TSW Best Practices 2012 Agenda Now Available: Sexy Operational Topics

The agenda for our Technology Services World Best Practices 2012 is almost complete. We are still finalizing case studies for the “Services Technology” track, so I wanted to highlight some sessions that show just how sexy some of the operational issues of service can be! The amount of expertise within our member and partner ecosystem is amazing, and I’m always impressed how willing experts are to share their expertise. The complete conference agenda is available via this link.

On the first day of the conference, Monday, May 7th, we open with a set of Professional Development Programs, a half-day deep dive on a topic with one of our expert alliance partners. Based on my inquiries, one session in particular jumps out at me as a “must attend:”  Winning Support Websites: From Assessment to Customer Love, presented by the always-popular Francoise Tourniaire. In this fast-paced workshop packed with checklists and practical recommendations, Francoise will show you how to:

• Conduct an audit of your existing support site, combining internal evolutions, customer user testing, and competitive analysis.
• Prioritize improvements to deliver an enticing customer experience at a reasonable cost.
• Use web analytics to create a better website, and to continuously audit customer usage to improve the site.
• Nail the three basic building blocks of support sites.
• Prevent customers from having to think (too much).
• Handle common dilemmas such as multiple product lines, multiple version numbers, and displaying alerts.
• Integrate forums, the knowledgebase, and troubleshooting wizards into a seamless experience.
• ….and much more.

With self-service success at an all-time low, please have someone attend this workshop and learn how to improve your customer self-service experience!

Speaking of self-service, who better to present a session on the topic than the 2011 STAR Award winner for Best Online Support, Cisco! On Wednesday, May 09, at 9:45am, hear from Chris Kells and Chris Vasan how Cisco earned this prestigious industry recognition for Online Support. During this session, Award-Winning Best Practices in Online Support, you’ll get the inside track and “how to” details directly from the individuals responsible for running this initiative. Additional session details coming soon, so stay tuned!

One of the trends I’ve been tracking over the last year is enterprise support adoption of web chat as a customer channel. In fact, one of our top attended webcasts from 2011 (which you can watch via this link to the OnDemand version) was a case study of how EMC successfully implemented chat, and we asked EMC if they would be willing to share their story at the conference.  On Tuesday, May 08, at 9:45am, don’t miss EMC’s Julie Larsen’s session:  Leverage Chat to Empower Customer Self-Help and Increase Utilization of Your eServices Support Channels. In this session, you will hear about how the journey to enterprise-level chat is an exciting one that includes a paradigm shift from the traditional support agent call-back model to a more direct, synchronous model across the globe and across business units. Learn about chat best practices and lessons learned as well as key considerations when considering multilingual chat. With a 700% increase in chat traffic, customers both large and small engage in chat sessions to quickly engage with technical and support experts. Customers are realizing faster response and resolutions times for their technical and support questions and issues. In fact, customers benefited from a 250% faster time-to-relief and a 15-25% increase in service requests closed in less than 24 hours. And customer satisfaction with chat is approaching 90%, the highest among our entire suite of online support tools.

Social Media is another favorite topic for TSW attendees, and we have several breakouts on the topic, including presentations by TSIA’s own social media expert, Shawn Santos. But I wanted to call your attention, in particular, to this session focused on the knowledge management side of social media, “Blending Knowledge Management and Social Media for Service and SupportService Social Media,” from VMware’s Lynn Llewellyn. This session will share social media and knowledge-management strategies from VMware® Global Support Services. The company has developed an innovative, award-winning program that provides invaluable assistance to its customers and helps deflect support cases–the Social Media Guidebook for Service and Support Responds to Customers Faster and Increases Satisfaction. It outlines VMWare’s efforts to create, implement, monitor, and measure its social support program. This is an ongoing process that the company continues to adjust and improve as the business grows.

In addition to these sessions, I will also be presenting the findings from my 2012 Services Technology Survey, highlighting technology  adoption, satisfaction and planned spending across 24 areas of services technology.  In “The 2012 TSIA Technology Heatmap: Service Technology Spending and Adoption Trends” on Monday, May 07 at 4:15 PM, find out what the most popular products are in highly-adopted areas such as incident tracking, multi-channel management, and web collaboration, and hear about the top technology trends impacting the service industry today.

And last, but hopefully not least, I will be closing out TSW with the closing keynote on Wednesday, May 09  at 12:30pm, “Lessons Unlearned: 25 Years in Customer Service.” I will be launching my new book, Lessons Unlearned, at TSW, and this session will highlight some of the book, as well as give you some background on my writing process. I’m hoping the book will serve as a manual for new support managers, and I look forward to finishing the publishing process and sharing a lifetime full of hard-learned lessons with you at Santa Clara!

Thanks for reading, now book your conference pass!

Interview with Partner Advisory Board Member Randy Mysliviec, RTM Consulting: Importance of Resource Management

TSIA has recently launched our very first Partner Advisory Board, consisting of technology, service provider and consulting partners in the TSIA partner network. This is a great opportunity for us to stay current on marketing and spending trends in other industries, as well as track emerging best practices in our own industry. We have an impressive list of partners on the board; here is a link to view the complete list.

Over the next few weeks, I will be bringing you interviews with our Partner Advisory Board members. Today’s interview is with Randy Mysliviec, CEO, RTM Consulting. A long time TPSA and TSIA partner, RTM works with consulting, professional services and shared services organizations to improve operational efficiency and revenue.

John Ragsdale:  I’d like to thank Randy Mysliviec from RTM Consulting for joining me today, and agreeing to participate in this blog interview. Randy, I know you were a founding member of the TPSA, now part of TSIA, and have served on the TPSA advisory board before joining the TSIA partner advisory board. Would you give us some background on RTM Consulting and the types of projects you help TSIA members tackle?

Randy Mysliviec:  Hi John, glad to be here. RTM Consulting provides strategic and operational advice to help technology companies increase revenues and grow margins by leveraging services more effectively. We specialize in Global Resource Management and Services Business Optimization, helping IT hardware and software companies, pure consulting businesses and support/shared services organizations get better at what they do.

In the past we have worked with many TSIA members including Adobe, Bullhorn, Compugen, EMC, Informatica, Mentor Graphics, MicroStrategy, NCR, TriZetto and others assisting with improving services strategy and operational performance.

John:  We are hearing from many members that there may be some belt-tightening ahead in 2012 due to risk in the economy. When professional services organizations talk budgets, one metric always drives the conversation: utilization. Why is utilization such a key metric for PS teams?

