Yesterday at The Big Conference in Portland Maine asked: “When did customer service become: You’re retarded”? That got a big laugh, because it’s so true about our experience with so many companies.

Comment by Emily Brackett
on 10/14/09 at 11:20 AM
 

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last several years helping my clients figure out how to more efficiently manage their queue of customer support tickets or how to better manage their vendors with regards to handling the issues they’ve logged.  No matter what the company, product or market segment it always seems to work itself out to three common points.

1.    There is a complete inability to understand the overall common denominator – Cost

2.    Far too much time is spent dealing with problems at the wrong level, whether that be management level or thought process in general

3.    There always seems to be a lack of good metrics that accurately represent the support related activities or product related problems of the organization

If you’ve said to yourself after reading those three items that “Hey, all of those are cost related,” you’re right.

So many companies view support and the entire ticket process as a necessary evil, and let’s face it, it is.  But, just as some firms look to the suggestion box for ideas on how to make their product better and ultimately sell more of it, companies need to spend just as much, if not more time combing through their logged tickets to do the same.  At the end of the day, companies should be saying “The failures of this product or process I’ve purchased are costing us money” and “The failures of this product or process I’m selling are costing our customers and ourselves a lot of money.”  That’s the real common denominator here.

Pick your country, China, India, Singapore… It’s all the same.  Tons of the companies that we all deal with are moving to these places in search of cheaper resources in the hopes of managing that budget line item for the cost of running their support divisions.  Let’s stay on this for a second though.  Company A moves their support division to Country 1.  They build a building for little money, hire people for even less and even though it’s not working that great it’s still pretty cheap so they keep going.  But Company A publishes their report on the cost and then before you know it, everyone is moving to Country 1 for outsourced support.  Even Company Z is headed over there.  But even while Company Z is commencing their migration plan, Company A hasn’t really even finished working out the kinks yet. So, year one through three costs look great, but what about long term.  Well, what I’ve seen is that now we’ve got a job market over in Country 1 that is increasingly difficult to find quality job applicants in and even retention is way down.  People can job hop for something better and they start to get choosy, which drives up wages.  And that ratio of interviews to offers starts going up.  I’ve even seen this go as high as 50 or 60 people interviewed for every offer letter out the door.

So, now that there’s this “Inexpensive” support unit up and running but have any problems really been solved?  Those tickets are still being logged and that cost is still being appreciated by the customers.  And this policy that Mike pointed out of tickets being closed after so many days or hours does even more to mask the problems and increase the costs to the customers and vendors.  I have my own ideas for setting up extremely inexpensive support units so if anyone has a few million dollars lying around, shoot me an email.

In my opinion the above scenario is the perfect example of dealing with the problem at the wrong level.  Senior management is concerned with budget line items and Middle management is concerned with keeping Senior Management happy.  But Line managers, that’s where the good stuff can happen if the company will allow it.  They call them “Management Metrics” but in my opinion it’s still the Captains in the field and not the Generals back at HQ that make the day to day difference.

Small business owners, in my opinion, are always wearing the Senior manager and Line manager hats; trying to grow the business while still keeping both ears to the ground.  So there tends to be a much greater awareness to the cost of doing business.  But in larger companies, the Line managers usually become the people intimately involved with the tickets and the customers or types of customers who will log certain types of tickets.  In some cases it’s product deficiencies, in others it’s lack of product knowledge and then there will always be certain categories of customers that require a higher level of touch for whatever reason.  But, if a company has the budget to put together some quality metrics and you reach out to the Line managers for not only their input but guidance, I’m sure you’re going to find tons of low hanging fruit that can be picked.  Spending $100,000.00 in development may not only save $1,000,000.00 in person hours handling tickets but it may also eliminate 15% of the tickets logged by each of your five largest customers.  You never know unless you look into it, but it may turn out that that $100,000.00 was the best investment ever made.

Comment by Ralph Ingrassia
on 10/15/09 at 03:41 PM