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ASPonline.com
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Call Center Operations
REPORTS
Front-Line Support
Incentives
Do support agents respond to performance incentives? This ASP
research report draws on data from 153 respondents to identify
best practices, success criteria, and potential problem areas
for various types of incentive plans.
A Guide to 7x24 Support Plans
(2010)
ASP survey research explores current industry practices in
setting service levels, pricing models, and service delivery for
after-hours technical support. In addition, the report offers
suggestions for handling key implementation and management
issues.
Setting Limits on Unlimited
Support
(2009)
A provocative ASP report explores the question whether the
best way to deliver high-quality support is to answer every
question that customers ask.
The Great Customer Experience
(2008)
How to deliver a Wow! experience.
Management Performance Benchmarks
(2007)
Relative importance rankings for ten areas of management
performance.
Tech Support Turnover Rates
(2006)
Benchmarking data on employee departures for various sizes of
organization and experience levels.
Maintenance & Services
Ratios (2008)
Revenue and cost benchmarks based on 100 individual public
companies, updated annually, plus expert advice on revenue
recognition, services accounting, and other financial
issues.
Tech Support Reporting Channels (2005)
Prevailing org chart models for support organizations.
Tech Support Cost Ratios Survey
(2004)
Benchmark data for revenue and headcount ratios, labor and
overhead costs, productivity, escalation, fee-based support,
and other useful metrics.
How to Manage Junk E-Mail (2004)
Spam is overwhelming tech support auto-responders and e-mail
mailboxes.
Doing More With Less
(2003)
Advice from support managers and other experts on how to
improve efficiency and cut costs.
Tech Support Outsourcing
(2002)
A look at outsourcing costs and performance metrics, with
advice on how to negotiate better contracts.
EXPERTS
 Indicates
complimentary Open House hours
Mikael
Blaisdell, principal, Mikael Blaisdell &
Associates
Rick
Kilton, principal, RWK Enterprises
Kristin
Robertson, principal, KR Consulting
Tom
Sweeney,
principal, ServiceXRG
Colin
Taylor, president & CEO, The Taylor Reach
Group
Françoise
Tourniaire, principal, FT Works
Phil
Verghis, President, The Verghis Group
LIBRARY
Direct-to-Support
Staffing
(Jim Hendrickson)
How to implement a real-time support model.
Escalations:
The Ticket to Successful Problem Resolution
(Kristin Robertson)
A formal methodology for managing escalations and SLAs.
Combining Service Excellence
with Profitability
Purdue University's Dr. Jon Anton offers a strategy for
making the "middle 60%" ("customers who cannot be ignored,
but who are hard to serve in a profitable manner") a new
source for services growth and profitability.
Why Customers Call Tech Support
and What Tech Writers Can do About It (Jack
Molisani)
One way to reduce call volume is to fix the documentation.
Timberline's Turnaround
Tactics
An inside look at how a dysfunctional support group got back
on track.
Tech Support Teamwork
(John Gniadek)
Six tested methods for creating a more tightly-knit support
team.
How to Motivate Middle Managers
(Mia Melanson)
Managers need a supportive work environment as much as the
people they manage.
E-mail Management Tips
(ASP)
Some fresh ideas on expediting e-mail support requests.
Scheduling: The Relationship is
Not Linear (Kay Khandpur)
Advice on efficient staff scheduling using queuing theory
mathematics.
Management Tips From The Experts
(ASP)
Practical and non-textbook tips for improving productivity,
customer satisfaction, morale, team building, recruiting,
career development, budgeting and forecasting.
FORUM POSTINGS
Speed vs. Satisfaction
"Has anyone seen evidence that satisfaction rates go up when the
average speed of answer improves? We're trying to make a business
case for a few more agents on the phone, but it's surprisingly hard
to find concrete data on the potential ROI."
Channels—With or Without Support?
"My company is about to take on a few resellers to supplement
our enterprise sales force. Some of my colleagues argue that
our resellers should provide support, while others here want
us to provide all support directly. A third group says we
should leave the choice up to individual resellers. Any
advice?"
Individual SLAs for Major Accounts?
"Our sales reps routinely negotiate customized service-level
agreements with big customers, and the reps insist it 'doesn't
cost anything extra' for us to respond to a customer in two
hours instead of four or eight hours. But these different SLAs
are a nightmare to manage. Help!" Suggestions?