Randy:  In a professional services organization, the largest cost line item by far is people.   Therefore efficient utilization of that resource is paramount. We have done literally dozens of resource management assessment and transformation projects, and we find most organizations continue to struggle with some aspect of getting the right person in the right place at the right time. And the issue is much larger than just cost efficiency – proper resourcing impacts project timeliness, profitability and quality in a big way. Interestingly, most PS teams have invested in a quality method, and a Project Management methodology, but not a Resource Management (RM) methodology. We think the industry has it up-side down. An RM methodology should come first, not last. If you cannot resource a project correctly, what’s the point of tracking quality and PM status – the outcome is quite certain!

John: So let’s talk about effectively managing those expensive PS resources. One of RTM’s specialties is resource management, and I know you have a practice built around Just-in-Time Resourcing® (JITR), including a YouTube video on the topic.  Can you give us an overview of JITR?

Randy:  We introduced Just-in-Time Resourcing® (JITR) solutions to help companies with the complex task of getting the right person in the right place at the right time. It is our brand of human capital management solutions. JITR provides a systematic and disciplined solution to managing human capital in a hyper-efficient manner, while enabling more productive application of PM and quality methodologies. I believe that over the next decade, growing competition and marketplace change will continue putting unprecedented pressure on service providers to rapidly adapt and innovate in every facet of service delivery. Effectively and efficiently sourcing and managing resources will be the new high water mark for the industry and by utilizing Just-in-Time Resourcing® companies build the right set of capabilities to accomplish the most efficient use of human capital.

John: Do companies have a difficult time transitioning away from the old project schedule approach? What are some of the common problems you see regarding resourcing with TSIA members?

Randy:  The industry in general still views RM as the last priority vs. PM and quality methods. It should be their first priority. There is so much waste in PS process spending today! Getting the right person in the right place at the right time does require substantial sophistication in human capital management, but given that it’s by far the largest line item in their budgets, it’s a no brainer investing in an RM methodology and solution.

John: With the recent launch of Consumption Economics, TSIA has a big push around making products more customer centric so technology is more easily adopted and time to value is accelerated. This is a topic RTM Consulting has been discussing for some time, with your Value Realization Framework. Can you talk about the link between user adoption and company revenue?

Randy:  You’re right John, we have been discussing this very trend for some time and it’s something we feel very strongly about. Today’s increasingly complex technology solutions are making it more and more difficult for customers to adopt all of the available features and functionality and achieve maximum value from their investments. Ultimately, this diminishes client satisfaction and loyalty, threatening client retention and future revenue streams for technology vendors.

As with most challenges, this trend represents a tremendous opportunity for services organizations within technology companies to increase their value by aligning their services portfolio with their clients’ most pressing need – achieving real value from the product. If these companies evolve their services teams from product implementation and support to valued advisors, they will drive user adoption – the most critical element in growing company revenues. Services is the key!  Shortly after J. B. Wood released ‘Complexity Avalanche’, we introduced a very comprehensive methodology designed to help companies improve value realization for their customers.

John:  We’ve focused on professional services so far in this interview, but before we close, I wanted to be sure our readers know that you also have a lot of hands-on experience in the customer support and outsourcing arena. What sort of projects are a good fit for RTM Consulting on the support services side of TSIA’s membership?

Randy:  At our heart we help technology companies make services work better for them in every respect. We know as much about Work Force Management (WFM) for support services as we do about Resource Management (RM) for PS teams. This is true for every other aspect of running a support or education services operation. For support service providers we can help with customer acquisition, retention, revenue management, work force management, channel strategies (contact optimization), infrastructure support, or overall support service strategies.

John:  Thank you for taking the time for this interview, and for providing such excellent content!

Randy:  Thank you for the opportunity John. It’s been an absolute pleasure serving on the TSIA Partner Advisory Board.

Eeek! Average cost of a field service visit passes $1000: How to change the math in 2012

In 2011 we overhauled the support and field service benchmark survey and began tracking additional operational metrics for field operations. Much of this data has never seen the light of day until this week, when I began preparing for this Thursday’s 9am PT webcast, “Optimize and Control Your Mobile Workforce.” In the webcast, I will reveal industry averages for multiple metrics, including onsite response time, onsite travel time, average repair time, percent of issues resolved on the first visit, and more. But the biggest shock to my system was when I pulled the average cost for a field service visit, which last time I checked with around $750.

The current average is now $1,011.17.

That means every time you roll a truck to a customer, it costs over a grand. When you aren’t able to solve the problem on the first visit, you are flushing another thousand dollars down the sink. With numbers this big, the ROI for improving key productivity metrics is fast and dramatic.

Tomorrow’s webcast is sponsored by Astea, and they will present a very compelling story, showing the complex series of processes required in scheduling and dispatching field service technicians, onsite work, and T&E tracking, and how automation can eliminate more than half of these steps being manually performed today. Which brings me to one other shocking statistic I found in the benchmark data: 58% of members say the scheduling and dispatch of field agents is done 100% manually. And guess how many have fully automated scheduling and dispatch? Zero percent.

Many companies have been existing for a decade on old CRM field service tools, waiting for a good reason to adopt newer, more flexible and more impactful tools. From what I’ve seen, mobility is that good reason. Mobile field service is revolutionizing how customers are serviced, as well as the cost model to do that service.  Tune in this Thursday to hear how investing in technology will prepare your service operation for the next decade, include pushing back that average field service visit cost to well under $1000 again.

If you aren’t able to attend the webcast live, please go ahead and register and we’ll send you all the slides from the webcast, and a link to review the OnDemand version (maybe as a reward for finishing that Christmas shopping).

See you Thursday, and thanks for reading!

Interview with Partner Advisory Board Member Ryan Hollenbeck, Verint: EFM/Voice of the Customer

TSIA has recently launched our very first Partner Advisory Board, consisting of technology, service provider and consulting partners in the TSIA partner network. This is a great opportunity for us to stay current on marketing and spending trends in other industries, as well as track emerging best practices in our own industry. We have an impressive list of partners on the board; here is a link to view the complete list.

Over the next few weeks, I will be bringing you interviews with our Partner Advisory Board members. This week’s interview is with Ryan Hollenbeck from Verint Systems, the leading provider of Actionable Intelligence^® solutions and services for enterprise workforce optimization and security intelligence.

