Live from the SSPA Best Practices Conference: Day 2

Tuesday was the final day of the SSPA’s Best Practices Conference held at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I spent most of my time in 1:1 member meetings, but for a recap of keynote presentations, you can read the conference blog.  I would be adding more pics to my posts, but WordPress has upgraded their blog software and it no longer allows me to upload and post pics–I suspect a Vista issue (the excuse I always receive these days).  Thanks a lot, WordPress!

The number of tracks and breakout sessions was a bit overwhelming, and many members said they struggled to pick between some great sessions.  Luckily we will be posting all presentations shortly so you can check out the sessions you missed.  The top attended sessions for Tuesday were:

Live from the SSPA Best Practices Conference: Day 1

With a total attendee count around 800, the first full day of the SSPA Spring Best Practices Conference got underway Monday at the Santa Clara Convention center with our Executive Director, Steve Smith, giving his views on strategic industry trends. My favorite part was the move from people centric to tools centric to product centric, meaning products are becoming smarter and more easily supported, with intelligent, proactive service becoming the norm. There are some great examples of companies making progress here–Xerox and BEA come to mind–and I agree with Steve that this will continue, not only to drive down costs and delays in support, but also to create a better customer experience.

Next up Mary Cay Kosten, Senior Vice President, Global Customer Services, Sun Microsystems, gave a keynote describing Sun’s journey toward JDPower certification, which they achieved last year and are about to start the process to renew this year. Mary Cay spent time talking about the internal and external marketing plan which I think is something support organizations often need a bit of help with. Clearly achieving certification is a huge accomplishment, and companies should brag about it in any way they can.

I was up next to give a look at adoption and spending trends across the 24 functional areas in my annual Member Technology Survey, which tracks what service and support technology member companies use, how satisfied they are with it, and what their spending plans are for 2008.

I also announced the winners of the Spring 2008 Recognized Innovator Awards.  Details on the categories and winners can be found here.

Attendees then had a choice of breakout sessions for the rest of the day.  The top attended sessions were:

Highlights from opening day of SSPA Best Practices Conference

After months of planning and preparation, today was the opening of our Spring Best Practices Conference, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center. We had several pre-conference workshops today, including mine:  “Web 2.0:  Key Elements for Success.”  I had a great group of members in the workshop, the majority of whom already have a discussion forum for customers in place, and are now looking at even more advanced concepts, including having customers author support content with Wikis.  I opened the session giving some stats on forum adoption as a support channel, which obviously differs greatly by age group.  I featured three guest presenters, as follows:

Masking process dysfunction: Support’s role as customer ombudsman

Last month I had the misfortune of having a credit card hijacked for fraudulent online purchases.  Citibank was wonderful, detecting the activity and stopping it immediately.  I had direct billing from several places going to that account, and I quickly set about switching those to a different card using online self-service.  All went well for my electric bill and NY Times subscription, but when I tried to change the direct billing for my home land line, Internet and satellite TV, which are combined into a single monthly bill, things went seriously wrong.  As luck would have it, that month’s direct billing was set to process the next day, so I felt a sense of urgency in getting it moved to a different payment source.

The telco would only take direct payment online by Visa, so I couldn’t use my Amex and wouldn’t have a new Visa number for a week.  I could have it directly billed to a bank account, but that would take 2 weeks (!) to setup.  So I called customer service.  I knew I was in trouble when the billing IVR asked me to “press 1 for land line, 2 for Internet, 3 for satellite TV” but had no option for converged billing.  I spoke with 6 people at 4 different 1-800 numbers before resolving the issue, and it took over 2 hours of my time.  One lady told me I could use Amex to make a payment by phone.  Wrong.  I tried making a payment using a debit card, but to do so I had to enter the 18-digit account number for my phone/internet/satellite bill.  And where do you get that?  Turns out the ONLY place to get your 18-digit account number is on your paper bill, which I don’t receive because I have paperless online billing.  My account number isn’t shown online “for security reasons.”  What a debacle.

All 6 people I spoke with had one thing in common:  the attitude that this wasn’t their problem.  And that, my friends, is the reason for this rant today. 

Coremetrics improves the Customer Experience by differentiating Visit vs. Visitor

I’ve been blessed with some amazing managers over the years.  The first was Judy Walden during my days as a support tech at JCPenney, who pushed me to think outside the box and be creative in attacking problems.  Another was Joe Davis, who was my boss at Clarify during the dark days after the Nortel acquisition.  Joe was the first executive I’d worked for with a “No BS” policy–he called ‘em as he saw ‘em, was clear and direct, and never afraid to discuss the occasional elephant in the room.  These two people have a lot to do with my becoming an analyst–a career that requires creative solutions to problems, and a level of frankness that some people find a bit uncomfortable.