Managing phone coverage
"I have about 50 support reps, and we've been using a central
Microsoft Outlook calendar to keep track of which reps are
supposed to be providing phone coverage during the day. As you
can imagine, a merged calendar for 50 people can get really
cluttered. Can anyone suggest an inexpensive, easy-to-use
alternative for managing staffing levels?"
E-Mail writing standards
"A few of our support reps have real problems writing a grammatical
English sentence. They insist that e-mail is a 'different medium,'
so punctuation and spelling aren't important. Who's right?"
Tracking time
"My support staff performs lots of different tasks during the day,
some of which take just a few minutes. I'd like to figure out how to
allocate their time on average, but I can't walk around with a
stopwatch and they probably won't fill out time sheets accurately.
Help!"
Better mail management?
"Most of our support requests come in by e-mail, and we've been
using a shared Outlook mailbox to distribute these messages to
staff members, who mostly work in remote locations. This isn't
very efficient, though, and we'd like to move to a better mail
management tool. Any suggestions?"
After-Hours Equipment
"When techs work at home providing after-hours coverage, is
it customary for their company to provide a notebook computer
and Internet connection? My new boss wants me to use my own
PC, but it's often used by other family members. Any advice?"
Waiting for Auto-Close
"How long should we wait for a response from the customer
before automatically closing an open incident? And should we
send out reminder notices? Right now, we're probably closing
cases too quickly, but if we auto-close after a longer period,
this will have a negative effect on our performance stats."
Getting to Know a Consultant
"We'd like to bring in a consultant to give us an independent
look at our support programs. But we don't want to spend a ton
of money and then end up with a report full of vague generalities
and recommendations about things we already know. Is there a
smarter way to get a feel for a consultant's works?"
Office closures and telecommuting?
"We occasionally have to close our offices because of heavy
snow. Most of our employees have PCs and can keep working
from home, but a few don't. I don't feel it's fair to dock
the pay of the people who can't telecommute, but it also
doesn't seem right to pay them for not working when everyone
else is being productive. Advice?"
How do we benchmark our
productivity?
"I've been studying the productivity benchmarks in various
research studies (including the ASP's), and the numbers
suggest that my own reps are superstars by comparison. I
guess that's reassuring-but I don't honestly believe we're
that good. Your thoughts?"
Call center mergers
"My company has just merged with a major competitor, and I'm
supposed to develop a plan for integrating the call centers
(which are a thousand miles apart). Help!"
Overseas escalation?
"Our support organization is transitioning from one U.S.
location to multiple, global locations. Issues will be
escalated to specialists across the globe. In the past, with
only one support office, the original support engineer
retained ownership, using a 'touch and hold' model. Will it
make more sense now to switch to a 'front-line/back-line'
escalation model for global support?"
How should our chargeback
system handle indirect costs?
"Our company recently put a chargeback system in place that
was supposed to allocate support costs to individual product
groups. Now the product managers are arguing that we should
only charge them for direct labor costs, while I say we
should add an overhead factor (about 50%) that captures all
of our indirect costs. How do other companies resolve this
problem?"
USEFUL LINKS
DMG Consulting,
West Orange, NJ 07052; 973/325-2954.
Web: www.dmgconsult.com
Westbay,
West Sussex, UK; +44 1293 88850973/325-2954.
Web: www.erlang.com.
Erlang C calculators for forecasting call center traffic; other
tools.
Global Response,
Margate, Fl 33068; 954-973-7300
Web: www.globalresponse.com.
Outsourced customer contact solutions and call center services
for multichannel retailers, direct response advertisers, healthcare
and insurance providers, government and higher education.
Ohio Business College
Web: http://www.ohiobusinesscollege.edu/default.asp.
PC Support Specialist Business Diploma
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Spectacular Support Centers
Kristin Robertson
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The Ultimate Customer Support Executive
Phil Verghis
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The Help Desk Audit
Julie L. Mohr
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Help Desk Practitioner's Handbook
Barbara Czegel
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The Art of Software Support
Françoise Tourniaire and Richard Farrell
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Microsoft Sourcebook for the Help Desk
(Second Edition)
Meg Olsen, project manager
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