Expanding Internationally? Here’s Your New World Order

Posted on 2 February, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Many companies struggle with expanding their support operation internationally. Many choose to expand their international operations one country at a time, and the support organization usually ends up reporting to the country manager as part of the overall sales organization. As business grows, the likelihood increases that those teams will grow without much planning, coordination or guidance, resulting in under-utilization of some individuals while others are over-extended, leading to employee frustration and attrition. This distributed model is generally viewed as overly expensive and poorly delivering. Certainly it delivers inconsistently across country borders and greatly depends on the support, good will and understanding of the local managers to succeed.

Companies planning global expansion should consider this situation early on and evaluate the benefits and risks of having multiple local organizations vs. having a single centralized operation:

  • Consistent customer experience world-wide can be achieved fairly easily through central management.

  • Focus on local market requirements should be built into the organization by taking the time to understand the needs of individual market and developing ways to address them

  • Flexible deployment of skills – a central organization can shift people to address urgent problems between customers in multiple countries or regions without extensive coordination and turf wars

  • Efficient utilization of resources – reduce the need for multiple facilities, labs, training schedules to address every single need, and focus on a centralized operation to

  • Redundancy of skills – local organizations tend to acquire critical skills without giving much thought to their ability to utilize them fully. This leads to situations where highly experienced engineers utilize their skills for only a small fraction of the time and are otherwise kept busy doing other work

  • Ability to deploy best practices rapidly – local organizations will tend to shy away from investing in best practices or joining initiatives that do not carry immediate benefits, counting on ‘corporate’ or other resources to deliver tools, information and knowledge

The main exposure in a centralized support organization is the need for local variation in delivery. Having a centralized organization that coordinates closely with the local country teams, focuses on understanding their needs and delivering to it can solve the majority of those problems.

Keys to the success of a centralized support organization are on-going executive support and the ability of the the support reporting chain to gain and maintain it through collaboration and execution.

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Posted in Global Operations, Support Management

What Can Enterprise Support Learn From The NBA?

Posted on 28 December, 2011 by | Leave a comment



My sincerest apologies to the blog’s loyal readers for the long hiatus. I have been occupied with several other projects that took way more time and involvement than initially planned.

There’s an excellent post on Mark Cuban’s blog, discussing why he does not support using smartphone applications as part of the spectators’ experience in Dallas Mavericks’ games. The post is especially emphatic about owning the customer experience from start to end and focusing on the main deliverable – a memorable experience with other people.

Reading this post got me thinking about the differences between the totality of user experience focus expressed in this post and the inconsistent, heavily segregated experience we encounter in our own industry way too frequently. For the Dallas Mavericks, the ownership and objectives for the customer experience are clear, and I can imagine every employee knows their role in it. Can we say the same about our industry?

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all readers a healthy, happy and prosperous new year.

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Posted in Customer Experience

Still Measuring Call Time?

Posted on 5 November, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I came across (via a comment on Wim Rampen’s excellent blog by Arie Goldshlager) a very interesting interview with American Express’ EVP of Service reviewing changes to the company’s contact center practices. In the interview Mr. Bush makes several interesting statements such as “We also strongly believe that great service doesn’t come down to what we think about our performance internally. It’s all about what the customer thinks after every interaction. So we’re not measuring our performance by internal measures.”

Later in the interview the discussion continues to review some of the benefits and guiding principles behind the change. Most importantly, however, is the focus on the long-term relationship between the customer and the company. If this kind of thinking works for a high volume operation like American Express it should work for the Enterprise Software market as well.

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Posted in Customer Relations

On Metrics and Employee Confusion

Posted on 30 October, 2011 by | Leave a comment

There’s an excellent post from Bob Champagne discussing the misalignment of strategy and metrics. I frequently seen this practice in employee objectives and evaluation as well as in job postings. It is not uncommon to see an enterprise software company talk on one hand about concepts such as knowledge creation and future call avoidance and on the other use low-complexity call center metrics, such as after call work and average call length. In this situation, employees will always veer towards the objectives that pay them more, either financially or in management praise or both. Conclusion? Take time to develop your metrics based on your strategy and objectives. Ask yourself how you would behave if you were faced with the choice and do not assume your employees will act differently.

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Posted in Metrics, Support Strategy

Who Are You Serving?

