Day 2 of TSW: Top Attended Sessions. Technology Case Studies and Business Makeovers Are Hot!

Yesterday was Day 2 of Technology Services World Best Practicesin Santa Clara, and I’m back to give you a list of the top attended sessions. We had a lot of variety in the focus of sessions yesterday, including a technology case study track, “business makeover” sessions, and collaborative workout sessions. Here were the top 10 attended sessions yesterday:

1. Business Makeover Case Studies – Support Services. This was the #1 top attended session yesterday with 169 attendees–a big crowd. Ken O’Reilly, our VP of support services research, hosted, with an expert panel including Chrisophe Bodin, VP and GM, Maintenance and Customer Support, BMC Software; Marco Bill-Peter, VP Global Support Services, Redhat; Randy Wootton, VP, Premier Success Plans, Customers for Life, Salesforce.com; Jim Robbins, Director of Continuous Improvement, Brocade; as well as me! Great questions, good discussion, and the fun part was we didn’t all agree with each other, which always makes for a better conversation.
2. The Road to Loyalty: Engagement Throughout the Customer Journey. This session was presented by Barry Lamm from LivePerson, and focused on moving interactions to less expensive channels, and the reporting and monitoring required to make it work. I’ve had the pleasure of doing webcasts with Barry and he has a wealth of high volume call center experience and brings great insight into the world of service technology.
3. Achieving Better Visibility into PS Operations, Project Performance and Financials. This session, presented by Pat Garrett – Director, Project Management Office, Experis; and Tom Donnelly – Regional Sales Director, Compuware Corporation; provided a case study in how Experis benefitted from improved visibility and decision making by implementing a “best of breed” PSA (professional services automation) solution.
4. Business Makeover Case Studies – Professional Services. This panel discussion was hosted by our VP of research for PS, Bo Di Muccio, but unfortunately I don’t have a list of his panelists. These business makeover sessions are unique to TSIA events because our members “open the kimono” to discuss their challenges and get input from peers–including competitors. A really powerful example of an association at work.
5. Extracting Meaningful Customer Feedback and Using It. Also a technology case study session, featuring Nicole Allen – Customer Insights Group, Manager, Acer America Corporation; and Ian Wright – Business Development Director, Clarabridge; this session profiled Acer’s voice of the customer (VOC) program, showing how a global PC company extracts meaningful feedback from multiple sources, and leverages it to improve products and the customer experience.
6. The Building Blocks to Optimize Your Recurring Revenue Business. Our members love case study sessions! This one was presented by Dan Biasotti – Sr. Director, Global Support Renewals, VMware; and Frank Lucier – Director, Customer Success, ServiceSource, Inc., and talked about how to identify the gaps and opportunity areas in your renewals business using an end-to–end business process blueprint.
7. Business Makeover Case Studies – Service Revenue Generation. This session was hosted by our VP of research for service revenue generation (SRG), Julia Stegman, with a panel of experts (again, sorry I don’t have the list of panelists) discussing challenges with pricing, renewals, contract tools, etc.
8. Transform Technology Support into a Loyalty-Building Engine: The Power of Advanced Remote Monitoring. This technology case study was presented by Jennifer Kuckelman – Director of Global Support Services, Perceptive Software, LLC; and Michael Cush – CTO, ISOdx Solutions, LLC. Jennifer explained the key financial and performance metrics Perceptive is using to measure success and describe the people, processes and technologies Perceptive is bringing to bear to transform its support team.
9. Proactive Services: How to Get Started. This session hosted by Ken O’Reilly included some great panelists (Joe Ward – Director of Customer Support & Services, Sage; Lewis Rubinstein – Director, Support Services, Enterprise Portfolio Management, Motorola Solutions; and Sydney Garrett – Director, Global Service Delivery Excellence, Cisco Systems) discussing the capabilities of proactive support tools and how to effectively incorporate them into support operations.
10. Social Support 2013: Lithium and Symantec Norton. Rounding out the top 10 attended sessions yesterday was this technology case study presented by Tony Weiss – Norton Forums Global Community Manager, Consumer Products & Solutions, Symantec; and Joseph Cothrel – Chief Community Officer, Lithium Technologies; showing how Symantec Norton’s social support effort has served as a model for many companies beginning the social support journey. Initiated as a platform for customers to help customers, Norton’s communities have matured into a key source of customer insight, and as a way for the company to share timely and accurate information.

