Announcing Categories for the Spring 2010 TSIA Recognized Innovator Awards

Now in its eighth round, the Recognized Innovator Awards recognize TSIA partners for outstanding innovation in products and services. The awards will be presented at our Spring Technology Services World Conference, May 3-5 in Santa Clara.

The categories are:

• Innovation in Knowledge Management (KM). Creating, maintaining and leveraging content to speed issue resolution and project success is not only a core process within every technical support operation, but increasingly field service and professional services are launching KM initiatives to share learnings from the field across a global operation. The Recognized Innovator in this category will provide documented case studies of how their technology and/or services are enabling service organizations to more easily publish knowledge and effectively use that knowledge to improve business results.
• Innovation in Value-Added Services. As documented in “Complexity Avalanche,” Value-Added Services (VAS) programs enable customers to fully consume purchased products and services, helping them quickly receive full business value and speed the repurchase cycle. In addition, VAS programs are providing new revenue sources for budget-strapped service operations. The winner in this category will have documented case studies showing how their technology or services are being leveraged to boost service and support revenues through delivery of Value-Added Services.
• Innovation in Emerging Channels. According to TSIA survey data, a quarter of TSIA support services members are leveraging video sharing sites such as YouTube to communicate with customers, and 36% are offering some level of support via micro-blogging channels such as Twitter. Support organizations are struggling to not only identify which emerging channels to support, but there is little ‘best practice’ information available on effective customer management via social media. The Recognized Innovator in this category will provide documented case studies of how their technology and/or services are enabling service organizations to meet and exceed customer expectations for support via emerging channels without breaking the bank.

One winner and one finalist will be selected in each of the three categories. Submissions will be reviewed by a panel of judges, including industry experts and technology-savvy association members.

Finalists will be publicly announced on Monday, May 3rd. On Tuesday, May 4th, I will lead two tours of the finalists’ booths in the Technology Services Expo. Winners will be announced and presented with their awards during the Service Revolutions Awards Luncheon at the conference on Wednesday, May 5th. One new award will also be presented for Best Innovation Demo, voted on by Innovation Tour attendees.

I’m now recruiting the judges panel for the awards.  If you participate, you will only judge one category, and your total time commitment is 30-45 minutes–definitely less than an hour.  If you are interested in being a judge, please email me at john.ragsdale@tsia.com. I will recognize the names of all judges during the awards presentation.

Thanks for reading!

Welcome to TSIA’s Newest Blogger: Michael Israel

I’m happy to report that there is a new voice of sanity in the service blogosphere, as our expert of field service operations, Michael Israel, has launched his new blog, Maintenance Matters.  Michael joined TSIA last year after years of being a partner of the AFSMI. His expertise on field service operations and technology has been a huge benefit for TSIA members, especially with our new emphasis on medical technology firms–all of whom have critical field service departments.

In addition to answering member questions on field service, Michael has also been tasked with the rewrite of the benchmark survey, updating old questions and adding in missing questions to make the survey even more powerful. Another of Michael’s projects was launching our very first Maintenance Pricing Survey, and his newest blog post includes highlights from the survey.  The Maintenance Pricing Report has just been published, and distributed to all participating members. The report is available for purchase by other companies.

Please bookmark Maintenance Matters, and stay tuned for regular posts from Michael on the state of the industry! Thanks for reading!

Coveo Customer Information Access: Search is Just The Tip of The Iceberg

I admit to being pretty jaded about “new” technology. In the 9 years I’ve been an analyst, I estimate I’ve had over 2,000 vendor briefings, and unfortunately the majority of claims about unique technology turn out to be the same or similar as other products. So when I say I was blown away by something new and innovative, it means I’ve been introduced to something pretty special.

This week I had the opportunity to spend some time in Quebec with Coveo, an emerging “customer information access” vendor, whom I will never again refer to as a “search vendor.” Oh, Coveo does search. They do it extremely well. But that is just the tip of the iceberg for this company.

But let’s start with search, as that’s what brought me to Coveo. I am finalizing the evaluation criteria for my upcoming market overview of search, showing how the worlds of enterprise search, customer support search and social search are merging. Coveo is on the list of vendor partners included in the study, and I wanted to learn more about what they were doing. The product had shown up on last year’s TSIA member survey for intelligent search with high satisfaction marks, but Coveo wasn’t coming at customer service search the same way as the multi-channel vendors. Turns out Coveo has over 700 customer installations, across several verticals, including the customer service market. Tied to no single knowledge base or content management tool, Coveo’s platform does very creative indexing of all enterprise and customer support content (biggest library of packaged connectors I’ve seen) and enables additional attribution or meta data to be associated to the content–sort of sophisticated tagging.

