December 2016 Newsletter

What’s New at ASP

What is Customer Success All About?
Tune in to our next free webinar with consultant and author Alex Alexander on December 20th at 9am Pacific time. Al Hahn will interview Alex, who is the founder of Alexander Strategists and has just authored a new book, Brilliant Customer Success. I read his book and interviewed him for our upcoming report on Customer Satisfaction, The Customer Experience, Customer Success, and Customer Effort which will be published this year Alex is charming, witty, and humorous, so it should be a very interesting interview. Everyone who attends the webinar will get a discount code good for 50% off the price of the book. Go here to register: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4630105413888641795

Mini-Report on Tricentis Available Now
We have finalized a mini-report on Tricentis significant achievement in making it into ASP Top ten Best Support Websites three years out of their six year history of offering support. They are also a small company with only around 240 employees and 40 support staff. Their score tho year beat half of the $billion companies. Isn’t that amazing? The report is now online and is available to all members on our website, just login and you should see it listed under Research Reports.

ASP Sponsors Call Center Week Conference and Expo in New Orleans
We know that most of you are not in Call Centers, but some of you definitely are. So ASP is sponsoring the Call Center Week Conference and Expo in New Orleans January 17-20. This is a big event with major speakers, an expo of solution providers, a chance to mingle with your peers, and New Orleans! 17% of attendees are C-level, 45% VPs/Heads/Directors, 29% Managers/Sr. Managers. Virtually every industry you can imagine will be there. There are meet ups by Contact Center size, lunch and learns by experience level, an Executive Club for VPOs and above, and a future leaders lab for those looking to move up. ASP members get a 10% discount. Login to get your discount code. Go here for more information.

Customer Satisfaction, the Customer Experience, Customer Success, and Customer Effort
Have you been wondering where all this Customer XXXX stuff is leading us? We certainly have. We have begun the research on this topic and will release a full report on it before the year ends. So far, we have talked with Jive Software, Team Support, Cisco, Blackbaud, Red Hat, consultants Dr. James Alexander, Evans Manolis and Dhaval Moonigame. The report is full of different views on this important set of issues as this is an unsettled area. We shed some light on it and make some recommendations to help our members sort it out. Watch for it in about two or three weeks.

Score Virtual Conference 2016
We have secured a special discount for ASP members who attend the Score Virtual Conference 2016. This is a series of recorded sessions from their conference earlier this year, plus some additional live sessions. This year featured many speakers addressing the Customer Experience, Customer Success and related topics. The session will be December 5th through 11th. Presentations from Progress Software, CA Technologies, NETSCOUT, and Nutanix are among those featured. The early registration price of $149 will be held for all ASP members registering, regardless of when you register. You won’t have to pay $249. Go to our website and login to get the discount code. Go here for more information on the SCORE Virtual Conference 2016: https://www.cvent.com/pub/eMarketing/Pages/WebEmail.aspx?emstub=07cad488-415d-45fb-a0f6-b2e688ded728

2016 Top Ten Best Web Support Sites is Available Now
The 122 page report features a trends analysis, essays from each of the ten winners with screenshots, and everything you could ever want to know about the competition. This Report defines the state-of-the-art in self-support websites and is eagerly anticipated every year. This is our 18th year of holding the competition and reporting on the winners. There are 25 different categories scored by at least 5 independent judges per site. All ASP members can download the Report as part of their membership. Just login and it is right there under ASP Research Reports. Non-Members may purchase the Report for $300, but since individual membership is only $150 that is the least expensive way to get the report.

Happy Holidays,
Al Hahn
Executive Director
Association of Support Professionals
ahahn@asponline.com
+1 503-668-9004 office
+1 503-780-3520 cell

Customer Satisfaction, The Customer Experience, Customer Success, and Customer Effort
ASP will release our report on these things in a few weeks. It has been both informative and fun to research these issues. We decided to research these things because there has been much evolution in this area over time, but particularly in the past few years. Many support managers are wondering what to make of it all, so we set out to find out what was happening and what some leaders recommended for action. First of all, customer satisfaction and customer effort are best thought of as measurements to be tracked to see how customers perceive your performance in specific areas. The customer experience and customer success are better thought of as strategies involving the many touch points in the customer’s journey with your company’s products and services. Customer success is more concerned with the customer’s perception of the outcome and customer experience us more concerned with the customer’s perception of the journey along the way. In both cases, the key word is perception. There are two major surprises in our report, one is concerned with emotion, which ties directly tom perception. The other is related to money, both revenues and profits. We’ll leave it to you to read the report when it comes out in a few weeks to get more information on these two issues. We strongly recommend that you read the report as ignoring either customer experience or customer success can be a career-altering experience for you. The report describes typical processes for custom experience/success managers, reporting structure alternatives, and specific recommendations. We will send out an email announcement when the report is published, but you can also watch our website for it. It will definitely be there before this year is out.ASP published the 2016 Top Ten Support Websites Report

This is our 18th year of competition and our report is just out. The 122 page report includes essays from each of the Top ten winners, a trends analysis, an explanations of the 25 elements that are scored, average scores in each category, judges names and pretty much everything you would want to know. This competition effectively defines the state-of-the-art in self support websites. Members get the report and all of our other reports, including back Top Ten reports included as part of their membership. Just sign in and that should take you to the report. Non-Members can purchase this report or any report for $300 each, but since membership is only $150, why not become a member and get this and all of our other reports less expensively?ASP Announced the Top Ten Web Support Sites for 2016

After our 18th competition, we announced the winners. They are:

Large Company (over $1billion)
Cisco
Dell Software
ESRI
Red Hat
Symantec

Medium Company ($100 million to $999 million)
Jive Blackbaud
LANDESK
Nutanix

Small Company (under $100 million)
Tricentis

Each entry was judged by at least five independent judges in 25 different areas. The companies scores were compared to other companies in their size category. Each entry received a custom report detailing their average scores compared against their size companies. All entries will receive our approximately 120 page final report, as will all ASP members.