Thanks to all the great presenters, and thanks to all the attendees who voted with butts in seats! And as always, thanks for reading!

TSW Day One: Top Attended Sessions

Yesterday was the official opening of Technology Services World Best Practices in Santa Clara. I haven’t seen the final registration count, but we have around 800 attendees. I kicked off the conference yesterday with our TechFUTURES event and the TechBEST Showcase. The TechFUTURES event was so much fun–we moved the audience forward to 2018 and looked at how support operations had changed, particularly around social media, knowledge management, mobility and customer experience. Great presentations and audience response. Now everyone is teasing me about the slide of me as “Rip Van Ragsdale.”

I just received the session counts from yesterday’s breakout sessions, and I always like to do a blog post showing which topics received the most attendees. Obviously conference attendees vote with their feet, so this is a good way to figure out which topics are “top of mind” for the audience.  The five top attended sessions from Day One of TSW were:

• Best Practices for Retaining and Upselling Customers. No big surprise, the top attended session with over 100 attendees was focused on revenue generation. Presented by Julia Stegman, TSIA’s VP of research for Service Revenue Generation, this session looked at industry performance with renewal rates and upsell rates for recurring service revenues, based on Julia’s SRG benchmark work.
• The 2013 TSIA Technology Heatmap: Service Technology Adoption, Spending and Inquiry Trends. I’m tickled that my session was the 2nd top attended session. I hosted this session with Edly Villanueva, one of our member success representatives, who was a great presenter and a lot of fun to work with. I presented findings from my annual Member Technology Survey, and Edly and I talked about top inquiry topics across service disciplines and gave a pitch to the audience to submit more inquiries!
• Linking Service Business Challenges to Service Optimization. This session was presented by TSIA’s Operational Best Practices (OBP) team of Joanne Weigel, Charles Thomas and Tom Pridham, who shared their global perspectives on known best practices, what they are and why they are important ingredients to a successful Support, Field or Professional service business.
• How to Transform Your Support Organization into a Knowledge Management Machine! We always have at least 1 KM title in the Top 5! This session, presented by Jeremy Largman, Knowledge Management Program Manager, Atlassian, discussed techniques to get past the common pitfalls with change across the organization. I’m doing a workout session today with Jeremy and looking forward to it!
• Picasso and Einstein: Best Practices in Content Development. It is great to see an education services session make it into the top attended sessions! Presented by Maria Manning Chapman, TSIA’s Senior Director for ES, this session presented research conducted earlier this year outlining best practices for approaching the content development process, timeliness to market, options for managing the expense of content development, metrics to gauge success and how volume of offerings is a key indicator of the level of science required to produce a work of art.

Stay tuned for more updates live from TSW! And as always, thanks for reading!

Announcing TSIA TechBEST Finalists: Citrix, DB Kay & Associates, MARKETii

According to the TSIA Benchmark, customer satisfaction with enterprise software averages 4.2 on a five-point scale (with 1 representing very unsatisfied and 5 representing very satisfied). It is troubling, then, that the satisfaction scores for the 24 categories covered in the TSIA Member Technology Survey range from a low of 3.29 to a high of 3.96—all are under the industry average of 4.2. However, if you look at individual satisfaction scores by vendor, multiple bright spots emerge. In fact, multiple partners received scores above 4.0, with one partner scoring an average of 4.44, well above the industry average of 4.2. The three partners with the highest satisfaction scores are named finalists in the TechBEST Best in Satisfaction Award.

