Overall, software companies spend 8% of their revenues for running their tech support business. Over the past few years, they have struggled to keep the cost of telephone-based tech support under control. Thousands of hours of consulting time, conferences, and operations research have been spent on finding ways to deliver support more efficiently, without cutting service quality to a level that might send customers to the competition.So what has all this effort accomplished?Sadly, not much.
Although individual companies have fine tuned their phone-based support operations, overall industry benchmarks for tech support performance have shown almost no improvement since 1997 (Surveyed by the Association of Support Professionals). For most software companies, telephone support remains a painfully expensive service that, even worse, rarely seems to buy customer loyalty or goodwill.Clearly, there’s no magic bullet for the support cost problem.
Better product design may reduce the total demand for support, call center automation can probably improve efficiency and delivery, and more attractive Web support options are bound to lure many users away from the telephone. In the meantime, though, the biggest payback in support process improvement is likely to come from customer education. Let us see why ,,,
It is interesting to note that each piece of accurate information provided to the customer (caller) about the products or services offered by their companies directly impact support costs i.e the cost incurred by the company in providing technical support to their customers. In summary – more an agent educates the customer, lesser the support costs for the company in the long run. Considering this fact, one would assume that the average agents’ performance in a team should contain ‘customer education’ as the highest criteria.
However, there has been no single process to track agent performance in technical support organizations because they vary from one business to the other, and there continues to be multiple debates on what parameters to include and what not to include. Moreover, the most important ‘customer education’ factor cannot really be measured accurately – be it by monitoring a telephone call or by monitoring email communication. The level / amount of information an agent shares with the customer depends on multiple factors like tenure of the agent, training undergone, level of product / technology knowledge and understanding etc.
Microsoft PSS has an answer for this problem – they evaluate tech support agents on multiple parameters although one of them plays a major role; this parameter is called the CCNR – ‘Cases Closed Not Reopened’. It is the percentage of cases that are closed by any agent which remain closed in a given period of time – a minimum requirement in the Microsoft PSS is 85% ~ of this value. By making sure that the agents only get rewarded if the maintain >= 85% CCNR, Microsoft has achieved more value into each call that is answered, because the technician is very conscious in providing ‘resolution’ to the customer and also making sure the caller is well educated – so that they don’t call back and open the case again, adversely affecting the agents CCNR. In short, more CCNR = more customer education = happy customers = lesser phone calls = decreased support costs.
Do you think Support Costs are inversely proportionate to agent performance? What other measures you think can improve agent performance and decrease support costs at the same time?
