State of support services

By Judith Platz, Vice President of Customer Success and Support Research, TSIA

The State of Support Services2015

333EXECUTIVE INSIGHT

The State of Support Services: 2015

EXECUTIVE INSIGHT

Apr i l 27, 2015

Judi th P latz V ice Pres ident , Research, Support Serv ices

TSIA

TSIA-01881

CUSTOMER SUCCESS & SUPPORT

© 2015 Technology Services Industry Association | www.tsia.com | Page 2

Contact Information Technology Services Industry Association 17065 Camino San Bernardo Suite 200 San Diego, CA 92127 U.S.A. Tel.: 858-674-5491 Fax: 858-674-6794 [email protected] www.tsia.com

Table of Contents Executive Summary.................................................................. 3

Planning for 2015: Extreme Automation................................. 3 Analytics and Dashboards: Putting Big Data to Work for You.......................4 Automated Proactive Support Emerges as Competitive Differentiator.........5 Customer Engagement Strategies: Ignore Emerging Channels at Your Peril .............................................................................................................6 Figure 1: Customer’s Preferred Channels for Support..........................................7 Knowledge and Content Management: Capturing and Sharing Tacit Knowledge...........................................................................................................8 Figure 2: Support Services Planned Spending on Knowledge Management .......9 Reducing Customer Effort Required for Support ..........................................10 Figure 3: Support Compensation Linked to CSAT Results.................................11

2015 Support Services Research Agenda ............................ 12 Table 1: 2015 Support Services Research Studies ............................................12 Table 2: 2015 Support Services Research Reports............................................13

TSIA Recommends ................................................................. 14


TSIA-01881


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The results of TSIA’s Support Services Benchmark Survey continue to reveal the hard truths about delivering technical support in 2015. Customers want more options than ever from their support providers and they want to expend less of their own effort in resolving issues. Customers are proving to be more loyal than ever before—if they feel like their support provider is listening to them and addressing their needs. While it sounds deceptively easy—ask them what they want, and give it to them—the reality is much more challenging.

Support teams are now faced with the task of figuring out how to engage with customers in more proactive ways across more channels than ever before. Customers may expect to have periodic issues with your product, but they don’t want to expend much effort to help you solve that problem. And while you’re busy focusing on your customers in 2015, you will be forced to have an even bigger emphasis on streamlining your internal tools and processes. Most support organizations already run lean and efficient operations, so how can you improve an already highly functioning organization and generate incremental revenue in the process?

2015 will be a challenging year for support services, but Pacesetter companies will embrace and overcome these challenges, often by investment in analytics, proactive support programs, customer engagement strategies, and knowledge management—all areas proven to improve the customer experience and reduce the level of customer effort.

PLANNING FOR 2015: EXTREME AUTOMATION

Scaling support organizations to meet the needs of rising volumes, higher product complexity, and increasingly demanding customers requires ongoing work to improve the people, process, and technology of support. With a cost center heritage, “doing more with less” has been a mantra for support executives for more than a decade. But several market forces are raising the stakes for cost-effective scalable growth yet again in 2015. These include:

• Reliance on service revenue. As TSIA’s Service 50 has documented, service revenues are the economic engine of technology firms, outpacing product revenue with the shift to cloud offerings, subscription selling, and managed services. Creating premiere support programs and encouraging customers to adopt them is now an MBO for most support executives.

• Eliminating the consumption gap. With customers struggling to adopt and consume today’s increasingly complex technology, support is shifting philosophically from a break/fix operation to a team focused on helping customers use and receive value from their purchases. Support is strategically aligned, and often organizationally aligned, with emerging customer success practices.


• Embracing mobile and social. Today’s customers have different preferences for how they connect with you, the tone of those conversations, and their expectations for the support experience. Customer engagement strategies are quickly evolving to better meet the needs of younger customers, with web chat, online communities, social support, crowdsourcing knowledge, gamification consoles, and more, all under investigation.

To understand how TSIA support services members can better prepare to meet these challenges, this paper will focus on the people, process, and technology elements of top interest areas: analytics and dashboards, proactive support programs, customer engagement strategies, knowledge management, and customer effort scores.

Analytics and Dashboards: Putting Big Data to Work for You

The interest in big data has been growing, as large corporations look for ways to manage and find insights from the oceans of corporate content being created. With TSIA members reporting that customer information in stored in an average of a dozen or more places, clearly the reporting needs of today’s companies are more than Excel alone can handle. Unfortunately, as new analytic capabilities are emerging, IT organizations are smaller than ever, and few companies offer enough business analysts, or even data scientists, to help business users construct powerful analytics.