Joe is now CEO of Coremetrics, the original “click stream analytics” company, and yesterday I went in for a briefing to better understand how Coremetrics can help support organizations improve the customer experience.  Though Coremetrics is best known as a solution for marketing professionals, there is a lot in their suite applicable to support.  The biggest takeaway for me was their in-depth understanding of Visit vs. Visitor, which gets to heart of why some knowledgebase vendors have ridiculous claims about the success of their self-service technology.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say a customer has a problem with their mobile phone. 

Best Practices for Talent Managment in India: Report Live 5/5

I’m thrilled to report that the long-awaited whitepaper, “Talent Managment in Emerging Markets: Best Practices for Attracting, Developing and Retaining Talent in India,” is now complete, and a press release dropped today announcing it.

A committee of SSPA members, many based in India, have been working on this project for nearly a year, including participants from Symantec, Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, Oracle, MeritTrack, EMC, Sun and other companies.  The report will be released at the SSPA Spring Best Practices Conference on May 5th, and a presentation on the findings and recommendations will be given by Dheeraj Prasad, Director, Developer Support, Microsoft Global Technical Support Center, at 10:45am on the 5th.

Here are some findings of the study.

Understanding Cultural Differences in Customer Ratings

Sorry I have been neglectful of my blog for the last week; I have been headsdown working on a report detailing the best practices for attracting, developing and retaining talent in India.  The SSPA has a committee of members who have been working on this project for the last year, surveying and interviewing hiring managers in Indian tech support organizations.  The amount of data they uncovered, and the indepth findings and recommendations from the members is amazing, and my job was to merge all the information into a research report.  I completed a draft of the report…all 46 pages…today so am coming up for air.

The report will be released at our Spring Best Practices Conference, and the head of the committee, Microsoft’s Dheeraj Prasad, will lead a session highlighting the findings. I hope you will attend his session; any company with either owned or outsourced support resources in India should leverage these findings.

While I was emerged in writing the report, I came across a fascinating article I wanted to share with everyone.  Over the years I have received inquiries from support managers who were perplexed about how the same service organization could receive such different ratings in post-interaction surveys from different regions of the world.  I have waxed poetic on this topic many times…but never in writing for fear of being politically incorrect.

Last week I had a briefing with CustomerSat, an SSPA partner providing customer satisfaction analytics for the support industry, and we talked about how people in different cultures rate the same experience differently. Marya Darabont, Research Consultant for CustomerSat Professional Services in Europe, wrote an excellent article on this. If you service customers outside of the US, I encourage you to read it. Some highlights discussing propensity for selecting certain scores on a numbered scale:

The New Low Cost Outsourcing Location: USA?

When I had 4 people in 2 weeks confirm that companies have been shifting calls from Canadian outsourcers back to the US because the US dollar’s slide was making the costs of “near shore” outsourcing too expensive, I suspected something was brewing.  And yesterday, when over 400 people registered for our SSPA Webcast entitled “Onshore vs. Offshore Support: Why Domestic Providers are Winning,” I knew we had hit on a hot topic.

Our SSPA benchmark data shows that no matter how you slice it, satisfaction is higher with onshore service than with offshore service:

Finally, A True Collaborative SOA Ecosystem: IBM and KANA

The enterprise application vendors have been touting their SOA (service oriented architecture) platforms and ecosystems for a few years now, but there was something that always bothered me:  the creator of the SOA platform shouldn’t also be the provider of the applications that run on the platform.  To use an example I’ve heard applied to Microsoft over the years:  the guy who provides electricity shouldn’t also determine the size and shape of electric plugs. 

A closed ecosystem, in which you buy all the infrastructure and applications from a single vendor, has been the only choice for CRM and ERP buyers wanting Web 2/SOA…unless you wanted to jump on the Open Source bandwagon with its own set of risks and limited functionality.  To me, today’s joint announcement that “KANA Embeds IBM Open Technology to Deliver Next-Generation Customer Service Solutions” finally delivers the first steps of a true SOA ecosystem, in which customers can select the right application functionality, and not be stuck using the only plug that fits the electrical outlet, even if it doesn’t meet their business needs.

IntelliResponse: One Right Answer for Web Self-Service Questions

I receive a lot of requests for briefings from emerging customer support software vendors, and a recent request from IntelliResponse caught my attention because of this line:  “Our unique competitive differentiation is our ‘One Right Answer’ approach, versus all of our competitors who utilize search based paradigms.” Because of the huge popularity of Google, many vendors in this space are creating a ‘Google-like’ search experience, which is great when you are researching a topic, but not so good when you have a specific question or problem and need the One Right Answer, not a scrolling page of thousands of possibilities.

IntelliResponse, a 100% SaaS vendor, has around 100 customers and nearly twice as many deployments, but their focus has been higher education and financial services, with reference accounts including TD Canada Trust, ING Direct, American Express, Scotiabank, Ohio State, and Penn State University. After receiving inquiries from many high tech companies, IntelliResponse is now bringing their solution to our industry, with a commitment I think many tech companies will find attractive: Go live in 60 days and deliver one right answer to at least 80% of visitor questions.