John Ragsdale: I’m very pleased to share an interview with one of our new Partner Advisory Board members, Ryan Hollenbeck, Senior Vice President, Global Marketing, Verint. I’ve known Ryan since the late 90s, when he was with Witness Systems, the original workforce optimization provider for call centers. I’ve seen the organization grow over the years, with mergers and acquisitions including Blue Pumpkin, the merger with Verint, Vovici, and most recently, Global Management Technologies (GMT).

Ryan, welcome.  My CEO has just published a book, Consumption Economics, that explains how the rush to the cloud is changing everything about the economics of servicing customers. A very central part of the story is the need to better mine customer data for business intelligence. I’d like to start by asking about voice and text analytics. Verint has won multiple TSIA Recognized Innovator Awards for your capabilities in this area. Could you talk about how companies can mine existing customer conversations for insight?

Ryan Hollenbeck:  Customer service has changed dramatically since you and I first started working together the late 90s. Back then, customers typically interacted with companies by calling into contact centers.  Today, consumers expect to conduct business using a combination of email, Web chat, text messaging, telephone, and social media postings. At the same time, competitive pressures are really pushing companies to do a much better job of tapping into the “voice of the customer” to make informed decisions and avoid costly missteps that can cost them business.

This ups the ante in customer service, since companies not only have to capture the “voice of the customer” across multiple channels, but also need to analyze it and use it for strategic and tactical decision making.  It necessitates a very different approach to customer service—one that involves the entire organization, rather than just the contact center.  So there has to be a way to capture, analyze, and share customer comments and sentiments across the enterprise.

Voice of the customer analytics solutions do exactly that by providing a platform for detecting, gathering, analyzing, and acting on insights across multiple communications channels.  They include speech analytics, social media analytics, email and Web chat analytics, and feedback analytics. They can even be integrated with workforce optimization software and strategies for a truly holistic approach to customer experience management. Voice of the customer analytics solutions offer a practical way for organizations to mine customer comments and sentiments, identify rising trends, determine root cause, and take action quickly.

John:  Another hot topic from Consumption Economics is how customers are more active in driving company and product direction. Clearly another Verint strong point is enabling enterprise feedback management. Can you talk about EFM, and explain why this is a bigger effort than just post-interaction surveys?

Ryan: Let’s start with post-interaction surveys, which are surveys that are delivered by the contact center, usually over the IVR, after the conclusion of interactions with agents. They’re almost always focused on the transaction that has just taken place.

Enterprise feedback management solutions expand upon this. They collect data across the entire enterprise, including the contact center, and centralize it so that it can be analyzed and tailored for various internal users.  Although EFM solutions can certainly include transactional surveys, they’re also used for relationship surveys, or to recruit survey panel members via social media. The surveys can be delivered over the Web, email, social media, and mobile devices, and text analytics can be applied to them to analyze open-ended questions. EFM solutions offer a practical way for operationalizing a voice of the customer program.

John:  While we are on the topic of surveys, could you talk about the Vovici acquisition? The timing of the acquisition was interesting, because we at TSIA had just evaluated multiple EFM vendors and selected Vovici, which we now use for all our member surveys. You picked a fantastic company, amazing user interface, sophisticated reporting, and as a TSIA member, a great service operation! How did Vovici fit into Verint’s strategy?

Ryan: The Vovici acquisition fits very well into Verint’s strategy. By adding Vovici’s enterprise feedback solutions to the Verint Voice of the Customer Analytics platform,  we’ve created a single solution set to support voice of the customer initiatives across voice recordings, surveys, email, chat, and social media. We’re also filling a void in the market by enabling organizations to extract tremendous value from this emerging toolset for their chief customer officers. Enterprises can benefit from Verint’s proven speech and text analytics solutions and workforce optimization suite, as well as Vovici’s advanced functionality, including sophisticated survey management, customer profile management, interactive dashboards, and ad-hoc analysis across any customer touch point.  Verint can now correlate this information and offer a single-vendor solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer insights, and that’s a compelling value proposition.

John:  You and I have talked about a few topics for years now, and one of those topics is looking at productivity in the back office and how it impacts customers. I remember first discussing this with you a decade ago during my Forrester years, when I was getting complaints from support organizations that so many  customer issues (account discrepancies, refunds, shipping problems, etc.) disappeared into the back office and never returned, leaving the support agent on the hook for an answer, but no way to get one. Clearly, the customer experience encompasses a lot of back office activity. How does Verint help improve customer-facing processes across the enterprise…including the back office?

Ryan: I remember those early conversations and scratching our heads!  The industry has come a long way since then, and Verint remains laser-focused on this issue.  Verint solutions offer visibility into the entire customer service chain, from contact centers to branch and remote offices to back-office operations.  And in the back office, one of the greatest challenges is capturing activity and performance information across a diverse set of tasks, functions, and teams.

Unlike the contact center, there’s no ACD to provide this critical information. Instead, Verint’s back-office software collects data from any available electronic sources, such as workflow engines, CRM, email, people queue management, imaging, and business process management systems. Since the penetration of those applications is still relatively low, our solution also provides a manual data entry interface and electronically logs volumes and activities into the system as work is processed. This enables managers to predict their ability to meet processing deadlines given resource availability, skills, and equipment/deadline constraints.  They can take corrective action proactively, which in turn can help companies avoid a flood of calls or emails into their contact centers.

John:  Your most recent acquisition, GMT, expands your customer experience message into banking. It seems that retail banking has a lot of the same challenges as workforce management for call centers:  you have customers waiting, limited staffing dollars, and if you don’t have the scheduling right, customers walk out the door, taking loans and deposits with them.

Ryan:  Yes, those are all significant challenges in retail banking, along with very  intense competition. Banks are under heavy pressure to drive sales, service quality, and customer satisfaction while lowering their costs, enhancing productivity, and retaining staff.

Verint addresses those concerns on a variety of levels.  Our retail financial services solutions automate forecasting, scheduling, and quality analysis across branches while enabling banks to predict customer demand accurately, which helps reduce wait times.  Our solutions also provide real-time customer and productivity information to regional and store managers for enhanced cost management, customer service, and sales. Managers can track how well employees are performing against their goals and even assign eLearning automatically to staff at their desktops during times when customer volume is low.

Verint has offered solutions designed for retail financial services for years.  Yet through our acquisition of GMT, a huge domain expertise in financial services, along with key differentiating functionality, such as robust technology value optimization and sales effectiveness tools, as well as a comprehensive set of consulting services and methodologies.