2009 Remembered: Top Three Customer Service Technology Trends

We all seem to be breathing a collective sigh of relief that 2009 is over. Thank goodness.  2009 started in a very dark place, with budgets in question, technology projects on hold, and a laser focus on ROI.  I remember advising our partners in January that, “2009 is not the year anyone wants to hear your Web 2.0 vision.” What a difference 12 months can make. As a buzz term, “Web 2.0″  certainly died, but it was replaced by the almost interchangeable “social media,” another generic term meaning whatever you want it to mean. Delayed projects seemed to mostly revive and continue by mid-2009, and judging by my inquiry volume from companies building RFPs for CRM and KM tools, 2010 will be a big year for updating infrastructure and building out some innovative technology areas.

As I look over 2009, with an eye toward what’s coming in 2010, here are the three technology trends I think most impacted the service and support industry this year:

Gartner and AMR: Shrinking Demand for IT Advisory Services

After I get a question for the third time, I usually try to write about it in my blog. I’ve had more than three inquiries from TSIA partners asking my thoughts on the continued consolidation among IT advisory firms as Gartner announced last week they were acquiring AMR, so here goes.

As a former analyst from one of the big IT advisory firms, I certainly have a perspective on this.  And here it is:  the demand for IT advisory services has been shrinking as:

• Large IT outsourcing projects means fewer companies are making IT decisions internally.
• Cloud computing/OnDemand/SaaS minimizes demand for IT as well as minimizes IT’s role in a larger percentage of corporate infrastructure.
• Business users become driving force behind product purchases as OnDemand and Web services put end users in the drivers seat.

Add to that the economy and tighter budgets, and there simply weren’t enough IT budget dollars to keep Gartner, Forrester, AMR, Meta Group and Jupiter Research (et al) afloat. Consolidation is the logical step.

I made the move in 2006 from IT research to business user focused research, and in hindsight, my timing was pretty good.  Business users continue to gain more clout (particularly in services, with our climbing revenues and strong margins), and personally, I find working closely with business users on functionality to meet unique business problems much more rewarding than discussing Linux versions with IT admins.

I do worry about the impact on IT, with fewer voices analyzing the market and giving advice, particularly when the focus from the largest analyst firms is always the big companies. Fewer voices talking about niche areas–like AMR’s expertise in supply chain–means less coverage for smaller and more innovative solutions, fewer options, and no alternative views to the bully pulpit sermons. But that just allows business users to assume even more control–they can look to industry groups such as TSIA for highly tailored advice based on the success (or lack of success) of peer companies.

The big losers are ‘best of breed’ and smaller vendors, who have to compete with Oracle, SAP, IBM and HP for analyst time and mind share. I’ve had complaints from partners for years now that they can’t even get a briefing with the big name analysts unless consulting dollars are attached, and the cost to buy your way in for inclusion in a Magic Quadrant or Wave is too high, with too much risk:  the small companies don’t have the lobby power the big companies do to influence findings or ask for edits.

And that’s my 2 cents! I hope there is a smooth transition for some excellent AMR analysts, like my friend Noha Tohamy. Thanks for reading!

Social Media Meets Tech Support: By the Numbers

The top attended session at October’s Technology Services World Conference was from Shawn Santos, TSIA’s Director of Programs & Community, entitled “Change is the Only Constant: How Social Media is Transforming Customer Service.” The content for the presentation was from the first TSIA member survey on social media, and I will be highlighting some of those results in Thursday’s Webcast, “Join the Conversation: How to Integrate the Social Web into Customer Service & Support.”

I plan to provide data to give insight on the top questions I receive regarding online communities and social media:

• Who should own social media initiatives?
• How do we staff social media projects?
• What social media channels should we use/leverage?
• What is the ROI story for social media?
• How to select which social media channels to pay attention to, or provide service to customers via?

We will also hear from Kyle Christensen, Director, Product Marketing, Salesforce.com, about the Service Cloud. The Service Cloud 2 announcement from Salesforce included knowledge management, crowd sourcing, Twitter integrations, contact center integrations, and other features, along with core CRM capabilities, allowing companies to bring social media channels into the 360 degree view of the customer automatically.

The ROI issue continues to thwart member companies. In fact, when asked what the barriers are for industry adoption of social media to support customers, the number one answer was “unable to measure ROI.”

 

Barriers to Social Media Adoption

There are a lot of opinions on this subject, from those clinging to call deflection as a means of cost justifying communities to those who say embracing social media shouldn’t be viewed in terms of ROI. I think everything should be viewed in terms of ROI, but that doesn’t mean anything without 100% ROI is a bad investment. We are beginning to see success stories about communities and adoption of social media channels from members, particularly in STAR Award applications, and I look forward to bringing you more case studies on measuring cost and effectiveness of social media in the months to come.

Thanks for reading, and please join in for Thursday webcast!

Trends Impacting Technology Services: Please Weigh In!

