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Today's technical support operations are hampered by their history as „break-fix_ centers—someone you call when something breaks. While resolving technical problems for customers remains a key role for support, service management must also have a higher level goal of helping their customers succeed. Companies buy technology to solve business problems, and support's more strategic role is making sure their customers are solving those business problems as quickly and effectively as possible.
The SSPA has analyzed conversations with members, conference presentations, and Q&A and feedback received during member Webcasts. Based on what we've heard, we have identified the top five initiatives for technical support operations to tackle in order to deliver breakthrough customer support and ultimately enable customer success. The five initiatives are:
_ Increase employee retention and satisfaction
_ Improve customer experience
_ Leverage customer feedback with Business Intelligence
_ Evolve from cost center to profit center
_ Adopt innovative tools and technology
In this white paper, each of these initiatives will be discussed, as well as the role remote support technology plays in successfully achieving each initiative.
Increase Employee Retention and Satisfaction
Simply put, unhappy employees lead to unhappy customers. When support representatives are not satisfied with their jobs, they are not invested in delivering exceptional support, and the level of service suffers. And when job dissatisfaction leads to high support rep turnover, supervisors spend disproportionate amounts of time recruiting and training new employees, not mentoring existing support reps. Again, service levels suffer as the general skill level of support reps declines due to a lack of long time, experienced support professionals.
Though attrition rates are definitely lower today than during the technology boom, when many companies saw annual turnover of 30% or higher, rates are still in double digits. Figure 1 shows the average annual attrition rates for enterprise support (B2B), consumer support (B2C), small and medium businesses (SMB), and IT service desk.
To enhance employee satisfaction and reduce turnover, companies need to develop a culture of performance within the support organization. The SSPA has an active committee devoted to talent management, and according to committee research, some vital issues for companies to consider in order to reduce turnover are:
_ Succession planning—taking proactive steps to ensure that you have a plan for replacing key employees as they move on to new roles
_ Career growth—ensuring that every employee has the opportunity to grow with your company
_ Motivation—providing the “carrots” that will keep employees performing at the top of their game
_ Recognition—providing a means to reward and recognize your top performers
_ Employee satisfaction—taking deliberate actions to address key sources of employee satisfaction
_ Leadership development—growing your future generation of company leaders and influencers
_ Customer satisfaction—maximizing your impact on overall customer satisfaction by ensuring that you have satisfied employees
_ Organizational knowledge—having a mechanism to retain the knowledge and institutional learning that accumulates from having folks spend long periods of time in your organization
The SSPA has identified three trends emerging in Talent Management, as follows:
_ Role of support reps evolving. Today's technical support reps are finding their roles evolving from break fix specialist to relationship manager. With more attention being paid to the customer experience, and personalized support experiences based on customer value, even complex technical support reps are receiving more training and incentives based on customer service skills, not just technical ability.
_ Emerging markets require different approaches. With global support operations becoming common, companies are realizing that support reps in emerging markets, whether India, China, Eastern Europe, or elsewhere, require different processes and training than support reps in North America.
_ Support technology plays key role in employee job satisfaction. The complexity of the agent desktop continues to rise, and support reps forced to use outdated support technology, or poorly implemented new technology, have lower job satisfaction ratings.
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