John:  Clearly companies need help getting EFM programs off the ground. In fact, nearly half of TSIA members said they had budget for consulting partners in 2011-2012. I believe the GMT acquisition also expanded Verint’s partner network. Could you talk about your partner ecosystem?

Ryan: Verint has its own highly successful consulting operations, offered by our own industry experts.  We have also long maintained partnerships with leading companies to extend the reach of our solutions.  From large, distributed consulting organizations with dedicated practices to smaller boutique firms, our customers have many options for ensuring the success of their WFo and VoC initiatives.

As you pointed out, the GMT acquisition has augmented our partner portfolio by adding strong partnerships with leading financial services organizations, including Talaris and Q-matic. It’s all part of our commitment to offering customers superior solutions and outstanding business value.

John: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.

Ryan: It’s always my pleasure, thanks John.  I appreciate the opportunity and look forward to serving on the TSIA partner advisory board.

 

 

From “Channel Chaos” to “Channel Harmony:” Five Steps to Future Proof Your Multi-Channel Strategy

Tomorrow at 11am PT I am speaking on a webcast entitled, “Multichannel, Mobile, and Social Customer Support: How Consumer Electronics & Technology Companies Can Go from Chaos to Harmony.” Please click on the link to register. Even if you aren’t available for the live event, by registering you will receive a link to download all presentation materials and view the recorded version of the webcast.

Multi-channel has always been a hot button issue with TSIA members: what channels do customer want, how to build adoption for one channel over another, what is the cost and satisfaction per channel, etc. A few years ago I did a lot of writing and speaking on “channel islands,” meaning companies tended to add one channel at a time from different technology providers without the required integration work. As a result, most companies have knowledge, interaction history and customer data stored in a dozen or more systems, one for phone, email, chat, self-service, etc.

I’m sorry to say we have not made a lot of progress in fixing that problem, and from where I sit, the situation seems to be going downhill fast. There are hot new interaction channels emerging, such as intelligent agents; mobility and video are forcing companies to develop additional self-service sites and content optimized for smart phones and tablets; and social media and online communities are adding even more avenues for customer interactions. And none of it is integrated.

The last time I surveyed members, there was an average of 13 separate systems routinely accessed by front-line support techs to support customers. That’s a heck of a lot of “alt-tab” to move from screen to screen, and you know exactly what that means:

• With so many applications to navigate, some data and functionality are just overlooked or underutilized, preventing ROI for the technology and negatively impacting productivity.
• Without customer data integration, there is no true “360 degree view of the customer,” so no one really has a handle on “the big picture view” of customer attitudes, consumption or loyalty.
• Customers have a disjointed experience, with agents from one channel not having visibility for incidents in another channel, and duplicate and conflicting knowledge depending on channel used.
• Entitlement is inconsistent across channels, meaning expired customers receive support for free, and priority customers don’t receive the service levels they are paying for.

In tomorrow’s webcast, I’m going to build out the actual picture of a multi-channel environment and talk about the missed integration points. I’ll also give a simple five step plan to begin consolidating channels, and discuss how to add new channels thoughtfully so as not to exacerbate the problem. The webcast is sponsored by eGain, and you’ll also hear from Don Muchow, eGain’s Product Marketing Manager, about the advantages of consolidating channels to a single–or at least fewer–platforms. eGain has done a lot of work building out their channel strategy, now with ‘best of breed’ offerings for enterprise/federated search, social media channels and monitoring, as well as phone, email, chat, virtual agents, and a single knowledge management platform across every channel.

See you tomorrow, and thanks for reading!

 

Interview with Partner Advisory Board Member Dennis Gershowitz, DG Associates: Customer Experience

TSIA has recently launched our very first Partner Advisory Board, consisting of technology, service provider and consulting partners in the TSIA partner network. This is a great opportunity for us to stay current on marketing and spending trends in other industries, as well as track emerging best practices in our own industry. We have an impressive list of partners on the board; here is a link to view the complete list.

Over the next few weeks, I will be bringing you interviews with our Partner Advisory Board members. This week’s interview is with Dennis Gershowitz, Principal, DG Associates.  Dennis specializes in helping large and small companies enhance Customer Loyalty Programs, understand more about their customers, develop improved tools for meeting customer expectations, conducting surveys and benchmarking analyses and helping organizations develop or further their CEM (Customer Experience Management) strategy.

John Ragsdale: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today! We are thrilled to have such a long time supporter of the AFSMI, and now TSIA, as a founding member of the partner advisory board. Could you start by giving us some background on DG Associates?

Dennis Gershowitz: Our firm specializes in developing CEM Playbook Strategies for hi-tech organizations whose objective is to drive revenues and profits. We incorporate a proprietary 12 component approach that has been developed through several hundreds of projects in various industries over 25+ years.

John: Customer satisfaction and loyalty are gaining more visibility, all the way up to Wall Street, as executives begin to understand the importance of lifetime value tracking and its impact on the bottom line. What are some of the trends you see today in satisfaction and loyalty programs?

Dennis: John, we are starting to see a deeper understanding of the importance of employee engagement in the successful customer loyalty formula. Although the leading companies know about the correlation of employee engagement and customer loyalty for some time, it has often been ignored by the rest of the pack. I see the trends in three (3) phases over time. The first phase, focus on revenue then customers. The second phase, focus on the customer and the revenue will come. The third phase, focus on the employees (they are your first customer) then the customer. One example of employee engagement is where the employees are directly involved in improving the customer experience the result will drive both customer and employee loyalty. Many organizations now have implemented a reward system linked to customer satisfaction/loyalty. A simple example is the customer facing groups being surveyed monthly and rewarding individual employees who achieve a minimum 4.0 customer rating out of 5.0. The rewards are laddered (4.0-4.1 /$25 gift card; 4.2-4.3 / $50; etc.) base on the survey results. Another example is empowering employees to resolve customer issues that are under certain dollar values in the initial customer call. Remember without the employees’ commitment and engagement with your customers your brand promise and customer loyalty will never truly be achieved.

John: I know this is a fundamental question, but it is one I receive a lot and would appreciate your views. What satisfaction scale do you recommend? We have members using 10 point scales, 11 point scales, 5 point scales, 7 point scales…on and on. It makes benchmarking very complicated. What is your preferred scale and why?

