Rob Addy

After watching the two Eurovision semi finals this week I am struck by many thoughts. Why didn’t Austria’s rapper with his pole dancing dominatrix accompaniment get through? Is there a small animal curled up on the top of the Albanian singer’s head pretending to be a hairstyle? Are the rumours true that the Spanish contestant has been instructed to “throw” the final to ensure that the Spanish national television station doesn’t go bust by being required to host the event next year? Yes, many many thoughts and questions have arisen. Eurovision is undoubtedly a circus. But it is also a well loved institution that teaches us many things. It is perhaps the only consistent showcase of European diversity that exists. We may not always appreciate the subtleties of all of the acts, but we should appreciate the fact that we get to see them each year whether we want to or not. Diversity is a fact of life. A fact that many fail to take account of.

Europe is not an amorphous blob and neither are your customers. Treating them as such is a big mistake which could cost you dearly. Within each customer account there will be numerous constituencies that are impacted by the nature and level of the support service being delivered. Within each constituency there may be numerous warring factions. Support providers must identify and classify the various audiences they must engage with if they are to increase overall satisfaction and become a valued provider. Different constituencies will sometimes have dramatically different requirements. Overly focusing on the needs of any individual constituency to the detriment of others should be avoided wherever possible.

Consider the humble system administrator. They may be focused on ticket closure rates and current issue status updates. Their manager, the IT Operations manager will have a dramatically different set of priorities. They are likely to be interested in overall availability, the relative levels of competence and performance of their in-house team and ways that they can improve system stability. The VP of IT Operations will have yet another set of concerns. Risk exposure and mitigation will probably be top of their mind. As will incremental productivity improvements and ongoing cost reductions. Line of business executives will have yet another set of drivers and requirements depending upon their level of seniority and the roles that they oversee.

Unless providers deliver specific service elements for specific audiences they are likely to come to a compromise which fails to truly satisfy any constituency. Generic services help to solve generic problems. Unfortunately, there aren’t many truly generic problems in the world.

If support is to be relevant and useful it must become more focused and personal.

If it is to matter and make a difference it must mean something to the people that use it.

Areas where the support experience can and should be tailored to the specific needs of specific user constituencies include:

• Reporting and dashboards – What are the metrics and trends that they really care about?
• Content streams – What value added information could or should you provide to help them to be more effective?
• Incident process flows – Is it appropriate for them to circumvent some aspects of the standard case submission process or perhaps they need additional help and guidance?
• Case submission templates / wizards – Are they all about incidents or do they need to submit change validation requests, routine task automation scheduling updates etc?
• Tone and language – Are they comfortable with geek speak or do you need to insert the Babel fish in their ear?
• Survey schedules and methodologies – Some cultures and personality types are less prone to praise than others. Some resent being asked their opinion of your performance every 5 minutes. Are you taking account of these differences when you design your customer satisfaction monitoring processes?

Yes, diversity is a wonderful thing. But alas many support providers fail to recognize it let alone embrace it. Failure to do so makes your service more generic. Generic can be ok. Generic can sometimes even be good. But generic isn’t great. And being great is important!

All that remains is for me to wish all of the combatants in Baku good luck for tomorrow – I (and a reasonable proportion of the world) will be watching!

TRKFAM

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Category: Customer Experience     Tags: Customer Constituencies, Customer Experience, Processes and Methodologies, Support Consumers, TRKFAM

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Game theory and the desire to realize short term competitive advantage suggest that someone will eventually break open the support black box as a means to differentiate themselves. A Gartner poll of over a hundred practitioners showed that 73% of product managers and marketers in technology providers are “concerned” or “very concerned” about their competitors breaking apart the traditional maintenance bundle which combines technical support service provision, patch access, firmware updates and product upgrade rights. 63% claimed that they would be likely to follow suit if their rivals were to implement such a policy. Given that many providers are overly reliant upon their support revenue streams for their very survival it is unsurprising that an action which many believe would significantly impact and impair this life giving annuity is feared.

Be afraid, be very afraid…

The breaking apart of the traditional support bundle would be likely to have a detrimental short term effect upon provider support revenues as customers experiment with alternative support provider’s and the cancellation of perceived “non-essential” elements such as product upgrade rights. What would be the net impact upon support revenues? No-one knows. Although we obviously have models and theories. The effect is likely to vary from provider to provider and market to market. Complex applications with extended implementation times will have lower upgrade rights stickiness. Mature, stable solutions with vibrant user communities are likely to exhibit lower technical guidance attach rates.

It is likely that after an initial decline, the market will find a new equilibrium point and revenues would stabilize. Vendors who are able to convincingly demonstrate the value of their support services as well as the tangible benefits of subsequent product releases have far less to be concerned about than those that rely solely upon the proprietary lock in effect of patch access rights.

This will never happen… The product support super tanker is unsinkable!

So was the Titanic! Many providers are overly ebullient about the long term future of the support black box. This enthusiasm may be a façade to hide their concerns, but their lack of willingness to discuss the issue is often mistaken as arrogance by their customers who are still largely unconvinced of the value they derive from their maintenance fees. The ongoing transition from reactive to proactive and predictive support services is helping but there is still a long way to go. Mature markets with high levels of solution penetration and low green field business opportunities are most likely to spawn such a phenomena. Providers who are haemorrhaging revenue to new SaaS entrants with lower cost bases are also potential candidates for breaking the bundle. It is, after all, preferable to get 5% of something rather than 20% of nothing. (Note: All estimations are arbitrary and individual provider’s gas mileage may vary!)

But support isn’t ready to enter the spotlight on the commercial stage…   …or is it?

