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

Thursday September 9, 2010




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SaaS & The Ownership of Success

The SaaS & Support Project research uncovered a lot about the current state of SaaS vendor operating patterns. In my opinion, the most significant finding was the degree to which SaaS companies tend to ignore the ownership of and responsibility for their ongoing customer relationships in their organizational structures and process. While some companies say that they have designated an owner, there is rarely any connection between that role and the metrics applied to measure the performance o

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Contact Center Technology: Getting What You Ask For

Implementation firms specializing in contact center technology tools have learned to be very particular about documenting the exact specifications of what the customer has requested. The contracts clearly state that while the implementers are of course willing to make whatever changes the customer desires anywhere in the process, those changes are not included in the quoted price or schedule. Implementation contracting can be a very profitable business. Unfortunately, in the end, it's not hard a

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The Mission of a Customer Contact Center

The true mission of a customer contact center  is: Profitability . Stop; read it again. The mission of a customer contact center is its contribution to sustainable corporate profitability. Everything about the center needs to be directly connected to that mission. A customer contact center, be it about service or support, is about generating two kinds of profitability - direct profits from immediate conversion of contacts to additional sales, and indirect profits from the retention of customers

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The Metrics of Customer Centricity

All across the corporate world, there's a metric and a means of capturing the data for nearly every possible operational detail to be found in any customer contact center. First Call Resolution Rate. (FCR) Average Speed to Answer. (ASA) Abandons. (People who hang up before being connected to a Customer Service Representative.) Escalations. (What happens when the 1st CSR couldn't find the answer.) Attendance. Adherence. Volume. Average Handle Time. (AHT) Service Level Compliance. The problem is t

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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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By Mikael Blaisdell

Hubble Telescope over EarthFor more than 30 years, I’ve been working with companies across a very wide range of industries and types/sizes of organizations on all aspects of their sustainable profitability and customer retention efforts.  While the engagements were usually described as being about fixing broken customer contact centers and optimizing working ones, the essence then as now is about success through keeping profitable customer relationships.

Through the LensI started writing about the world of customer support & service in the late ’80′s with articles and columns in MicroTimes, InfoWorld, VARBusiness, Reseller Management, Customer Support Management Magazine, etc. I’d gotten into the profession of customer relationship management by accident, long before CRM ever became a buzzword. I was the 8th employee of MicroPro, a software company, back in ’79, the manufacturers of an early word-processing package called WordStar. In those days, WordStar owned the word processor market and thought that they didn’t have to worry about the kind of support that they offered to their customers. They were wrong. Not long after, a company called WordPerfect came along out of nowhere and MicroPro’s ownership of 95% of the market swiftly evaporated.

I went on to run a customer support, documentation & training group for another company, and then had my own VAR operation for a few years afterward. In the process, I learned first-hand that customer retention is an all-company effort.

Vision at all Levels

Under the MicroscopeTo get an immediate view of what’s going on out in the community of your customers; go sit in your company’s customer contact center for a few days. Listen in on the conversations that go on all around you. Talk to the support and service representatives – they know, just as I did when I took those calls, exactly what the customers are saying and thinking about the product and company..

What you’ll get here are the observations that come out of those years of direct and in-depth experience about what’s important and why in achieving success in the high technology business.

Charting the Right Course

In management effectiveness, it’s what gets measured that matters. Those who focus on measuring short term events tend to make short term decisions. Unfortunately, such tactical expediencies often can damage long term strategic corporate goals. An emphasis on pursuing new customers, for example, which is inherently more costly than selling to existing ones, can prevent organizations from attaining significantly greater levels of sustainable profitability through customer retention.

HotLine shorter NoTagline 300x30 Lighting the HotLine MagazineStrategy will be a consistent theme in Commentary articles, as will the importance of alignment with it of all of the other elements of success. The technology industry is in a time of profound change, and the pace of the transformation is accelerating rapidly. Companies will need to employ a variety of tactics in the face of increasing competition without losing sight of the ultimate goal. The intent of The HotLine Magazine is to be an active resource to C-Level corporate officers to help them navigate and succeed. If you’d like to be a part of that, the first step is a free membership.