profession. If all you need to access your applications is a browser and a web connection, then the operating system of the local PC is no longer a significant factor. And since most of the issues flooding into customer support groups all over the industry are about the Windows operating system, the shift to SaaS will mean a substantial drop in the support burden for every on-demand manufacturer.  If/When that category of incoming issues goes away, the staffing requirements in support will be much less.  There are two immediate and vital questions that this scenario poses to the industry. The first concerns the accuracy of the prediction. What if it’s correct? The second is simply: What will happen to those people who are no longer needed for Break/Fix problem solving?

When Break/Fix Goes Away

I have done operational reviews of technical support contact centers for many years. In every engagement, I always analyze incoming case categories and volumes. The “Not Really Our Problem” category of operating system issues is almost never less than 50% of the total when the data is carefully examined. SaaS companies, however, are another story. I recently visited a SaaS manufacturer for some off-the-record conversations with the support executive and their team. Their largest case category was something they called Access Issues — lost passwords, other inability to connect problems, etc. How many of their cases were really operating system issues? None. And as I expected, the size of their organization was noticeably smaller than would have been the case in a traditional-model software manufacturer supporting the same number of customers.

Granted, I’ve only interviewed a few SaaS company contact centers on this point so far, and therefore the accuracy of my premise can’t be deemed proven yet. The consistency of the anecdotal data, however, strongly suggests that this is an issue that support professionals need to be seriously investigating themselves. If — When — the premise does prove true, then the second question I posed will confront every member of the community. What will become of those support professionals who think of themselves in terms of Break/Fix problem-solving when the need for that role sharply drops? The same question will also have to be answered by the companies.

SaaS companies who see only a cost-reduction benefit in the reduced need for contact center headcount are wasting an opportunity for significantly enhanced profitability. Unfortunately, interviews with team managers, support reps and even a few support executives have indicated that Break/Fix thinking is still prevalent even in the SaaS ecosystem. There is no future in Break/Fix as a role for the support group or its members. Those jobs contribute no economic advantage to either company or customer. It’s time to change the nature of the profession into something that makes a contribution and does generate value and profitability.

Series Table of Contents