Today at the Technology Services World Conference, I interviewed the TechBEST Best in Satisfaction finalists in the Santa Clara Convention Center theatre to kickoff Technology Services World:

• Citrix. Citrix is transforming how people, businesses, and IT work and collaborate in the cloud era. The Citrix GoTo cloud services portfolio powers mobile workstyles, allowing companies to work with anyone from anywhere. Its GoToTraining product is an easy-to-use online training service that allows you to move your live instructor-led training programs online. Reach more learners, collect real-time feedback, record and store your training sessions and more—all while slashing travel costs. With GoToAssist, companies are able to deliver amazing support experiences and maintain maximum uptime of people, their devices, and apps. GoToAssist seamlessly integrates web collaboration with technical support and remote monitoring tools to remove support complexities, drive efficiencies, and reduce costs. Using all three capabilities together makes it simple for support professionals to identify, ticket, and quickly resolve issues. Citrix also offers other services purpose-built for collaboration and remote access that include GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToMyPC, Podio, and ShareFile. Learn more at http://www.citrixonline.com.
• DB Kay & Associates. DB Kay & Associates, Inc., helps support organizations create sustainable knowledge programs. The firm consults and trains to drive best practices and sway internal stakeholders, reducing risk and accelerating success. DB Kay provides measurement frameworks that help organizations develop their team members and show value to their executives. They tailor their services to their customers’ specific needs, offering everything from short strategy sessions to hands-on program management. Whatever the engagement, they know they’ve been successful when they’ve transferred knowledge effectively enough that their customers no longer need them! DB Kay customers include Sage, IBM, Carestream, Riverbed, Microsoft, and NetApp. For more information, go to http://www.dbkay.com.
• MARKETii. MARKETii specializes in end-to-end customer satisfaction and service quality assessment and reporting solutions covering event-based and business relationship surveys via telephone and web surveys, along with mystery calling. MARKETii operates in over 25 native languages to over 85 countries. Reporting is via multilayer, real-time web portal and proactive summaries, action items, and recommendations. Advanced reporting comes with the aid of call recording, culture indices, NPS, Strategic Priority Analysis, Service Correlations, and tech support call-reduction analysis. MARKETii works with companies such as Hitachi Data Systems, Ricoh, HP, Extreme Networks, Agilent, and many more. The company has never lost a client since its inception! For more information, go to http://www.MARKETii.com.

Congratulations to each of our finalists, each of whom is clearly doing a great job in meeting and exceeding customer expectations, and creating excellent customer experiences. I will announce the winner of TechBEST Best in Satisfaction during the awards ceremony at Service Revolutions on Wednesday. Stay tuned for details. Thanks for reading!

Join us live for TechFUTURES in Santa Clara!

Last fall at our Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas, the question I asked everyone I talked to was, “What does the support desk of the future look like?” What I heard were lots of elements that are quickly evolving, and will definitely be different in 3 or 5 or 10 years. Social media and rising customer clout were voiced by many people. Impacts of mobility–on how we service customers and how customers consume our products–is another game changer. Remote workers becoming the predominate model for support was also on the minds of many people. And other people expressed concern that many of today’s challenges, such as knowledge management, will only get worse in the years to come.

Out of these dialogs grew a new TSIA event, TechFUTURES, which will open our Spring TSW conference on Monday at 11:00am at the Santa Clara Convention Center. TechFUTURES presents a day in the live of a support technician, and the day in the life of a technology customer, in the year 2018. We will look at how things will change in respect to four specific areas:

• Social media. How will social media shape customer conversations, especially as Generation Y becomes the primary demographic for employees and customers? After seven years of investment, TSIA members are finally starting to see ROI for social initiatives. How will customer communities, as well as current and future social media channels, allow service operations to accommodate ever-growing customer demand for support without infinite scaling of service employees?
• Knowledge and content management. With the amount of content exploding due to rising complexity and faster release cycles, how can future service employees navigate an impossibly large knowledge infrastructure? Tomorrow’s corporate content store will be even larger and more dispersed than today, creating challenges for service organizations to find what they need quickly and efficiently. How can knowledge tools become more intelligent, anticipating our needs and proactively serving content to employees and customers?
• Mobility. The mobile revolution has quickly moved customers from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets, with a myriad of smaller and smarter devices on the horizon. As customers become inseparable from technology, their expectations for service continue to rise. As more sophisticated mobile devices proliferate, and mobile applications become the predominate way customers access our technology, how do we effectively support this increasingly mobile customer?
• Customer experience. With the customer quickly gaining clout and visibility, how will the customer experience movement impact service operations in five to ten years? With the push toward managed services, how can next-generation remote and proactive support technology radically change the customer ownership experience? Where can we make investments today to better enable the ultimate customer experience in the future?