Luckily, technology is helping fill this void with more applications, including robust analytic capabilities out of the box and sophisticated dashboards that business users can take advantage of without a data scientist guiding the way. This is also making proactive and intelligent analytics available for more than just operational data. Here are ways support services should be leveraging analytics in 2015:

• Unassisted support. With TSIA data showing that customers overwhelmingly prefer unassisted support to calling or emailing you, clearly there is a need to bring more intelligence to the self-service website. One approach is leveraging analytics to recommend solutions to the customer based on their profile and looking at problems other customers with similar profiles have experienced. Even filtering FAQ lists and search returns to only show content relevant to products owned by the customer can help eliminate the noise and make finding the right answer easier.

• Assisted support. Similarly, assisted support technicians rarely have tools at their disposal that analyze all past support interactions, recommend actions to take, present applicable content, or identify experts to reach out to for help. Most companies say their average repeat rate, i.e., the percent of support issues received more than once, ranges from 70% to 90%. If you are not leveraging previous scenarios to inform and guide repeat issues of a problem, you are forcing support techs to “reinvent the wheel” every time—a huge resource drain.


• Scheduling, queueing, and routing. Having the right resources available for each inbound service issue is harder than ever before. Companies frequently have multiple geographic centers and/or a growing number of remote/at-home employees. Also, moving away from tiers of generalists toward new approaches such as swarming requires more care in scheduling and routing, especially when multiple channels—each requiring specific skills—are offered. Adoption of analytics for resource management and interaction routing remain low, with many companies still doing manual scheduling and basic routing by hunt groups and availability, not skill or experience.

• Voice of the customer. Truly capturing the voice of the customer requires a lot more than sending post-interaction satisfaction surveys. The majority of members are not using analytics to mine case notes, phone, email, and chat conversations, or forum and social media posts to identify trends, customer sentiment, and loyalty hot-button issues. Cisco and Avaya both report that monitoring social media conversations helps them identify product and service issues one to two weeks before the issue is reported via assisted support. Voice and text analysis platforms can pinpoint common themes across products, geographies, languages, etc.

Automated Proactive Support Emerges as Competitive Differentiator

The term “proactive support” has come to mean remotely monitoring customer technology to detect errors early and fix them before the customer is impacted. While this remains a valid use case, and a common element of premiere support offerings, proactive support is a broad category, implying much more than just remote monitoring. Technology companies need to identify additional processes that can be automated to anticipate and deliver content or services in real time to customers. Consider these examples:

• Product features and education. With an eye toward boosting consumption and adding value, technology should be able to anticipate a customer’s needs and provide the information they may need next. This could be about “next-level” product features or process flows; training that can improve their use of the product, or even product purchases they may make based upon what you know about how they are currently using the product. Mining usage data and clickstreams is key to this analysis.

• Self-service. Rule systems built into products should be able to detect when a customer is struggling to complete a form or a process, proactively prompting them with assistance. Being able to address the what, how, and when of customer needs and deliver proactive content to customers will emerge as a key differentiator, helping speed time to value and boosting consumption. If self-service isn’t effective, rules can even proactively prompt a customer to ask if they need assistance via a chat session, or schedule a call if necessary.


These types of proactive activities can be continuously tuned to more effectively and efficiently service customers. Problem areas and usage data can be provided to service marketing to help develop new offers, given to product development to create new or different product features, presented to customer success teams to predict customer attrition, and the list goes on. Embracing proactive capabilities will lower the human cost of service delivery, speed resolution for problems and questions, and drive improved customer satisfaction and loyalty scores.

Customer Engagement Strategies: Ignore Emerging Channels at Your Peril

Creating a customer engagement strategy is trending as a hot topic with TSIA members. This strategy defines which channels (phone, email, chat, social media, online community, self-service knowledgebase, etc.) you should offer customers, how they should be staffed, and how quality is measured for each. In legacy support centers phone calls were king, however that is not necessarily the case anymore, even for B2B support. According to the TSIA Support Services Benchmark Survey, as of Q2 2015 the percentage of total customer issues reported via phone was only 37%, with growing volumes from self-service, web chat, and discussion forums.

To understand why this is changing, TSIA’s social support survey asked respondents which support channels they preferred to use when needing help for a product. As shown in Figure 1, assisted support is declining as a preferred channel, with Google, self-service, and online communities all ranking as preferred by far more customers than phone.

TSIA Benchmark Data Point

As of Q2 2015, phone calls only represented 37% of total interaction volume.


Figure 1: Customer’s Preferred Channels for Support

Source: TSIA 2015 Social Support Survey

Channel preferences are changing for a variety of reasons, but primary drivers include these hot industry trends:

• Ubiquity of Google. Google has created a way for anyone to access any content with a simple typed or spoken search string, effectively training the general public that information can always be a simple search away. To capture mindshare for your content and self-service options, knowledgebase and community content should be indexable by Google, so your content shows up at the top of the search results for customers looking for an answer. Registration can still be required before accessing the content, so valuable intellectual property is not being compromised.