Posted on 22 October, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Every once in a while we encounter a discussion that attempts to apply concepts from the consumer environment to the enterprise, without giving much thought to the differences between the two. I wanted, therefore to share an academic paper (pdf) I came across recently, that does just that – analyze the differences between the consumer and enterprise environments. The paper is called “Outsourcing Services to other Firms: A Framework for the Analysis of Consumer Satisfaction” and was written by Roland Böettcher and Marco Gardini.

the paper makes several important distinctions, chief among them is the distinction between the roles different individuals play in bringing an enterprise service transaction to completion:

“…individuals consuming the service and perceiving the quality most likely are not involved in the purchase process, i.e. in decision-making with respect to provider selection and price-quality trade-offs.”

The paper proposes a simple model for understanding the different roles:

This model, in turn, helps us understand the source for discrepancies in service negotiation, design and delivery between B2B and B2C interactions:

and identifies three potential gaps that can impact customer satisfaction:

  1. Definition Gap – Between the customer’s expectation and the negotiated contract

  2. Design Gap – Between the vendor’s contractual commitment and its ability to provide service

  3. Delivery Gap – Between the contractual commitment and delivery performance

Many support managers are intuitively familiar with these gaps and understand how they are created. Formalizing the definitions gives us additional information towards resolving them.

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Posted in Service Theory, Support Strategy

How to Irritate Your Customers Without Even Trying

Posted on 13 October, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Evernote is an innovative service that allows users to clip webpages and other files, tag and store them centrally, and then search and access from anywhere. I have been a paying user for a long time and am generally pleased with the service. But, two problems make it inconvenient for me to use the service in certain situations.

I tried to get evernote’s attention to these problems multiple times, and received no acknowledgement, until today when I posted the following on one of evernote’s facebook threads:

“Two questions, 1. when will pdf clipping from safari return? and 2. when are you going to fix the stupidity that focuses on the notebook’s top when moving a note from the middle? This makes organizing information tedious and annoying. I am a paying customer using the mac client, and I find that evernote’s service is non-existant. I have been asking these two questions for a long time and never received a response or even an acknowledgement. Too bad to see excellent technology being undermined by dismal management practices and too much success too quickly.”

The response came a short time later:

“Sorry for your frustration. We are definitely hearing all of the feedback and try to acknowledge all of it as it comes in. Regarding your specific questions. 1. We don’t have a date on this, unfortunately the recent Safari updates has caused some issues with our extension. For a more in depth discussion and explanation you can check out our forum. 2. This feature requested is noted, thanks for passing along. We appreciate all of your support, I assure you we are hard at work continually improving Evernote.”

So, what’s wrong with this response? Many of us have written similar ones over the years. Well, I am glad you asked:

  1. Evernote say they try to acknowledge all feedback. Well, either they don’t, or they fail miserably at that. In any case, not a word about doing it better in the future

  2. Sending users to their forum with no pointer to a specific discussion or record. If there is information in that forum that’s relevant, please post a link, or better yet, summarize it here. After all, forcing customers to switch channels to get a response is one of the poor practices discussed in my previous post

  3. There is no indication of any timeframe or intention to solve the problems

  4. despite this, they end with an assurance that they “are hard at work continually improving Evernote”. Employees’ hard work is between them and their management. Customers pay for functionality and service, and could care less if they are delivered by people sitting by the beach on a tropical island while sipping drinks with little umbrellas

So, evernote, you received some free advice. Will you do anything about it?

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Posted in Customer Relations, Poor Service, Support Management

Are You Making Your Customers Work Too Hard?

Posted on 9 October, 2011 by | 1 Comment


Over a year ago, The Harvard Business Review published an article titled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” (caution – pdf, subscription required). In this article, the authors make the observation that improving service beyond a certain point does not necessarily increase customer loyalty and retention. The authors continue to state:

“Reps should focus on reducing the effort customers must make. Doing so increases the likelihood that they will return to the company, increase the amount they spend there, and speak positively (and not negatively) about it—in other words, that they’ll become more loyal.”

To meet customers’ expectations, reps should anticipate and head off the need for follow-up calls, address the emotional side of interactions, minimize the need for customers to switch service channels, listen to and learn from disgruntled customers, and focus on problem solving, not speed.”