The use of product support and the associated contract model(s) as a competitive differentiator is still rare within many IT markets, and yet, given the continual commoditization of technology and solutions it can be anticipated that it is an area that will be leveraged more aggressively in the future. Support competence is rarely considered within today’s technology procurement evaluations. As support transitions from reactive to proactive and predictive models, customer understanding of the value of support will increase. As understanding and expectations increases, opportunities to use support as a competitive differentiator will emerge. Providers who are able to demonstrate reduced TCO and increased business value through a combination of support service elements such as issue avoidance, routine operations out-tasking and product advocacy services will be more attractive. The internal IT operations costs associated with technology purchases are considerable. By focusing messaging on how the technology is operated and maintained within the customer environment as well as the value it delivers, providers will show that they are committed to more than the technology sale and are looking to build a long term value based relationship with their customers.

Okay… Maybe I’m interested / concerned / amused / confused… But what now?

Burying ones head in the sand never did anyone any good. This is a very real (if somewhat unlikely) possibility and it is necessary and appropriate for every technology provider to prepare and periodically update and review contingency plans to deal with the effects of a competitive move of this nature within their markets.

When deciding to break open the maintenance bundle there are many many options to choose from. Providers must carefully consider how far they wish to go as they may be able to claim market share without offering every element of the package as a standalone offering. First movers will get to choose how far they go. Followers will be faced with fewer options.

Different products have different usage profiles and implementation lifecycles and consequently the value attributed to the upgrade element of the support bundle will vary from sector to sector. Providers must ensure that their upgrade element pricing reflects actual customer upgrade behaviour if it is to be compelling.

This is not a course of action to be taken lightly. But it is a strategy that has the potential to deliver significant benefits for those brave and ballsy enough to go through with it. It will undoubtedly hurt. But so long as it hurts the other guy more then that may be a price that people are prepared to pay. After all, small SaaS start-ups may not have the reserves necessary to weather an extended storm. Leaving the market for the previous incumbents to reclaim at their leisure.

Will any of this actually happen? Yes. No. Maybe. But irrespective of whether or not it actually does; provider’s need to consider this “end of the world” scenario and plan accordingly.

Don’t have nightmares people!

TRKFAM

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Category: Support Strategy     Tags: Strategic Planning, support as a weapon, TRKFAM, Value Proposition

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Support related reporting packs MUST evolve from backward looking accounts of provider and product failure to include as much detail about what went right as well as what went wrong. Focusing solely on the negatives is best left for those with sadomasochistic tendencies and a love for Leonard Cohen albums. If you regularly present your customers with a tale of doom and gloom, how can you expect them to think anything but the worst? I’m not suggesting that you gloss over the real issues, but instead how about trying to bring in some balance by pointing out all of the good stuff that you did on their behalf that they may not be aware of and what the benefits of those activities were. If you don’t tell them, and they don’t know, then don’t be surprised if they are unsure of the value you deliver.

Customer Dashboards (CDs) and self-service consoles must be redesigned and refocused to demonstrate value daily (DVD) bearing in mind that value hides sometimes (VHS) . Note: This paragraph is sponsored by the Acronym Reclamation Society of Europe .

Reporting and communications are perhaps one of the most underutilized value demonstration mechanisms that providers have. Reporting typically focuses on historic events and compliance with arbitrary targets that have little correlation with the success of the customers’ business. Many of today’s metrics exist because it was possible to measure them. Internal metrics can be even worse – Often harking back to contact center best practices from the 1980s. As Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”. The development  of audience-specific dashboards and reports that clearly show how the support service has added value that is directly related to the role and their specific issues is critical. Demonstrating how your support service continues to add value on a daily basis is one of the primary areas that you as a provider must focus on as you develop next-generation services. If your customers fail to see the value that you deliver, there is no value. Reporting should ensure that no one is unaware of the benefits you are delivering.

Less is more – Providing that the “Less” is actually based upon “More”

Current reporting packs are overly long and often contain superfluous content that adds little or nothing. If your reports are unwieldy and difficult to assimilate then your customers will ignore them. If you provide too much data, you open yourself up to interrogation. Transcending the knowledge pyramid from the noise of data overload to achieve true wisdom is the aim. Aggregating multiple data streams into consolidated Quality of Service (QoS) Indices is essential.

Make it personal – If it’s not personal no one will care!

We have been conditioned by The Godfather and Donald Trump that “It’s business, it’s not personal”. And yet, everything that truly matters is personal. If it’s not personal, it doesn’t matter. Support must become increasingly personal for it to be valued. Generic reports will fail to resonate with any audience. Constituency specific reporting packs are the starting point. User configurable reporting packs and mutually agreed QoS Index algorithms are the end game.

Reporting should not be a value added extra – It is your opportunity to shine!

Some providers consider reporting to be a value added service feature that should only be accessible to premium support customers paying premium fees. This is just plain silly. I can understand that today, many of these high end reporting packs are incredibly labour intensive (as the required data collection, analysis and presentation activities are not yet systemic). But this is a legacy issue. In the future, your services will HAVE to do these things as a matter of course and as such EVERY customer should have access to the outputs of these processes.

Go forth and shout your value from the rooftops!

TRKFAM!

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Category: Customer Experience Support Value Technologies Underpinning Support     Tags: Dashboards, Processes and Methodologies, Reporting and Metrics, TRKFAM, Value Demonstration, Value Proposition

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Premium support offerings should deliver, and be seen to deliver, premium value.  Unfortunately, many don’t.

