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What Are the Support Impacts of Ever-Increasing Technical Complexity on Margins and Customer Satisfaction?
The increased complexity of technology has created huge volumes of service interactions populated by customers with low levels of patience and high levels of frustration. Companies are continually investing in technology to streamline problem diagnosis and resolution to help address the rising surge of phone calls, email and Web chats. Unfortunately, SSPA Benchmark Data shows that service levels for both phone and electronic channels have declined in the last few years, meaning current processes and systems are not keeping up with the dramatic volume increases.
An excellent illustration of how complexity is impacting the technology industry can be seen in the way members classify the products they support. The SSPA Benchmark survey asks: How would you describe the complexity of the products that you support?
- Standard. General business products or applications. Requires product proficiency to effectively support.
- Moderate. Increasingly complex products running in a variety of environments. Requires advanced technical and/or business skills to provide effective support.
- High. Complex application and/or operating environment. Requires high degree of technical and/or business expertise.
The percentage of clients who identify their products or applications as highly complex has grown from 42 percent in 2003 to 63 percent today. As seen in Figure 1 below, only 11 percent of members now identify their products or applications as “Standard.”
Customer-interaction volumes have exploded in the last 3 years, with the average monthly interaction volume increasing 111 percent from 2003 to 2006. When this explosive volume meets the rising surge of complexity, technology-support organizations find themselves in a “perfect storm,” in which:
- Each interaction is harder to resolve. With the increased adoption of Web self-service, customers are able to easily solve simple questions on their own, and many Chief Service Executives have commented to the SSPA that the easy, “one and done” questions are declining via the phone channel. If Web self-service weeds out many of the frequently asked questions, this means the calls to the support center are on average more difficult than in the past.
- Existing problem-resolution technologies are inadequate. Companies that have made do for a decade with basic knowledge base and search products are finding that more robust problem diagnostics are needed to resolve a higher percentage of issues; better searching tools are necessary for agents and customers to find desired content; and stronger tools for creating and maintaining content are required to meet the needs of knowledge engineers. Without investing in newer eService capabilities, more issues are escalated to Level 2 and 3.
Service levels decline over time. With the average complexity of each call increasing, naturally problems take longer to solve. Without additional investments in training, staff or technology, first-contact closure rates decline and incident-resolution time increases. To illustrate the impacts of this perfect storm, SSPA Benchmark Data shows that since 2003, there has been a decline in first-contact closure rates and percentage of issues resolved in 24 hours, for both phone and electronic channels (eChannels). First-contact closure for phone calls dropped 6 percent from 2003 to 2006. The increased volume of eChannels is a likely co-conspirator in the 12 percent drop of first-contact closure for eChannels, from 52 percent to 40 percent, during the same period. As problems become harder to solve, self-service success rates suffer as well, and the Benchmark Data also shows that successful visits to self-service are also declining, down from 48 percent to 44 percent.
The Role of Remote Support in Combating Increased Complexity
Remote-support technology can have significant impacts on the fallouts of increased complexity, including:
- Reducing call-handling time. Case studies from successful remote-support implementations show that with agents in the driver’s seat, incident-handling time can be lowered by as much as 50 percent for certain incidents. As technology becomes more complex, walking novice customers through recovery procedures or checking detailed settings can take time and increase customer frustration. With the agent free to take control of the machine, perform needed procedures and check settings, much less time is spent actually resolving the issue. - Increasing first-interaction closure rates. When agents are able to instantly “see” error situations first-hand and check the system environment remotely, problems can be identified and resolved immediately, avoiding multiple calls or email communication to gather additional information.
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