My boss, Thomas Lah, executive director of TSIA, is doing some interesting work on trends. His latest blog post discusses 9 key trends impacting technology services in three areas:

• Performance Trends: These are trends that will impact the performance metrics and results of a technology services business
• Practice Trends: These are trends related to the business practices employed by technology service organizations to optimize their businesses.
• Preference Trends: These trends related to buying preferences of customers consuming technology services.

His blog post includes a poll, asking which of these trends do you personally feel will have the greatest impact on technology service organizations over the next five years, as well as asking for input on other trends to watch. This information will help us build out and prioritize our 2010 research calendar, so your input is requested! Please take a quick read and weigh in on the poll:

http://thomaslah.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/nine-key-trend-in-technology-services/

Thanks for participating!

The Economics of Customer Service Excellence

I’m preparing for tomorrow’s Webcast, “The Economics of Customer Service Excellence: Critical Improvements for Tier 1 and First Contact Resolution,” and wanted to share some of the data I’ve come across in my research.  Obviously in a down economy (and for all the talk about recovery I’ve yet to hear any service execs getting budget increases) there is a big focus on servicing customers as cost effectively as possible. But in this case, reducing support costs is a win:win–not only does resolving more issues at Level 1 lower operating costs, but customers are much happier when issues are resolved more quickly, and by the first person they speak to.

The economics are simple:  the longer a support incident is open, the more it costs.  If you escalate an issue from Level 1 to Level 2, the cost doubles.  Everyone asks about incident costs, and based on member surveys, here is the data I quote:

Five WORST Practices of Customer Service

A few years ago I was speaking at a conference and committed a cardinal sin: I used a company as an example of poor customer service, and that company, an electric utility, was in the audience. I tried to mea culpa my way out of it, and apologized profusely to the company’s support manager at the conference. A couple of weeks later I received a call at my office from the head of support for the utility company, who informed me they had made major investments to their support operations, including 100% call recording, and he had listened to every one of my phone interactions over the last couple of years and I had zero reason to think they gave poor support.

Worst Practice #1: Never tell a customer their feelings about poor treatment are unjustified. You are basically calling them a liar, and putting the customer immediately on the defensive.

The folly of all of this is that the account I had had so many problems with was a rental property I owned at the time, and the electric account wasn’t even in my name. Using call recording as a bully club to argue with customers is ridiculous, as you can’t possibly tie me personally to account problems my name and phone number aren’t associated with.

Fast forward a few years. A few weeks ago, Northern California received a record breaking storm, the remnants of a typhoon from Asia. I live in the Santa Cruz mountains, and I received 10 inches of rain in one day. We had sustained winds at 40mph, with gusts up to 70mph. My power was out for 4 days, and if that wasn’t bad enough, my encounters with that same utility company left me so frustrated, that weeks later I am still angry. This blog post is my attempt at catharsis.

Meeting the needs of remote and mobile workers

I am preparing for tomorrow’s webcast, “Developing a Support Strategy that Embraces Change in Today’s Increasingly Remote Workforce,” and though we don’t have a tremendous amount of data on the topic–YET–in the TSIA benchmark, I have found lots of interesting data from the US Department of Labor and various research groups who graciously shared their findings.  This is an interesting topic because it impacts support in multiple ways:

• Technical support and call centers have growing percentages of employees working from home, and old approaches to training, coaching and monitoring don’t work.
• Our customers are becoming more mobile, and assumptions about devices and support processes don’t meet the needs of these customers.
• IT support is also struggling, as more complex applications are available on mobile devices, meaning your IT help desk needs new skills and tools to support the mobile workforce.

There are lots of benefits to remote workers, and during the webcast I’ll give some survey data on this, covering everything from cost savings (no facilities costs) to increased employee satisfaction to support of Green initiatives.  But what I hear from TSIA members is the pool of possible employees is much larger and better when remote is an option: According to Gartner Inc., 70-80% of home-based agents have college degrees, compared with 30-40% of workers in conventional call centers.

I’ve done a number of webcasts in the past on mobile applications  (including Increasing Field Service Productivity and Profits With Mobile Automation Tools and Take the Mobile Field Service Challenge), and last week I blogged about how SAP is seeing wide adoption of their CRM tools on multiple mobile devices and platforms. Just check out the iPhone AppStore and see the growing number of enterprise application vendors offering iPhone apps to access your corporate data: Oracle, SAP and Salesforce are just three examples.

Clearly customers expect seamless support regardless of what device or platform they are using, and that is putting pressure on support teams when their tools and processes only address applications running on a desktop.  We don’t have all the answers yet, but I hope you will make time for this webcast to learn what to expect and some tips to setting up your mobile and remote strategy. Register here: http://webcasts.tsia.com/event/gtcprwkckb If you aren’t able to attend the live event, go ahead and register–we’ll send you a link to the OnDemand version later this week.

Cheers, and thanks for reading!