Improving the customer's experience with support: Member results

Attachmate (www.attachmate.com), a leading provider of host access management and E-business solutions, has been working with the Customer Support Consortium for more than four years. During that time, it has implemented the Solution-Centered Support model in its worldwide support centers and as an early adopter, has achieved a measurable reduction in support costs. Support analysts capture solution knowledge in the workflow and share that information in a worldwide knowledgebase, enabling them to solve problems faster and support more products. Solutions are also made available to customers on their SupportWeb site, resulting in reduced call volumes of up to 30%, which directly translates to lowered support costs.

Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) conducted an intensive pilot in its support organization for BackOffice products, which focused on developing a culture of collaboration, deploying standards for content, and implementing a workflow focused on knowledge capture and reuse. The support engineers were able to create solutions without adding incremental time to the problem resolution process. Despite the fact that the pilot was conducted in their second level support organization, where the problems are typically unique, their reuse of solutions rose from below 10% to 60%. As a result of the improved efficiencies demonstrated in the pilot, Microsoft is engaged in a worldwide deployment of the SCS methodology.

Nortel Networks (www.nortelnetworks.com), is a leading provider of telecommunications technology. Over the past two years, Nortel has deployed the Solution-Centered Support strategy across its North American support organizations. The implementation focused on improved team-level solution management processes and on publishing solutions on the Web for direct access by Nortel Network distributors. Through that initial implementation, the organization has demonstrated improvements in support capacity. Currently, the organization is able to publish 49% of its solutions to the Web without added labor. In the next few months, distributors will begin contributing to the solution base and will become part of the organization’s extended support community.