Dennis: John, we see for companies measuring customer satisfaction a 5- point scale. For loyalty measure both a 5-point scale and NPS 0-10 scale are most commonly used.
The most common satisfaction 5-point scale ratings are:
5 = Exceeding Expectations
4 = Performed Above Expectations
3 = Met Expectations
2 = Performed Below Expectations
1 = Did Not Meet Expectations

The 5-point scales major benefit is the ease of use by survey respondents that results in a more consistent accurate response by survey participants. The 5-point sale provides easy to understand gradients. For loyalty measure both a 5-point scale and NPS 0-10 scale are most commonly used.

The loyalty 5-point scale ratings are
5 = Definitely Recommend
4 = Likely Recommend
3 = Maybe Recommend
2 = Unlikely Recommend
1 = Definitely Not Recommend

The same benefit applies for the loyalty 5-point scale as the satisfaction 5-point scale.
The NPS is used by many organizations due to the popularity of the ultimate question book. The NPS rating is based on the question “How likely are you to recommend (company x) to a colleague or friend?”
0 = Not at all likely to recommend
10 = Extremely likely to recommend

John: Something I see as a worrisome trend is more companies creating some sort of customer success index, bringing in data from multiple areas to create some sort of analytic that supposedly tracks customer success and loyalty. But sometimes the analytic is so abstract, including data from so many sources, that I wonder if the numbers even mean anything. If the average goes up or down, can you even tell the root cause? Are you seeing these indexes, and what are your thoughts on this approach?

Dennis: A challenge always facing a business is having the right information to make informed decisions. Often times, we find that the executives are looking at the myriad of data they collect and putting together what they think is the set of analytics that tracks their customer. The problem isn’t their lack of data, not at all, in fact, most businesses are consumed in tracking data points ranging from basic to sometimes very abstract. The result is that businesses will tend to drown in data, while at the same time, searching for insight that does not take them close to the root cause. This is why we will often work with clients on three (3) fundamental measurements, satisfaction with product and services. Next, identify loyalty ratings between product and service. Lastly, conduct key driver analysis to pinpoint the customers’ key issues, to effectively utilize your resources, so the result will be higher satisfaction and loyalty ratings. This approach seperates the issues between product and service essential to procuring actionable data. The three (3) indexes are based upon data that reflects what drives the customer and how the company is being impacted.

John: Let’s talk customer experience. I’m seeing more companies today creating a role with experience in the title, such as “Customer Experience Officer” or “VP of Customer Experience.” In your experience, who is the primary owner of the customer experience in technology companies? Is it support, or marketing, or sales, or a cross-functional team?

Dennis: Definitely a cross functional team whose primary reason to exist is to deliver a centralized customer experience that is coordinated on a cross-functional basis and receiving the operational support required. This approach enables being Customer-focused companies with the right processes and systems in place built upon actionable insight. Being cross functional will permit integrated communication plans to ensure customer insights is delivered and understood. Complexity should give way to progress and a well thought out Customer Experience Management Strategy.

John: Customer experience is obviously larger than support—it includes brand awareness, the buying experience, the product experience, etc. When you go in to help a company improve their customer experience, where do you start? Any common problems you have seen that you are willing to share?

Dennis: John, there are two common problems we run into all the time. One is not knowing or accepting the fact that the company is NOT as customer centric as they think they are. We use a technique called the Clear Customer Intelligence Methodology (CCIM) that utilizes a 360 alignment survey that compares the company’s executives, managers and frontline personnel’s view of how they think customers will rate them compared to the actual customer rating. This is then tracked throughout the year, which provides consistent understanding where they need to improve the customer experience. The second one is then not taking responsibly cross functionally in the organization. What is needed is not “ghost busters” but “silo busting”! All functional groups need to share in the responsibility to creating a great customer experience. There needs to be a common customer experience goal that ties all the functional groups together that is tied to their compensation.

John: TSIA recently launched a new discipline for Service Revenue Generation in response to so many member companies looking for increasingly creative ways to generate revenue from service. I know that one of your specialties is Account Management. It seems that once sales closes the initial deal with the customer, account management sometimes disappears. What are some of the account management principles you recommend companies adopt, and how do they help generate incremental revenue in the long term?

Dennis: John, it is extremely important that the customer life cycle be management in a transparent manner. The transition from sales to implementation to ongoing account management needs to be seamless. Therefore, having the account manager introduced early on in the sales cycle is a good best practice. It not only helps the sales process by reinforcing your company’s capabilities, but lays the ground work for an ongoing relationship. Another good practice is to incent the account manager on the overall satisfaction, retention and revenue growth of the account.

John: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today, and again, we are thrilled to have you as a founding member of our partner advisory board!

Dennis: And thank you John, I appreciate the work that TSIA and it staff does for our industry. You guys are the best.

Interview with Partner Advisory Board Member TJ Felice, President, ISOdx Solutions

TSIA has recently launched our very first Partner Advisory Board, consisting of technology, service provider and consulting partners in the TSIA partner network. This is a great opportunity for us to stay current on marketing and spending trends in other industries, as well as track emerging best practices in our own industry. We have an impressive list of partners on the board; here is a link to view the complete list.

Over the next few weeks, I will be bringing you interviews with our Partner Advisory Board members. This week’s interview is with Anthony (T.J.) Felice, President, ISOdx Solutions. ISOdx has harnessed the power of change isolation, dramatically improving the efficiency and productivity of support organization. Change isolation allows you to pin down the exact nature of a problem by comparing a known good operating state to one that is compromised — and identify the differences.

John Ragsdale: First of all, I’d like to thank TJ Felice for agreeing to be a founding member of our Partner Advisory Board! TJ, thanks for taking some time to speak with me today. Could we start with you giving my readers some background on ISOdx?

TJ Felice:  Thank you very much, John.  It is always a pleasure to speak with you, and I’d be happy to give you some background about our company and product. ISOdx is a forensic software tool that enables organizations to resolve technology support issues faster than ever before. The need was identified over eight years ago when Cranel, Inc. (our founding company) was partnered with Symantec to deploy and support its NetBackup product. As part of that partnership, Cranel provided “Level 1” and “Level 2” support for NetBackup, and was financially incented to resolve as many issues as possible. Our support organization was ranked the #1 for the highest number of tickets tapped out, over 98% because of our visibility into the ecosystem.

The challenge of supporting a single software product that was tightly integrated with a customer’s unique “technology ecosystem” soon became obvious. Cranel  realized if they approached this hurdle by  proactively capturing point-in-time snapshots of each customer’s unique technology ecosystem to see what changed to cause the issue,  life would be much easier—and from that concept, ISOdx was born!