I will open TechFUTURES and then turn things over to our panelists, each an expert on one of these areas, who will present their vision of the future. Our experts are:

• Social Media: Joe Cothrel, Chief Community Officer, Lithium
• Knowledge and Content Management: Diane Berry, SVP, Marketing and Communications, Coveo
• Mobility: John Purcell, Director, Products, LogMeIn
• Customer Experience: Anthony (T.J.) Felice, President, ISOdx Solutions

After the 4 presentations, each audience member will vote live for what they think is the most provocative view of the future, using hand held response units provided in each seat. I will announce the winner during the awards ceremony at Service Revolutions on Wednesday at the close of the conference.

If you are interested in attending TechFUTURES, attendance is included with your TSW registration. If you aren’t attending TSW, TechFUTURES is open to the public and you can register and get an entry badge at the TSW registration area in the rotunda. I’m really looking forward to this new event, and hope to see you there! Thanks as always for reading!

TSIA 2013 TechBEST Awards: Best in Satisfaction and Best in Show

I wanted to bring you an update on the TSIA 2013 TechBEST Awards. This is the 2nd year we are giving out these awards, recognizing excellence in our partner community. There are 2 awards: TechBEST Best in Satisfaction, and TechBEST Best in Show.

Each year TSIA conducts the Member Technology Survey, tracking adoption, satisfaction, and planned spending across 24 categories of technology and services. The satisfaction section of the survey, which closed on 3/31, has delivered interesting results, with the majority of categories averaging a satisfaction score well below industry averages. There are, however, some clear outliers from these averages, with some technology or service providers well regarded by TSIA members and highly rated for member satisfaction. Multiple TSIA partners did well, scoring above a 4.0, with one partner scoring 4.44.

Average Satisfaction Scores by Category

The three partners with the highest satisfaction scores are considered finalists for the 2013 TechBEST Awards, Best In Satisfaction. I will announce the finalists and interview each of them during the TechBEST Showcase on May 6, 2013, which opens the Technology Services World Conference in Santa Clara, CA. I will announce the winner on May 8th at the close of TSW.

The other TechBEST Award is Best in Show. Conference attendees vote for which partner in the EXPO offered the best demo, the best information, the best overall experience. Having spent time in my career as a Demo Dolly, I know creating a memorable experience for booth visitors is a challenge, and this award will recognize the partner who goes “above and beyond” to educate, entertain and enlighten attendees. I will also present this award on May 8th.

Look forward to seeing all of you in Santa Clara! If you have any questions about the awards, please let me know. And as always, thanks for reading!

Compuware Changepoint 2012 Release: Usability, Embedded Analytics, Doc Management, Mobility

I attend a lot of vendor briefings, usually an annual update or to hear what’s new in the latest release. Last week I had an opportunity to catch up with Lori Ellsworth, SVP & General Manager for Compuware Changepoint, a Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution which is one of the top installed PSA products by TSIA members, and one of my top recommended solutions for large enterprises. Lori gave me an overview of the Changepoint 2012 release, and there was so much to love I decided it was definitely blog worthy.

In my 2012 Member Technology Survey, 54% of PS members had budget for new or additional PSA technology in 2012-2013, and the early results from my 2013 survey (open until 3/31) show similar results. Companies are getting serious about moving off spreadsheets and enforcing processes for PS that bridge the gap between CRM and ERP. According to our benchmark data, companies that have adopted a PSA solution have improved metrics in many areas, including hot metrics like utilization rates and rate realization.