The product support service value proposition is based on 4 foundational elements:

• Mitigation of the impact of failures i.e. productivity loss minimization
• Increased availability, improved stability and reliability i.e. reduced risk
• Achieving a greater return from the technology investment i.e. more bang for their buck
• Internal cost savings / Reduction in the total cost of support i.e. operational efficiency

The word “premium” implies better, more desirable, more valuable. Historic models for Premium Support often fail to address the above value points let alone add to them. The differentiation between the base level offering(s) and the premium offering(s) is key. If there are insufficient tangible differences between support service tiers then customers will resent paying more and opt to “make do” with the lower value cheaper alternative.

Failing to offer a choice of service levels is tantamount to leaving money on the table. Offering too much choice will create confusion and result in lower net revenues (If you don’t believe me, look at the Costco model for retail – restricting buyer choice in an intelligent manner encourages people to make positive decisions from the provider’s perspective). Offering choices that the customer does not understand is also a potential issue to avoid – Whilst in a coffee shop in the US this week I was asked if I wanted my cappuccino “wet” or “dry”. Seeing as it was a beverage I assumed it would always be “wet” but it seems that my lack of understanding of the intricacies of Texan barista best practice opened me up to peer ridicule, polite smiles and a slightly condescending explanation of something that I had no interest in whatsoever.

Premium support offerings must justify their increased fees by:

• Responding (as opposed to reacting) to service impacting events more effectively i.e. predefined response plans, contingent actions to mitigate the potential effects of a failure etc
• Proactively intervening (as opposed to just proactively alerting) to prevent more issues (and mitigate the effects of predicted failures that cannot be avoided) than base line services
• Offering increased levels of routine task outsourcing and automation to help decrease the internal staffing requirement in order to reduce the total cost of support further
• Understanding more of the details of, and interdependencies within, the customer’s operation to be able to best position the solution and promote its capabilities to deliver increase business benefits

Staff augmentation is not an effective or sustainable differentiator

Staff augmentation plays are often used to differentiate premium offerings from base line services. This distracts from the Premium Service value and causes providers to fail to analyze their premium support value propositions properly. Staff augmentation may be a long term requirement for customers. However it is not always. It is common to require embedded provider personnel whilst a new technology implementation stabilizes but this requirement often disappears when the customer’s in-house team gain the required level of skill, experience and knowledge. Staff augmentation can not, and should not, be relied upon to differentiate premium support value.

So how should providers differentiate their high end offerings?

Some traditional differentiators are flawed…

• Technical account managers… (See my previous posting regarding “Sam I am”)
• Improved response time objectives / Priority case handling (i.e. queue jumping)… Customers may say that they want you to be quicker at fixing things after they break but what they really want is for you to make sure the stuff doesn’t break in the first place!
• Dedicated communication channels (i.e. the customer specific hot line)… Really? I mean… come on… It may have worked for Commissioner Gordon in Gotham City but it is really necessary in a world of intelligent call routing?
• Greater numbers of permitted customer contact points – Arbitrarily restricting the number of contact points you have within your customer organizations is silly. Expanding your sphere of influence and understanding of the customer environment is always a positive thing. Why would you handicap yourself in this way?

Some aren’t…

• Dedicated engineers… Often a wasted opportunity. If they are truly spending time getting know a customer’s implementation then they must have formed an opinion of its relative level of health, efficiency and potential. Why not have them share these opinions?
• Performance tuning services… Good valuable stuff that helps the provider to help the customer to help the provider etc.
• Time boxed consulting service credits… Enables customer’s with limited discretionary spending authority to bank some cash to use on proactive focused initiatives (which is always a good thing).

Additional stuff that could / should be in the premium mix

• Anything from the right hand side of the Gartner Product Support Maturity Scale v2
  • Premium content streams
  • Change Management process involvement
  • Capacity planning
  • Lifespan extension consultancy
  • Feature / Function deployment planning services

Is the above listing exhaustive? No. Is it a good starting point? Yes, I think so.  Premium support offerings should be the innovation incubator of the support industry. High end support services should be seen as the equivalent of Formula 1 / NASCAR within the automotive industry.  Just as developments and advances within Formula 1 / NASCAR eventually find their way into the standard family hatchbacks of the major car vendors, premium support has the potential to be the proving ground for innovation and advances within the field of product support. Unfortunately, all is not as it should be.  Many providers fail to consistently and fully deliver upon this potential.  But the opportunity is there. And it is real. Grab it with both hands!

TRKFAM!

“And the winner is…”

Regular readers (thanks Dad!) will recall that I offered an amazing prize a few posts ago to anyone who could come up with some novel use cases of mobile apps in the support context. Jim Roth from Dell took my suggestions and extrapolated them to devise “Shazam for Fans” – A delightful branding derivative that made me smile. Look out for it in your app store of choice soon (maybe) – Jim, I will deliver your prize in person the next time we meet. I of course look forward to receiving my share of the proceeds from the many millions of downloads it will undoubtedly attract

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Category: Support Strategy Support Value     Tags: Gartner Product Support Maturity Scale, Support Value Chain, TRKFAM, Value Proposition

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Products are lifeless inanimate things. How they are used determines the amount of business value that they deliver. Helping customers to use their products better is essential if they are to appreciate them and the organizations that manufacture and/or support them fully. Support providers have historically shied away from product usage related guidance and focused on the technicalities of making sure that the thing is running and theoretically capable of fulfilling its potential. This is a mistake. Theoretical capabilities help no one. The real life implementation of features and functions is paramount. Support providers must supplement and enhance their formal education offerings with content that helps customers to make the best use of their products. The increasingly data driven nature of today’s hardware and software solutions means that such an approach is no longer sufficient. Providers must identify and/or develop best practices and promote their usage. In a world where a million dollar server can be converted into a machine room heater by means of a few misplaced configuration data changes it is critical that all possible use case scenarios are supported. Providers must help their customers to get the best possible return on their technology investments (and continue to extract the maximum value on an ongoing basis).