The Corporate Executive Board has made the article available, together with an evaluation tool, allowing organizations to assess their own performance on various customer effort criteria. But, the tool evaluates the systems and processes and does not provide

However, thinking about the article, we can quickly realize that there are several ways in which customer support organizations can make their customers work too hard:

  1. Repetitive requests for information, of for the customer to recreate the problem

  2. Multiple attempts at fixing the problem

  3. Insufficient and infrequent feedback to the customers requiring them to follow up

Taking the two into account, it is easy to see the need for an “effort index” that will measure the ongoing effort customer support requires of customers in order to resolve cases. Seems like a topic for a future post.

Have you implemented CES measurement? Are you aware of anybody who does? What’s your impression with it? Do you see the need for a more detailed effort index bases on enterprise support criteria?



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Posted in Uncategorized

So You Think You Can Delight Your Customers With Break Fix Service?

Posted on 3 October, 2011 by | Leave a comment

[This post touches on a few aspects of service theory and is therefore a little more academic than usual.]

I have, for a long time, supported the position that it is impossible to delight customers in a break-fix service setting, but to understand the reason for that, let’s first review the definition for delighting customers.

According to service theory, customer expectations for service quality span a range, called “zone of tolerance” (very good ppt presentation detailing the concept here). The low boundary of the zone is “adequate service”, or the minimum level the customer will accept, while the high boundary is “desired service”, the best level the customer can imagine. Now we all know that customers expectations for service are derived from their prior experiences, so even if we do a good job at delighting customers, our job will become increasingly difficult with time as expectations will rise in accordance with prior service experiences.

But wait, didn’t I say earlier that it is impossible to delight customers with break-fix service?

I did, and here’s the reason:

Some time ago I wrote a post discussing the ways customer support protects and expands customer value. You may recall the point made there, that break-fix service should be focused on restoring the product to delivering its expected value. Now, we can safely assume that for our customers desired service is having the product work flawlessly, then the inevitable conclusion is that delighting customers with break-fix service is not possible.

Do you try to delight your customers? Are you successful doing that? If so, I’d love to hear from you, and from everybody else as well.

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Posted in Customer Relations

Automatic Case Closing, Good Idea Or Not?

Posted on 21 September, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Closing cases automatically is a highly debated topic in almost every support forum. In a previous post I wrote about closing cases before receiving the customers’ consent for doing so. That post was written from a purely high-complexity, enterprise support perspective.

A recent question on linkedin’s ASPI group (highly recommended) led me to think about this question in more detail and try to determine times when closing cases automatically can be a good idea. After some thought I arrived at a model that attempts to distinguish between the nature of the technology supported and the nature of the customer relationship:

One distinction the model does not make is whether support is waiting on additional information or confirmation whether a solution worked or not. This can determine the amount of time before closing the case or the number of reminders before closing the case

Do you close cases automatically? How do you determine when to close them? Do you issue reminders automatically? Is there human intervention or other input to the decision? How many of these cases are eventually reopened?

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Posted in Customer Relations, Support Management

Support Managers: How much do you owe?

Posted on 13 September, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Agile practitioners have been discussing technical debt for a while, using this term for the gap between the investment in software development and the business value derived from that same software.

After being introduced to the term and the concept behind it I kept wondering about the best way to implement a similar concept in the customer support environment.

If we accept the concept that customer support is responsible for generating or protecting customer value, then we can come to the conclusion that outstanding support debt at any point in time can be defined as “the total amount of customer value that is unrealized due to unresolved cases” at that specific point in time.

When we look at our open cases (aka backlog) we can reasonably assume that a case that’s been open for a longer period has a bigger negative impact on customer value than a case that’s been open for a shorter period. Therefore, we can safely accept the amount of time a case has been open as an approximation to its negative impact on customer value, and the total impact support has on total customer value can then be represented by the total age of all open cases (regular blog readers will note that this number is similar to the pain report, but has no weighting for the severity of the case).

So, now that we have this metric defined, what do we do with it?

First, we have to understand that this metric is a trailing indicator, showing the success we had in accomplishing two goals that are common to most support organizations:

  1. Reducing the number of cases opened
  2. Processing cases faster

And like most other metrics, its main value is in the way it changes over time and how it is associated with changes in business volume. The best option I have found for that is dividing the change in support debt by the change in revenue over a certain period. If the resulting number is lower than 1, then the organization is improving its performance, if it is greater than 1, it is not managing its workload well.

In a future post I will talk about the relationship between this metric and other commonly used ones. Stay tuned.

An open question remain. In what way ca we relate this number to financial value? Any ideas?

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Posted in Metrics