With this as a backdrop, the Compuware Changepoint 2012 release has a lot of differentiating features, including:

• UI overhaul. The new version of Changepoint has more of a web 2.0 look and feel, including support for a wide range of browsers. The app looks better, the user controls are updated and intuitive, and they also make great use of browser space to minimize scrolling.
• Mobility. Making use of technologies like HTML5, Changepoint now offers mobile device support for a wide array of devices, including features for time and expense tracking on smartphones, and real-time management dashboards available on tablet devices.
• Offline capabilities. We like to pretend that staying connected 24/7 is easy, but the truth is that life is filled with pockets with no cell reception (like my neighborhood), and places where connectivity isn’t allowed (hospitals, airplanes). Compuware Changepoint has been brave (if you’ve ever helped develop an offline synching application you’ll know what I mean–it ain’t easy) and introduced offline capabilities on the laptop using an Excel based expense template, with a typical use case that a PS consultant can enter their expenses offline while flying home from a project, and the expense report can be uploaded as soon as they reconnect.
• Embedded analytics. Last year I published a report about how service organizations were leveraging big data, and what I found is that few service organizations have a standalone BI tool, or the expertise to use it. The companies getting the most value from analytics have adopted platforms with “best of breed” analytics embedded in the platform. This is the route Compuware has taken, embedding IBM Business Analytics (Cognos) into the  Changepoint 2012 release. The release includes a library of real-time dashboards, and that library will continue to grow with each new release. With business user-targeted controls, PS groups can now start doing real analytics–no data scientist involved.

• Document generation. Another OEM partner included in the Changepoint 2012 release is Intelledox, providing smart forms and automated generation of business documents and reports. Using a wizard-like interface which prompts you for needed data, Intelledox shortcuts the creation of statements of work, complex project bids, etc., increasing accuracy and saving hours of time per report. The rumors I’ve heard from the field is that existing customers can’t wait to get their hands on this integration.
• eLearning. Compuware Changepoint has developed a library of training courses–all designed to be consumed in 5 minutes or less–to help new users get up to speed quickly. As an example, there are 40 lessons alone for working with the project worksheet. Contextual help is also available, linked to every part of the application, including an option to personalize the online help and eLearning  to contain company specific information.

I thought I would share Lori’s responses to some of my questions:

John Ragsdale: When I look at a PSA platform with as much sophistication as Compuware Changepoint offers, I’m surprised that so many companies–including many large ones–have yet to adopt PSA. But with high planned spending, luckily this is changing. Among your customers and prospects, what do you see as the catalyst that forces them to finally move to a PSA platform?

Lori Ellsworth:  While the timing may be different for every organization, we see a couple of catalysts for investment pretty consistently:

• Revenue  growth – either it is already underway or is planned near term,  with an expectation of sustaining that growth rate.  Organizations need to drive growth while maintaining or growing margins, which they cannot do while “flying blind”
• Greater dependence on services for adoption and delivery of an organizations product
• Changing services portfolio – need to optimize core services and build higher value add services
• Global expansion
• Planned resource growth
• Managing mergers and acquisitions

John: The Changepoint 2012 release is hitting on some very hot trends. One of those is mobility. What are requirements or use cases for mobility you frequently hear from PS customers?

Lori: We see the two most prevalent groups pushing to work in a mobile environment are executives and services consultants.  For the executive who carries their device everywhere, we are delivering real time visibility into key business metrics and dashboards on the tablet.  For consultants or anyone “on the road”, the advantages of tablet and smartphone access is about time and expense management , and participating in business process – making it easy for them to do both so that they can focus more of their time on billable projects.

John: Another trend you are leveraging in this release is embracing big data, and you can’t do better than an OEM of IBM Cognos–one of the most popular BI products available. Could you talk about how real-time dashboards can help PS management become more proactive?

Lori: It is essential that services leaders are able to have “real-time” visibility into the health of their business, because as you suggest, they need to be proactive. Whether they are looking at dashboards for utilization, rate realization, margins, performance by line of business etc. anywhere access to data allows them to operate their services business better by identifying issues and trends while there is still time to have an impact!

John: I’ve been wanting to see a demo of the Intelledox integration since I read all the buzz about it on Facebook when it was first announced. I have to think with budget cuts being a common theme for 2013, this is a “must have” integration. What sort of time savings are your early adopters seeing?

Lori: Our expectation is that this solution is all about saving time – we have a wealth of information captured in the Changepoint solution for every part of the business.  Our Intelledox partnership allows them to leverage this information to build real time critical business documents, and get them quickly out to the customer.  Think about a Statement of Work for a services organization, which must contain standard legal info, terms and conditions and customer specific pricing and detail, all in a professionally presented document.  With the Changepoint/Intelledox solution, dynamically choose the template and text need, insert customer specific data from Changepoint and publish the document in multiple formats.  The alternative is to do this manually – very labour intensive and error prone.  This is one very specific example and there are many others, but the savings from this can be enough to justify the investment!