Product advocacy is a potential differentiator…

The provision of technical guidance on the operation of a particular product is a given.  Support providers looking to differentiate themselves or the products that they support must go beyond mere technical support if they are to truly add value.  How can the supported product be used smarter? How can the benefits received from its usage be increased?  What are the best practices related to its use?  These are the questions that support providers need to address.  Support providers must extend their reach beyond the their traditional audience within the internal technical support functions of the IT department and engage with end users and management within their customer’s lines of business if they are to avoid the constant price pressure that they face now.  Only by adding value and demonstrating that they understand the needs of their customer’s business will they be able to become a trusted adviser.

This is all well and good, but how…?

When considering how your customers are using your stuff there are various indicators that should be considered:

• Configuration meta data analysis will indicate how the customer wants to use the provider’s stuff (although we must recognize that aspiration and reality are often very different).
• Inbound case analysis – Customers will report issues relating to the stuff that they are using. How often are corner case requests consigned to the black hole of the “unsupported configuration”?
• Transactional data analysis will give a reasonably good indication (but nothing more than that) of how the stuff is being used in practice. Will they allow you to extract usage data (without the transactional content obviously) to see how they are using their system? Never? Have you actually asked them?
• Reporting outputs (e.g. Report designs and report run frequencies, ad hoc reporting usage etc) show what the customer thinks is important (although this may not necessarily tally with your priority list)
• Feature / function awareness surveys – Try asking them (and by “them” I mean all constituencies) what they know about your stuff and how they are using it. You never know. They may tell you. If you never ask the questions you will never know.
• Business activity monitoring agents that track user and administrator actions allow a provider to understand how a customer actually is using their stuff in reality.

Note: Relying on a single source of product deployment data is always risky. Don’t do it. Invest some time and effort into truly understanding how your products are being leveraged in the field. Customer use cases are often very different to the product design parameters. Understanding how they are using your stuff now will help you to help them to use them more effectively in the future.

So is anyone actually doing this stuff?

Yes. CA, Sage, Salesforce.com and SAP (as part of their Max Attention offering) and others are all doing this to some degree or other. Are they doing it well? Perhaps. Could they do it better? Yes. But they have at least started down this path. Why are they doing it? A myriad of reasons. Some providers resented small niche players nibbling at the edges of their solution suite capabilities and using up discretionary customer budgets that they themselves wanted to get a bite of. Others wanted to differentiate themselves from their rivals. And some wanted to drive their products deeper within their customer environments so that they become stickier and harder to replace. Whatever the reasons for these efforts, the results are beneficial for the provider (and even sometimes for the customer).

OK, we get it. Helping them to help themselves, helps us in the long run?

Yes. Customer advocates help you to understand your customers better. Product advocates help your customers to understand how they can get better value from their investments in your products and your support services… Customers that understand your value are less likely to question it.

TRKFAM!

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Category: Support Processes Support Value     Tags: Customer Perceptions, Customer Service, Gartner Product Support Maturity Scale, Processes and Methodologies, Support Quality, Support Value Chain, TRKFAM, Value Proposition

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Mobile support apps aren’t necessarily bad or pointless; it’s just that we haven’t seen any examples of good ones yet. Many support providers have put the need to “go mobile” at the top of their investment list for 2012. And this is why I have an issue with them (mobile support apps and the providers that develop them). They are diverting much needed R&D investment dollars from areas that really need it far more urgently. If on the other hand you ARE a provider that has highly automated prevention based proactive and predictive offerings as well as a full set of constituency specific dashboards and product advocacy programs then by all means knock yourself out creating a mobile app for your service consumers to use. Most providers aren’t and therefore shouldn’t. I would argue that you may be better served building multiple meaningful mobile dashboards (and we’ll delve into what those would / could look like another time) for the supervisory / middle management or executive tiers but that’s just my perspective.

Mobile is hip and trendy. It’s also often counter productive and self-defeating.

Providers that eagerly brief me on their latest whizz bang mobile app for support are often surprised and confused by my lack of enthusiasm (and in some cases criticism). It’s not that I am against mobile per se. It’s just that all too often it is a half baked attempt that fails to leverage the inherent benefits of the mobile platform and just badly replicates the customer web portal on a smaller screen. Sure, some providers throw in Twitter readers and embedded Facebook clients to prove the are “down with the kids” but that just makes them look rather silly (and a little ridiculous) in my eyes. Social media is undoubtedly a very useful and powerful tool. But most active community members will already have a preferred mobile solution for interacting with their communities of choice. Replicating this functionality is a needless waste.

Mobile support applications are being developed by provider engineering teams who want to play with smart phones irrespective of whether their customers really want or need mobile apps or not…

When I ask how many system administrators that they know who leave their desks (without taking their laptop with them) in the middle of an ongoing technical issue they go quiet. It just doesn’t happen. So why do they need a mobile app? I then usually ask what the use cases are for the mobile app. All too often they just tell me that the customer can submit a ticket, update a ticket and check ticket status. Wonderful… Not! I have yet to see a mobile support app where it was simpler to submit a case on the mobile device than it is on the web portal. Now, if the poor sys admin could use the camera on his iPhone to scan a barcode on a server in the machine room and then with a single thumb press (or swipe™) create a case then that might be ok. But as yet I haven’t seen it.

