.

There are a wide array of opinions about measuring Service Deflection out there in the industry today, and as many methods to do so. In a study we did several years ago, we found that out of over 90 survey respondents there were almost 80 different measures of deflection being used.

In a service organization there is always more service demand than can be met in a single day, week, or month. Incomplete service requests, “work in process,” backlog or case load are some of the common names for the work yet to be completed in the support center.

No matter what stage of development your services organization is in, relying entirely on the product sales force to drive services is not a good idea. Discover how to tap into your hidden sales force—what it takes to get your technical talent competent, confident, and committed to seriously selling services.

I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book and ran across this Chinese proverb and set the book down and thought about how this relates to service delivery… It took awhile but I came up with this…

I thought back many years ago when I worked for a large high tech company as a supervisor in the service organization. We were churning away working our cases, meeting our goals and all seemed well (I am the worm), but apparently the executives thought differently and had lost confidence in the service leader and replaced him. A new Director was hired to bring a “new way of doing things around here”…

By Steve Brand, SGSA Ltd.
The overused war cry of “we need everyone to give 110%” is likely to fall on deaf ears when companies are cutting staff, bonuses and even salaries. When morale is low, managers struggle to reach 75% levels of productivity after normal deductions for sickness, vacation and training.
And what about training? [...]

Recently, our partners at Service Strategies Asia Pacific held their 2010 Executive Forum event. The session brought together service leaders in the Asia Pacific region to discuss challenges and strategize on the future direction of the industry. Several presentation were given at the event, which we are including here for review. Enjoy, and thanks to everyone that participated in the event.

by: Tom Flodeen, VP and GM of Customer Support – Mentor Graphics Corporation
Most of us believe we are great change advocates, but the reality is we also all like stability. Especially when it is stability in our own operation. I have learned over the years that change is often the result of pain. As long [...]

According to data from the Future Foundations think tank, one in eight employees throw in the towel and leave their job before they reach a competent level of performance. Why they fail to reach a competent level is more about training and the skills of their manager than it is about the employee.

Just in the past few years we have noticed a trend where companies are consciously limiting or denying customers direct phone access to technical support staff. They are in fact reverting back to a Call Back support model that was pretty standard back in the early 1980’s.

Escalations are the bane of all service managers and are often a result of poor communications about unresolved customer cases. Keeping customers informed of what you are doing to resolve their issue is key to driving their ultimate service satisfaction. Unnecessary, low value escalations, often times occur when a customer finally gets fed up with waiting for their issue to be resolved or hearing something from the engineer, and escalates their case. These escalations result in higher per case costs, needless interruptions, lower customer satisfaction and frustrated technical staff. So how can you improve customer “Statusfaction”?