I’d like to thank Lori Ellsworth, and the rest of the Compuware Changepoint team, for the briefing and demo, as well as for entertaining my questions. And as always, thanks to you for reading!

Doing a poor job on social media support is worse than not supporting social at all

I’ll probably catch a lot of flack for this column title, but that’s my opinion and I’m sticking with it. I just finished reading an article in today’s San Jose Mercury News about a study done by cloud vendor LiveOps about social media support, claiming that 70% of customer complaints on Twitter and Facebook are ignored; the average response time for Facebook questions is 2 days (opposed to 2 hours, which is the customer expectation), and that more than a third of companies have deleted a customer question from their Facebook page they didn’t want to answer.

Unlike phone calls and emails, social media support is very public. I always say that opening up a new customer interaction channel is like blowing a hole in the side of your corporate office. You now have a big gaping hole for customers and information to flow in and out, and if you don’t police that hole, including audit trails for traffic in and out, and service level agreements for who can use the hole and how quickly you must respond, you will get in big trouble.

Thousands of companies put very little thought into the decision to begin supporting customers via Twitter or Facebook, and I suspect many now regret it. Once that hole in the side of the company is open, it is all but impossible to close. And it is incredibly visible when you can’t keep up with the volume and begin ignoring–or deleting–customer questions.

Based on lots of TSIA data, it is clear that online communities/discussion forums are hugely successful for technical support–or at least have the potential for being hugely successful. But on the B2B technical support side, I remain unconvinced about social media channels. The typical use case for Twitter support is, “I called Comcast and was told there was an hour wait for an agent, so I Tweeted instead.” I don’t think any TSIA members have an hour wait for a phone agent. Ever. In the B2B, i.e., enterprise support world, in which you pay a very large fee for access to technical support, you don’t have long wait times. In fact, dedicated account reps are common for premium support. And the bottom line is, if a system administrator Tweets or Facebooks that their corporate ERP or supply chain system is down, that is not reporting a tech support issue, that is airing your company’s dirty laundry and a fireable offense.

There is also something in the article I laughed at. According to the survey, “customers are likely to spend about 30 percent more money” if the company has a social media presence. Well, I review RFPs all the time, and I’ve never seen a B2B purchase decision based on which vendor has the most Twitter traffic. It galls me that news outlets refuse to differentiate between B2B and B2C when they write things like this, and some wrong-headed B2B manager is going to bring this article into his boss and say, “Let’s start social media support and we’ll raise sales 30%.”

So, before you decide to begin supporting customers with technical issues via Twitter or Facebook, please remember:

• Only a very small slice of traffic will have anything to do with a technical support issue. Most traffic will be about your latest commercial, your stock price, your CEO’s private life, the color of your company logo, etc. Technical support engineers are not equipped to handle these questions, and it is a waste of their time. But, if you are going to support the general public via a social channel, you need a strategy for these non-technical issues. If you don’t have an outbound marketing or PR group staffed to handle these posts, which will probably be 90% of traffic, don’t open the channel to begin with.
• If you do insist on supporting customers via social channels, please leverage one of the many knowledge platforms now offering plugins to social media. For example, you can create a tab on your Facebook page that allows searching your self-service knowledgebase and shows lists of FAQs.
• Record every interaction in CRM..or someplace. You need an accurate history of which customer asked which question, regardless of channel, and you need to understand which questions are asked and answered by all channels to make sure knowledgebases are current and accurate.
• Establish SLAs. If you are going to support a new channel, whether it is social or not, you have to establish response times for the channel. And you must have staff dedicated to meet those SLAs. I’m not saying you necessarily publish the SLAs (“All Facebook posts will be answered within 2 hours”), but internally, you must have some SLA guidelines and the ability to measure how well you are doing in meeting those SLAs. Customers have expectations, and if you can’t meet them, you shouldn’t launch the channel.

And as always, thanks for reading!