Mobility does have significant potential to add value in a product support context. But as yet that potential is untapped…

The use cases are everything. How can the mobile app actually help the customer? Will it provide an augmented reality view of the innards of a server so that the sys admin knows which boards to “jiggle” (a highly technical term related to the re-seating of a component to ensure all connections are good)? Will it guide them through the various stages of fitting a Customer Replaceable Unit (CRU)? Will it enable a support representative to sit on their shoulder as they troubleshoot an issue? Can the application “listen” to the various sounds coming from power supply units or cooling fans to see which is most likely to fail? Can the mobile device’s camera be used to “see” if a mechanical component is suffering from wear and tear (by means of checking for surface discolouration or components working themselves out of tolerance ranges or being worn down or becoming deformed) and determine its likely remaining life? Can the mobile device use the Infra Red sensors within its camera setup to map out hotspots on motherboards to help predict potential component failures (or recommend fan repositioning or cleaning etc)? Can the touch screen of the phone be placed against the side of the rack enclosure to monitor tiny variations in equipment vibration that could forewarn of impending disaster? Who knows? (Who cares?) But the fact of the matter is that there ARE many many possibilities.

In the software support arena there are different potential use cases. Back in the day (the late 1990s), when I was a software implementation consultant I used to be able to troubleshoot the client side workflow of a system by watching the screen paint sequencing of fields in an application as the focus bounced and data was populated and re-populated. Could a mobile app that “watches” screen displays do the same? Other examples include <fill in the blanks here people as I can’t currently think of anything specific to the software support space >…

I’d really love to hear your ideas on how a mobile device could / should be used in a product support context. I may even consider rewarding the best with a prize (admittedly this “prize” is likely to be a copy of my book (as I have a stack of a thousand of them in my garage )).

Today’s mobile devices have a myriad of electronic sensors built in. Tomorrow’s will have even more. What could you do with them to help your customers to improve the reliability and efficiency of your stuff?

Ask not what your customers could do with a mobile support app; ask what your mobile app could do for them!

Remember that your service consumers (i.e. the technical rank and file) ARE likely to say that they want a mobile app. Not because they will use it or because it will add value, but because it will help them to try and convince their boss that they need a new snazzy smart phone on the company. Try to think about what you could provide to the support consumer so that they can become more effective. Because that is the sort of stuff that their boss really wants you to deliver…

Before embarking on a mobile support application development project I urge you to please please please consider the following three questions:

• How can the inherent capabilities of the mobile device be leveraged to make the support experience BETTER?
• What can a mobile support application do BETTER than a traditional web portal?
• How and when could a mobile support application deliver ADDED value to your customers?

If you can’t improve on the current customer experience or deliver increased value; please save your money. Better yet, spend it on something that WILL improve the customer value proposition!

TRKFAM

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Category: Customer Experience Technologies Underpinning Support     Tags: Customer Experience, mobile apps, mobility, Product Support, support apps, TRKFAM, Value Proposition

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Tomorrow, IBM will be launching their response to the HP Gen8 Server launch of last month. Or are they? If one watches their pre-announcement video one might be forgiven for thinking that it is in fact an infomercial for Oracle’s app-to-disk engineered stack (And to be frank if you were to overlay a heavy (or heavier) rock soundtrack and increase the amount of red used in the visuals it would be pretty difficult for the casual observer to tell them apart). But those similarities aside, will their alleged “Next Generation Platform” really be capable of managing itself? Will it truly redefine the IT Operations cost equation? Will it make support services redundant? Nah! I am as yet unconvinced. While we await the details with bated breath, my hunch is that the IBM announcement will probably overly focus on the technology and its inherent capabilities without fully considering the associated ongoing support services and IT operations impact. Both Oracle and HP are actively investing in and promoting their proactive support credentials to compliment and enhance their “intelligent” hardware improvements. IBM has not done this so far. Will this change tomorrow? Maybe. Although the trailer to the announcement doesn’t hold much promise. Nor does their launch landing page. Smarter systems are undoubtedly a welcome technical improvement. But they can not and will not deliver the 100% availability, reduced running costs and increasing return on investment nirvana that is promised in isolation. Technology on its own is not enough.

The long term reliability of, and return from, any device will always be directly related to the type of environment within in which resides and the day to day processes and procedures that are used to operate and manage it. Hardware does not operate in a vacuum. A multi-million dollar device can be brought to its knees through a few inadvertent key strokes. Even the most “intelligent” of machines can be rendered into little more than an expensive heater in the data centre relatively easily. Providing upfront deployment guidance and pre-configured devices based upon years of best practice identification and refinement is great. But we MUST remember that this becomes increasingly irrelevant as time passes. The price of reliability and continuous return on investment is eternal vigilance.

Twenty questions that every support provider should ask themselves regularly…

• How are our customers using our stuff?
• Are they (in our opinion) making best use of its capabilities?
• How well are we making use of the capabilities of our stuff to add value?
• Could we help them to use more of it or use it differently to get even more return?
• Are they using our stuff in ways that we hadn’t even thought of?
• How are they maintaining and running our stuff?
• Are they following our recommendations and defined best practices?
• Are they consistent in their implementation?
• Have they developed their own operational practices that we can learn from?
• Do they have the appropriate mix and volume of skills necessary?
• What can we do to help them get even more value from their investment?
• How is their business environment changing and what are the effects of these changes on their requirements?
• What are their future plans and how will these impact us and our stuff?
• Can our stuff readily adapt to their changing needs?
• How can we help them to make sure our stuff remains relevant (or becomes even more relevant than it is / was)?
• How well is our technology maturing within their environment?
• What can we do to help extend its useful lifespan and/or redeploy it to another role?
• What is the nature of the ongoing relationship that we have with them? Who do we have relationships with within our customer’s organization?
• How has this changed? Do we need to invest time and resources to improve the relationship?
• Are we our customers first port of call for ideas and suggestions on how to improve how they use our stuff?