John: I’ve seen some impressive customer case studies—a good example being from TSIA member IBM Netezza–of how ISOdx helps companies solve issues faster, and can even prevent outages from happening. This was also a key message from my CEO’s first book, Complexity Avalanche: companies must leverage technology to proactively prevent problems and short cut downtime when outages occur. Could you talk about the ROI for ISOdx—it must be fast and dramatic?

TJ:  John, the ROI is so compelling it’s really often difficult for our prospects to believe. ISOdx pays for itself in less than six months, and one of our customers recently realized a 100 percent ROI in less than three months!  It’s important to note that ISOdx doesn’t just reduce an organization’s “cost to serve” — ISOdx’s compelling return on investment occurs while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction.

There is no other product available today that enables an organization to resolve technology support issues faster while also improving customer satisfaction. In today’s competitive economy, customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention are more important than ever, and providing the customer with technology support that actually exceeds their expectations can be a significant differentiator in both customer acquisition and retention.

John:  One of my ongoing frustrations is that companies try to build a solution like this, only be become disappointed because home grown tools will never be able to touch all the operating systems and application versions of an enterprise tool like ISOdx. Do you have any advice for support managers who are being told by IT or development, “We can build easier than buy?”

TJ:  My advice to any organization is to invest their finite resources, financial, human capital, and time, into the pursuit of their mission and the development of their core offerings. Obviously, any component, be it a product or service, that can accelerate the realization of an organization’s mission by being combined with their core offering, should be brought to bear as quickly as possible.

The large technology providers of today (IBM, SalesForce.com, Apple) have achieved their success in large part due to their ability to partner or acquire complimentary technologies that help them develop a more complete offering to their customers as quickly as possible. Successful organizations always focus on what they do best, and look for valued partners that can provide niche solutions in areas that are outside their area of expertise.

John: TSIA data shows that customers whose expectations for issue resolution time are met or exceeded tend to be more satisfied and more loyal. I would love to hear your views on the impact of customer retention on revenue and profitability, especially in these challenging economic times. What are you hearing from ISOdx customers?

TJ:  One of my recent blog postings (www.isodxprez.com) addressed this very topic. Let’s think about what drives customer loyalty. According to studies conducted by Forrester Research and RightNow Technologies, there are two main drivers of customer loyalty, (1) resolving support issues in a timely fashion, and (2) providing the customer with access to knowledgeable support representatives.

Organizations that do these two things better than their competitors enjoy an eight percent improvement in customer retention. ISOdx customers are able to address both of these drivers by using our product to support their customers, and as a result have dramatically improved their customer acquisition and retention capabilities. In today’s economic climate, more and more emphasis is being placed on retaining existing customers, and providing customer support that exceeds expectations is the most significant driver of that customer retention.

John: One of the biggest trends we are seeing on the revenue generation side is that more support organizations are creating managed service offerings for customers, essentially taking over IT administration duties at the customer site. I would think that a solution such as ISOdx, which makes problem identification so easy, would be an important part of a cost effective managed services offering. Is this a trend you are seeing as well?

TJ:  Absolutely. Technology is changing faster than ever, and customers are constantly making modifications to their IT “ecosystems” – the collection of hardware devices, operating systems and middle-ware components, and web-based and on-premise applications that support their business.  For a managed service offering to be successful, a thorough understanding of the customer’s entire ecosystem is required.

ISOdx proactively captures forensic information about each customer’s unique environment so that the support technician has all the information needed to resolve the issue without gathering information from the customer on the phone, via email, through remote desktop or chat. ISOdx is also the only solution that enables the support technician to compare two moments in time – offering detailed information about the customer’s IT ecosystem during a “known good” state – when everything was working as it should – and the current “known bad” state. By providing the forensic information needed to trouble-shoot support issues and the ability to compare two points in time, our customers have realized a 92 percent improvement in their Mean Time to Resolution.

John: An ongoing challenge we hear from members is the number of applications support techs must navigate to help customers (an average of 13 according to member surveys) gets in the way of adopting and using new tools. Can you explain how ISOdx tightly integrates to the incident/case management system, so employees can stay in one place and still receive all the benefits of the tool?

TJ:  John, we have heard the same message from our customers as part of our quarterly conference calls to discuss our product roadmap. During these calls, we discuss the planned enhancements we have slated for ISOdx with our customers, and capture their input and feedback on our approach.  Earlier this year, our customers raised this very issue and asked us to make it our highest priority.  We listened and responded by developing an Application Programming Interface/Software Development Kit (API/SDK) that enables ISOdx to be seamlessly integrated with any incident/case management system. The end result is that support technicians can access the forensic support information captured by ISOdx directly from the system they are already familiar with.  We have already implemented our API/SDK for two customers, one that uses Remedy and the other that uses SalesForce.com.  The reception from both customers has been extremely positive and has further improved their ability to resolve cases faster by eliminating the need to constantly refer to another software application.

In addition, because ISOdx supports practically any platform (Unix, Linux, Windows, etc.) and any application (Oracle, SQL, Websphere, IIS), our customers can replace the various “niche” tools being used to support their customers with ISOdx.

John: Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today!

TJ: Thank you for the opportunity, it’s been my pleasure!

Enterprise 2.0 Recap: Social Channels: Engagement, Integration and Response

Yesterday at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center I served as a moderator for a panel entitled, “Social Channels: Engagement, Integration and Response.” The panelists included a mix of B2B and B2C experts: Franck Ardourel, Sr. Director, Online Marketing, 24 Hour Fitness; Peter Simonsen, Sr. Director, Web & Community, QlikTech; and Daniel Zucker, Social Media Manager, Autodesk.

We had a good crowd for the session, and lots of audience questions–which made my job as moderator much easier. I opened with an overview of TSIA data from our 2011 Social Media Survey, just completed last month. I tried to make the point that while there are lots of opinions out there about social media, we now have data proving which best practices are delivering business value, i.e., ROI for social media projects. Best practices with proven results include integrating online community into the corporate website, including single sign-on; creating performance dashboards for the community to be sure all questions are being addressed; integrating social media activity with CRM so every customer interaction or touch point is captured; and offering federated search of self-service knowledgebase content AND online community content.