Support services should be the Jiminy Cricket of the IT world. Continually reminding customers of what they (hopefully) know that they should be doing already and pointing out when they fail to do what they know that they should. Support is the conscience of the internal IT Operations team. A gentle but firm guiding force for good. Or at least it could and should be…

TRKFAM!

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Category: Support Operations Support Value     Tags: Supporting Smart Systems

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I had a call last week with an organization that is spending 20 times as much as the support premium they are paying to their software provider for a full-time team of 18 sub-contractors to operate and manage the solution on a day to day basis. This 2000% cost uplift isn’t intended to cover incremental enhancements and customizations. They have a separate sub-contract team of 7 with a separate budget to cover this. Naturally, I was horrified. I know that I shouldn’t have been, but I was. Why? Because this wasn’t an ERP solution… Someone had applied a bloated ERP staffing plan to a relatively straightforward client server application with half a dozen or so integration points. Total and utter madness. A call to a friend and ex-colleague who acts as a the solution architect for this particular software platform within a well respected managed service provider reinforced my view when I found out that their set-up was of a comparable size (by the number application instances), serviced over 45 times as many end users and had over 20 times as many integration points. How many people are on his team? 6 (including him). Yes, just half a dozen system administrators / developers. And that team is required to perform all incremental enhancements and ongoing configuration too!

So this got me thinking. Did the software provider know that their customer was spending this amount to support their solution? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m guessing not. But you never can tell… But if they did know (and alas I cannot tell them due to client confidentiality), what would they do about it? Would they do anything at all?

Reducing the cost of IT Operations associated with running a technology product is a significant opportunity for support providers to demonstrate and deliver real and tangible business value.

I have been using the following graphic for the past 3 years within Gartner. It’s not great, but it’s ok. It shows many of the costs associated with product support usage and support failures. It was designed to get people thinking beyond the support premium and so in this regard I think it works. It needs a revamp. I’ll add it to my “To do” list.

Yes, it’s a visual cliche. But cliches exist because they work…

You can see that the “In-house Support Team” is on there. And so are a lot of other things too! Previously, I had worked on an assumption (which I now believe to be incorrect) that the Total Cost of Support would typically equate to no more than 4 or 5 times the annual support subscription (Note: I originally referenced this in the first version of the Maturity Scale – see “Market Insight: Introducing the Gartner Product Support Maturity Scale” for details). Naturally, I had always stated that there will be a significant range to account for different software solution types and the degree of configurability associated with them as well as variances within customer process and governance maturities . But it now seems that I may have been wildly underestimating these costs. And if I was, surely this represents an absolutely massive opportunity for the support industry to shine!

The Total Cost of Support (TCoS) has many components…

Say “Hello” to The Total Cost of Support Elephant… Let’s call him “Nigel”

As you can see there are plenty of opportunities to help customers to eat this particular elephant. Nigel has a weight problem. But don’t worry. We can put Nigel on a strict diet and exercise regime to help him lose a few hundred pounds (or maybe even a few hundred thousand dollars of operational costs per year). Here are a dozen questions to ask yourself about how you could materially affect your customer’s internal support cost model to get the ball rolling:

• Do you assess the level of IT process maturity of your customers so that you can understand their operational risk profile and the likely inbound transactional volume you can expect from them? If not, why not?
• Have you developed educational road maps for your customer’s so that they can plan the career development of their staff that support your solution? If not, why not?
• Do you work closely with your customers to develop customized individual development and training plans for their key staff? If not, why not?
• Do you give your customers guidance on the optimal internal support team (in terms of sizing and team structure / skills) needed to support your solution? If not, why not?
• Have you defined job description templates that describe the roles and associated responsibilities to maintain and enhance your solution set? If not, why not?
• Do you evaluate the competence of your customer’s internal delivery teams and provide them with recommendations on who to promote / fire / educate? If not, why not?
• Do you participate within succession planning processes with your customers? If not, why not?
• Do you help your customers to recruit personnel to support and maintain your solutions e.g. example interiew questions, skills and experience profile pre-requisites, interview panel participation etc? If not, why not?
• Do you monitor the activities of your customers internal operations functions to see how well they are maintaining your solution? If not, why not?
• Have you defined the routine operational tasks that should be completed (along with the associated frequencies and detailed descriptions of the activities that need to be undertaken) to maintain your product correctly? If not, why not?
• Do you reach out to customers who are not performing the housekeeping activities necessary to assure system performance and availability and let them know of the potential risks they are exposing themselves to? If not, why not?
• Are you actively investing in automated tools or product enhancements to remove the need for you customers to do as much routine housekeeping and maintenance activity themselves? If not, why not?

Internal operations “bloat” is inevitable if you, as the support provider, fail to give your customer a framework of realism to work within. Something will always fill the information vacuum. And it will probably be based on out-dated conventional wisdom that promotes over specialization, functional siloes and staff intensive control models. Internal tribal politics and historical project precedents will almost always act to increase the size of an internal support team. But that trend can (and probably should) be reversed. By helping your customers to help Nigel to lose weight you will demonstrate your commitment to their business success as well as showing them that you understand the business context within which you  and they operate. But more than that, you will have earned the right to suggest that they perhaps offset some of their savings against higher value support offerings or additional product. Who knows, maybe you can even demonstrate how upgrading their support level they can save them even more…

And remember. We’re not talking peanuts; we’re talking cold hard cash!

TRKFAM

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Category: Support Strategy Support Value     Tags: Processes and Methodologies, Support Value Chain, TCoS, Total Cost of Support, TRKFAM, Value Proposition

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Dr Seuss’s story of “Sam I am” and his reluctant friend’s aversion to trying new things is a cautionary tale for the support industry. In it, Sam attempts to convince his “friend” of the merits of Green Eggs and Ham over and over again. Eventually, after the friend has tried everything they can to avoid it, they give in, cautiously try the eggs and ham and find, to their surprise, that they actually like them.

But what has this got to do with product support?

“Sam I am” could be considered to be the archetypal Support Account Manager (SAM). In fact, Sam epitomizes many of the best and worst characteristics of today’s Support Account Managers (AKA Technical Account Managers, Customer Success Managers, Customer Advocates, Product Evangelists etc). He knows his products (hopefully). He believes in his products. He is (perhaps overly) enthusiastic about his products. He knows his customer. Or at least he thinks he knows his customer. He knows what he believes his customer needs (Because he obviously needs the only thing that Sam has got to give him). He knows that even when his customer says “no” that he should continue with his predefined plan. He knows that if he is persistent enough he will grind his customer down and force him to eat what he is being offered. He knows lots of things. Or so he thinks.

Doesn’t that make “Sam I am” the perfect SAM?

No. “Sam I am” got lucky. He got very very lucky indeed. Sam’s motives were pure (as far as we know). Sam was trying to help but just came across as annoying. Sam was very fortunate. His customer failed to escape, despite going to extreme lengths to try and do so. His customer did eventually agree to try the eggs and ham and did like them. But things could have been VERY different. What if Sam’s friend had actually managed to evade him? What if he had tried the eggs and ham and found them unpalatable? In the real world, customers won’t allow their providers to be as persistent or as invasive as Sam I am. In the real world, Sam would have been ignored. Sam would have been kicked out. Sam would have been forcibly removed by security. Sam would be looking for a new “friend”, if not a new job!

So what DOES Sam spend his time doing at the moment?

Today, Sam tends to spend his time being kicked by either the customer or his management team. He is the meat in the sandwich. The thing (but not “Thing 1” or “Thing 2” ) between the proverbial rock and the proverbial hard place. Sam the Support Account Manager:

• Acts as a focal point (or bottleneck) for all interactions – What if Sam falls under a train? Or is butted by a goat in a boat? Or eaten by a fox in a box?
• Champions the customer perspective (or claims to be doing so when berating colleagues for failing to deliver what his customer needs)
• Performs account administration, creates meaningless spreadsheets and chases paperwork – Activity can easily be mistaken for action
• Circumvents or undermines the normal support delivery process because his customer or this specific case is “special”, “different” or “important”
• Badgers them to use more of your stuff, proposing generic (and often implausible) solutions to non-existent problems that the customer isn’t facing
• Begs his support colleagues to escalate his customer’s requests to the top of the queue to prevent him getting a kicking
• Presents his customer with tediously detailed reports that show how badly his support colleagues have been performing in the preceding period
• Blatantly tries to foist additional product and services upon his customer at every opportunity without any consideration as to what their ability to consume such change is
• Overly focuses on tactical issues to allievate short term pain to the detriment of strategic moves to secure life time customer value
• Blames the product or the customer (depending on audience) when put under pressure

OK then, WHAT is it that Sam should REALLY be doing instead?

Sam isn’t helping. But he could be very helpful indeed. Sam must have a clear mandate from his management and understand what his role really is. An example of a dozen of Sam’s many and varied potential responsibilities are as follows:

• Identifying target constituencies with whom the support provider needs to engage
• Developing relationships that extend beyond the technical rank and file
• Helping the customer to understand the services for which they have signed up for and how to make the best use of them – Increased support service adoption is the first step towards increased product adoption!
• Understanding how your product or solution is currently being used and its future potential (including the development of proposed deployment roadmaps)
• Promoting the increased usage of your solution by referencing comparable case studies, the product value proposition as it aligns with the customer’s context, TCO calculators and ROI collateral etc
• Maintaining your intelligence file on your customer. What’s the political landscape? Who’s hot and who’s not? Who should you cultivate and who should you distance yourself from…
• Overcoming internal customer politics to position you and your products in the most positive light possible
• Assisting their customer to calculate their Total Cost of Support to act as a benchmark measure for ongoing improvement activities
• Explaining the benefits of proactive prevention based support approaches to mitigate risk, reduce costs, improve performance and increase return
• Keeping an ear out and watchful eye open to spot commercial opportunities early on. Helping customers to shape their requirements so you are best placed to win when the time is right.
• Facilitating and encouraging customer contacts to engage with the most appropriate resources within the services organization. Realizing that acting as a filter or conduit is counterproductive.
• Helping their support and product development colleagues to understand the impact and relative importance of their acts or omissions

Excellent! How can we help to steer Sam towards this better path?

We like the new Sam I am. The new Sam I am could be valuable. This is all well and good but your current Sam may not be up to the job. It’s a fact. Sam may need to be re-educated, redeployed or retired if he isn’t suited for his new role. But assuming he has the pre-requisite abilities to do the job, what should you (as Sam’s management team) do to help make him a success?