Dan Zucker from Autodesk discussed the company’s social media evolution, from first introducing forums and blogs, then a period of social media experimentation, and finally as the processes matured, operationalizing social media so it became part of core operations. He highlighted three key steps in succesful operationalizing of social media. The first is creating a central touch point for social media to guide corporate strategy, training, policies, infrastructure, etc. The second was naming a core social media team to guide and inform strategy and provide leadership on execution. The third, which I found fascinating, was the creation of a Social Web Council of employees and customers who are social media enthusiasts or have social media-focused roles. The Council shares best practices and keeps a dialog going about emerging trends.  When asked what sort of people to look for when staffing social media project leads, Dan quoted one of his managers, “They should be contortionists.” I love that and totally understand–social media gurus must be able to bend in many directions, and adjust to rapid change with aplomb.

Next up was Peter Simonsen from QlikTech. Peter described the history of the highly successful QlikCommunity, with over 65,000 active members. An interesting angle of Peter’s story is that QlikTech views their community as a critical lead generator. By offering free trial downloads of their software, they involve prospects in community discussions on best practices for the tools, with 10,000 leads being referred to the community each month with a surprisingly high conversion rate. Not only has the QlikCommunity been instrumental in harnessing customer advocates to gather insight, that insight has been leveraged to create a better QlikView product, using IdeaStorming or Ideation.

The third presenter was an expert in consumer social media, Franck Ardourel from 24 Hour Fitness. In the consumer world, social media is not just about the online discussion forum. Franck has been building the 24 Hour Fitness brand across popular social media channels, with great success: 200,000 fans receiving exclusive deals on Facebook, 28,000 Twitter followers, 430 clubs driving 200,000 visits a month on Yelp, 3.1 million views on YouTube, and special incentives and offers to customers on Foursquare. In addition, 24 Hour offers a dedicated online community for customers. With his aggressive strategy, Franck has delivered business value, including acquiring new customers with a higher and faster ROI, increasing brand awareness and sentiment, and decreasing customer service costs. Franck told a great story about how customers organized to raise their specific club’s ratings on Yelp, wanting their location to be recognized.

I’d like to thank each of the panelists for sharing such actionable information, and a special thanks to Sameer Patel of Savos Group, the chair for this conference track who asked me to participate. And thanks as always to all of you for reading!

Fall 2011 Recognized Innovator Awards: Why They Won

One of the highlights of Technology Services World is announcing the winners of the Recognized Innovator Awards.  These awards are presented to partners of TSIA; partners submit applications for consideration, and case studies documenting business results are required. TSIA Research identifies a panel of judges for each round of awards, including technology-savvy association members and several industry experts. Judges rated the applications using four criteria: is it innovative, is it unique, is the innovation exemplary of the category, and what is the business impact from the innovation.

In an earlier post, I provided backgrounds for each of the finalists. In this post, I will provide a bit of insight into why the winners won, using comments provided by the judges.

Recognized Innovator for Products: Kopin

Kopin’s Golden-i is a hands-free, wireless, mobile computing headset, providing users on-demand access to nearly all digital information. Information is viewed on an “All Weather”, “Sunlight Readable”, virtual 15 inch full color PC screen, which appears as a standard laptop display 18 inches from the user’s eye. To achieve “Hands-Free” operation, Golden-i employs advanced noise canceling natural speech recognition and a six axis head gesture tracking interface. Golden-i further enables hands free control of multiple remote devices at one time, allowing businesses to significantly improve worker productivity, safety and the efficiency of their workforce.

Judges comments on Kopin’s application included:

• This is truly an innovative product. I was really impressed with the uses and capabilities.
• Great innovations and great presentation of technical details.
• Tremendously innovative and original product that can have a huge impact, especially for field service personnel.

Recognized Innovator for Services: Convergys

Convergys Corporation is a global leader in relationship management. Convergys provides solutions that drive more value from the relationships clients have with their customers. Convergys turns these everyday interactions into a source of profit and strategic advantage for their clients. For more than 30 years, Convergys’ unique combination of domain expertise, operational excellence, and innovative technologies has delivered process improvement and actionable business insight to marquee clients all over the world. In their application, Convergys provided two case studies in which they enable transparent multilingual support to channel partners and distributors using a team of English-speaking agents in the Philippines.

Judges comments on Convergys’  application included:

• Interesting use of partner capabilities.  Focus on support and on the core competency of solving the technical issue – let someone else deal with the distraction of language.
• The process descriptions are very nicely captured.
• Nice solution to the classic multilingual support coverage problem(s).

Recognized Innovator for Consulting: Verghis Group

The Verghis Group is a management consulting firm focused on senior service and support leaders. The firm’s founder, Phil Verghis, is an internationally-recognized expert who has helped dozens of support and services executives devise winning strategies. The application from the Verghis Group detailed multiple client projects and business challenges, with four specific areas of innovation cited from client projects: Innovation one: Clear alignment from vision to the individual; Innovation two: Let the ‘doers’ do; Innovation three: Focus; Innovation four: Savvy Support (No more ‘tiers’ model).

Judges comments on Verghis Group’s application included:

• Fantastic approach!
• I like the concepts here.  The idea of empowering the individual contributors to own the process is an excellent may to build passion.
• Again excellent execution, combination of state of the art approaches.
• I really appreciate the comprehensiveness of this submission, the clear story full of content and proof points.

We give one additional award as part of the RIA program, Best Innovation Demo. Attendees of my Innovation Tour, which opens the TSW conference, vote for best demo. To me, this is a very important award, because few companies are good at articulating their innovations, let alone demoing them! The award for Best Innovation Demo went to DB Kay & Associates, a finalist in the Innovation in Consulting Category. Attendees loved David Kay’s focus on results and best practices, and they were intrigued by his discussion on introducing gamification concepts into support.

I would like to extend my thanks to the judges for the Fall 2011 Recognized Innovator Awards:  Alon Bar, Amdocs; David Bickford, The Via Group; Meredith Calvert, Callidus Software; Joe Clarke, Cisco; Brent Flanders, Perceptive Software; Edwin P. Gehres, Aprimo; Chris Karp, Tektronix; Carlos Pignataro, Cisco; Ann Reichert, Mitek Systems; Bill Rose, Bill Rose Inc.; Gonzalo Salgueiro, Cisco; Anton Vukovic, Siemens Enterprise Communications.

Congratulations to the all the winners! And as always, thanks for reading!