• Clearly define Sam’s role and responsibilities so he knows what he is supposed to do, where he fits into the overall mix, how he will be measured and what success looks like
• Give Sam the appropriate time, tools and support to do his job
• Incentivize Sam to extend his sphere of influence with his account or accounts
• Understand that forcing Sam to interact with his customer continuously may not be helpful
• Reward him based upon service up-selling, product cross-selling, driving product adoption as well as improving customer satisfaction levels
• Put controls (such as periodic account rotations) in place to prevent Sam from becoming “good ol’ Sam” i.e. going native
• Encourage Sam to recognize, accept and work within his technical and product knowledge limitations. Sam is not expected to know everything. But he is expected to know what to do when he doesn’t know something.
• Facilitate Sam’s interaction with other Sam’s to share experiences and best practices
• Consider sponsoring Sam to become educated in the specifics of his customer’s industry

Simple. Well it is when you put it like that anyhow!

Of course the picture of Sam painted above may not be accurate or complete. It may be a portrait of a very different Sam to yours. Perhaps your Sam is wonderful. Perhaps your Sam is already doing all of the above and more. But perhaps he isn’t… And perhaps he should?

You do not like it. So you say. Try it. Try it. And you may. Try it and you may. You might like it. You will see…

I do so like Green Eggs and Ham. Thank you. Thank you, Sam I am!

Buy the book. Read it. Buy the book for your SAMs. Ask them to read it too…

TRKFAM.

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Category: Customer Experience Support Operations Support Processes Support Strategy     Tags: Customer Constituencies, Internal perception, Processes and Methodologies, Product Support, Strategic Planning, support as a weapon, TRKFAM

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Benchmarking data is a powerful tool. But it can be misused just as any tool can. Benchmarking data is meaningless unless the comparison is against something very very similar to a particular providers operation. Comparing restoration times for servers against switches against PCs against consumer electronics is bogus. Even within these asset classes it is often inappropriate as taking the casing off a mid-range box may take significantly longer than ripping and replacing multiple components for a blade system. Unless you compare oranges against oranges the best you can get is misleading results that may help or hinder. Troubleshooting a simple software application can take a fraction of the time needed to get into the guts of a complex enterprise application with multiple integration points and system dependencies. Even benchmarking performance for the same product or solution can be problematic. Solutions that are deployed in chaotic IT shops will fail more frequently and be harder to diagnose and remediate than comparable implementations in well managed and controlled environments.

“Obvious” comparisons that can be done easily are just as risky if not more so. Consider inbound call hold times for a service desk. Lower call hold times are good, right? Maybe. Maybe not. Always remember to look at it from your customer’s perspective. That’s the only perspective they use. Technical callers will often prefer to wait an additional 30 seconds to be connected if it means that they can be routed to someone they have worked with before. Relationship continuity value cannot and should not  be ignored. How many IVR systems give people the option to remain on hold to get to the person they really want to talk to? Not enough!

So what do you suggest Mr Smarty-Pants?

The best plan is to continually benchmark your delivery organization against itself. Are there any regions, teams or individuals that are performing significantly “better” than the average? Seek them out and look at what they do differently (remembering that not everything that is different is automatically better). Be mindful of the need to segment your customer base by their level of IT process maturity (Historic failure rates will be a good simple indicator for this) to prevent chasing false trends and corner cases. Remember that “better” is often seen through the eyes of the beholder. Dirk Gently teaches us that the fundamental interconnected nature of things is such that any improvement in one area may have a corresponding positive or detrimental impact somewhere else. A detrimental effect that could be catastrophic if it were to be replicated across the entire organization.

Is there any customer feedback on direct competitors that can be used? Why not ask the question? If you’d prefer not to open that particular can of worms, then a year on year improvement target of 10-15% for all key metrics is usually an appropriate starting position. But this insular focus should not be the only driver for improvement.

In addition to this continuous incremental improvement objective we would also highly recommend deconstructing the end-to-end process occasionally (every couple of years or so) to take it back to first principles and create a blue sky plan of what you could do if you were free from the constraints of the current set up. This is much harder than it sounds as many organizations remain blinkered by what they have always done and what they think that their customers want. (Note: Very few service organizations ever really ask what their customers (Remembering that the customer is often different to the service consumer) want, need or expect) – they tend to assume that customer expectations continue to rise (which they may) and that the performance of the past was never good enough (which may also be true) BUT unless you ask the right questions of the right people you will never really know. Consider involving new employees that haven’t yet been conditioned to your corporate culture. Better yet, involve new entrants to the workplace to avoid the norms of the industry tainting their view. If all else fails, find yourself a bright 6-8 year old (I am fortunate to have several on hand ) and explain what you are trying to do to them. They will invariably ask the highly perceptive questions that you may be too “knowledgeable and intelligent” to consider. Another good catalyst for this type of activity is to try and apply parallel industry models to your circumstances – How would washing machine repair processes play in your environment? What do consumer electronics providers do? Go further than that. Look beyond the direct comparisons… What are the fast food retailers doing? How are the media companies delivering their customer experiences? What do manufacturing, petrochemical and the pharmaceutical industries do?

So that’s it? You torpedo conventional wisdom and run? Typical!

Yes. Yes it is. And let us be clear. I have not said that all benchmarking is bogus. Benchmarking can be a VERY useful tool providing it is relevant and used appropriately. The problem is that relevant and useful benchmarking data in the product support space is very hard to come by. We are often asked for it. And we are sometimes criticized for not having it. But it remains my view that having data that we know to be bogus would be more harmful than having none at all. If you want metrics for the sake of metrics then there are places you can find them. If you want meaningful data that is relevant and useful then you may have to pay for it. The choice as they say, is yours…

Choose wisely!

TRKFAM

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Category: Support Operations Support Processes     Tags: Customer Experience, Customer Perceptions, Market Perceptions, Processes and Methodologies, Support Technologies, TRKFAM

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