Interview with Partner Advisory Board Member, Bill Hall, co-founder, Pretium Partners

TSIA has recently launched our very first Partner Advisory Board, consisting of technology, service provider and consulting partners in the TSIA partner network. This is a great opportunity for us to stay current on marketing and spending trends in other industries, as well as track emerging best practices in our own industry. We have an impressive list of partners on the board; here is a link to view the complete list.

Over the next few weeks, I will be bringing you interviews with our Partner Advisory Board members. This week’s interview is with Bill Hall, co-founder, Pretium Partners. Pretium Partners was a founding partner of TPSA, a forerunner of TSIA, and has worked with many TSIA members on service sales and service pricing strategies.

John Ragsdale: Talk about synergy. TSIA’s key message, especially with the launch last week of our CEO’s new book, Consumption Economics, is all about finding new and creative sources of services revenue, which happens to be the sweet spot of Pretium Partners. Could you start us off with a brief company overview?

Bill Hall: Sure, John, we founded Pretium in 1997 and have had a deliberate focus on technology services market place from the beginning. In all, Pretium’s clients sell technology, software, support and professional services and outsourcing. We accelerate revenue by creating and enabling the high value sales force. Services include customized value assessment sales and marketing training, coaching, and predictive assessments for sales talent selection, alignment and development.

John: At our recent Technology Services World conference in Las Vegas, you gave a professional development workshop, “Creating Business Value Changes Customer Perceptions and Wins More Business,” examining the value of service and how to leverage it to change customer perceptions and win more business. Would you talk about the course and how the materials were received by participants?

Bill: Services have been value-challenged since their inception: they came into the world as unwanted requirement of owning technology! Obviously, there has been great progress by companies to improve positioning of services and the value received for them. But what helped before is insufficient today.

Providers need to be more effective at defining the attributes they use to differentiate AND explaining how those attributes contribute to value for the customer. In my opinion, buyers are trying really hard to make the right purchase decision and struggle differentiating the options presented to them. To stand out, a provider must do a lot of things but rethinking how they differentiate and how that turns into value for their customers are musts. Harvard Business Review frames it perfectly saying that when sellers do not differentiate well, “any distinctions that do exist have been overshadowed by the firms’ greater sameness.”!

The workshop also focused on two other key areas. The role of Marketing in defining and communicating service value for the sales teams is critical. The best value-selling sales force is handicapped if the service offering does not have a well defined value proposition, or worse, no meaningful value proposition at all. It happens! The last focus of the workshop is on the value selling process; that is, the importance of positioning services early in the process and how to engage senior level buyers in a process that defines business value created.

John:  I have to be honest, it seems that “services marketing” is an oxymoron for many companies. The two disciplines: support services and marketing, couldn’t be more different. How do service organizations get more savvy about marketing? Do they partner with corporate marketing more, or do they need marketing expertise in house? How do we bridge this chasm?

Bill: Regardless of how organizations try to tackle the partnering/internal issue (I think both can work), two things are critical. First, companies must be able to articulate very clearly why buyers should buy from them over and above everyone else. If you can’t figure that out internally, you certainly can’t expect the buyer to. Second, they must understand who their buyers are and how they buy their services. Research by the Corporate Executive Board has shown that, thanks to the internet and abundance of information now available, buyers have completed 57% of their buying process before they ever reach out to a vendor for information! That means that wherever a company and their services show up online, the messages must be not only clear and consistent, but targeted as much as possible to the various buyers out there. What a game changer. Not only does this change the role of the sales professional, but it also makes the marketing role more difficult and complex.

John:  Over the last few years, I’ve recommended Pretium Partners to many TSIA members struggling with how to define business value of services, sales strategies, and definitely those needing marketing assistance for service renewals, upsell and cross-sell. What are some common problems you see with technology companies trying to move to a value-added services model?

Bill: There’s a whole lot to that question, John! But I’ll focus on at least two things that can really improve success. First, value selling is a process, not a sell sheet. Simply giving sales people value-oriented content is not sufficient. Providers must define the sales motion that is best for their company and put in place a process that enables value selling.

Second, a company must rethink the sales role itself, examine the talent they have and how they hire. This may be the single biggest mistake providers make; that is, poor selection of sales people. It may seem logical that good sales people will make the transition from one selling model to another. But did you know that only 7% of top performing “hunters” (new business developers) are likely to succeed as a top performing “farmer” (account manager)? Now those are very different sales positions but the same is true for a wide variety of selling roles, albeit to a lesser extent, but still enough to be a major problem. Or, perhaps you have a successful service engineer or consultant who has great customer interaction skills and you decide to give them a shot at sales role. Think through that logic – the person has sound technical knowledge/skills and they have good communication skills; yet, we know that technical knowledge is not the key to success, and there is an abundance of unsuccessful sales people who are fine communicators!

Service providers simply must become more sophisticated at sales talent management. They must identify the skills critical to success for a role, identify the incumbents that have high potential to perform the skills, and change hiring practices to find high potential performers.

John: In Thomas Lah’s book “Bridging the Services Chasm”, you wrote that selling products and services are not that different. That’s an interesting perspective. Could you elaborate?

Bill: The adage goes that selling services is really different than selling products. I’ll grant you that selling services is different than the undesirable practice of being a speeds & feeds, transactional sales person. But all-in-all the difference isn’t all that great. I believe it is more a matter of will not skill. Will and knowledge actually.

In the early days, selling services was unfamiliar to product sellers. Unfamiliar in the same way that selling cath labs would be to a virtualization sales person. Combine that with the few actual differences – intangibility being chief among them – and the industry accepted the fact that selling services was a very different sale.

If you were to poll a group of service executives about the sales requirements for service you would hear: must be consultative, focus on results, relationships and trust are important, must articulate value, and so on. Are these NOT required for effective selling of technology solutions even without services? At TSW Santa Clara last May I asked two senior executives how many of the product sales people at their companies understood how to sell services. They both said that about 20%-25% “got it.” I then asked them if that same 20%-25% were among the top performing sales people. And they said “yes”.

So if this is the case, then why haven’t providers been more successful in developing sales? My answer to the previous question is a big part of it. Further there are a variety of issues unassociated with how-to-sell; such as, educating salespeople about the value of service and how to spot opportunities, position services earlier in the sales process, incentive compensation, and more.

So we have found that aligning marketing’s efforts, selecting the right sales talent and focusing on consultative, value-focused selling methods will produce great results.

John: Thanks so much for talking with me today, and thanks again for being a part of our new Partner Advisory Board.

Bill: My pleasure! Happy to be onboard.