• Mobile and video revolution. As we will explore in a later section, customers are now insisting on low to no customer effort interactions. This will create tremendous demand for mobile self-service channels. Companies will need to rise to the occasion for this and ready their self-service solutions to be mobile-enabled. In addition to mobile, video chat is growing in popularity, with some members introducing video as a means of connecting customers face-

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When you need support for a product as a customer, which of the following is your preferred channel?


to-face with a premiere support technician or technical account manager, while other members are offering video chat as a new channel option to all customers.

• Social engagement. For younger customers who came of age relying on Facebook and Twitter, social expectations for support are rising. Increasingly, customers expect their technology providers to have a support presence in the customers’ social channels of choice, and that the provider be monitoring social conversations to identify issues and problems. But also, social customers are more willing to share information and collaborate, boosting participation in online customer communities and social approaches to knowledge management.

• Virtual support. For many organizations, the move to chat as a channel of support has been a challenge. Providing support via chat has become essential, but providing immediate access to live chat agents 24/7 can be quite expensive. To reduce the costs of having trained support personnel staff chat queues, organizations should look at technology to reduce these costs by offering virtual chat. Today’s technology solutions for virtual chat look and feel like live chat with a much lower headcount cost. These technology solutions are being used to automatically suggest resolutions to customers, capturing these suggestion success rates and mining this data later for improving knowledge content.

Virtual chat as a channel can also resolve the very repetitive frequently asked questions, entitlement issues, and how-to questions that take agents’ time and frustrate customers the most. Pacesetter companies are using virtual chat during low staffing hours to reduce headcount costs and improve resolution times. During peak chat hours, virtual chat is also being used to supplement staff and automate activities such as case creation tasks. Implementing virtual chat can reduce headcount costs, reduce or eliminate customer hold times, as well as improve customer satisfaction scores.

Knowledge and Content Management: Capturing and Sharing Tacit Knowledge

Knowledge management has been a top interest area for TSIA’s support services members for over two decades, and interest remains high in 2015. Retiring Baby Boomers, mobile and social trends, and increasingly sophisticated technology are forcing companies to create new KM strategies and programs. At the same time, technology companies are now looking for every way possible to reduce the manual costs of the traditional employee and customer-facing knowledge solutions, and many support organizations will find it necessary to perform an overhaul of the traditional manual management of knowledge to scale the practice effectively.

According to TSIA’s annual technology survey, knowledge management has been a top spending area in recent years. As seen in Figure 2, 77% of support services organizations have budget earmarked for new or additional knowledge tools in the next two years. Much of this spending will be


on new knowledge repositories, intelligent search platforms, and knowledge-centered support (KCS) training and processes. Some of the spending is planned to make existing knowledge easier to access via mobile devices, whether rewriting Flash websites in HTML5, or even creating mobile-specific websites or applications. Social as well is driving KM spending, with more companies investing in crowdsourcing strategies such as tribal knowledgebases.

Figure 2: Support Services Planned Spending on Knowledge Management

Source: TSIA Global Technology Survey.

According to McKinsey Research, 15 out of 17 sectors in the US, including high-tech, have more data and information stored per company than the US Library of Congress. This vast amount of knowledge being created each moment in our world requires automation. Looking ahead, interactive technology (Siri, Ok Google, etc.) will start to be used to collect data and turn it into internal and customer-facing information. This will become key to reducing cost and the manual overhead involved in today’s solutions. Pacesetter firms will use these solutions to automate knowledge creation, support agents will be provided with faster/stronger answers and, ultimately, for the very first time, they will be able to build and integrate an entire company's knowledge infrastructure seamlessly.

This building and integration of a company’s knowledge assets will ultimately uncover new revenue streams and opportunities to delight customers, enable a better understanding of top issues and top-accessed content and interest areas, and monetize access to information.

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2013-2014 2014-2015 2015-2016

Percent of Members with Budget for New or Additional Knowledge Management Technology


Reducing Customer Effort Required for Support

A new theme emerged in support operations in 2014 and is gaining traction to become a major discussion topic with TSIA members in 2015: customer effort scores. For the uninitiated, measuring customer effort for assisted and unassisted support as well as annual surveys can be as simple as asking a single survey question: How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request? Customers base their score on a variety of elements:

• How easy was it for them to logon to your self-service website? • How easy was it for them to find the information they needed? • What tools were offered to help them find the necessary content? • How easy was it for them to reach a live support agent if needed? • How many times were they transferred, and how many times did they have to explain their

problem?

Traditionally, support organizations have surveyed customers periodically and after each support interaction in order to gauge their satisfaction, loyalty, or willingness to recommend the organization to others. But what exactly influenced these scores has been nebulous, with little data captured to really explain dissatisfaction. The same types of questions for service interactions can be used for annual surveys or for surveys conducted for other business units: How much effort do you have to put forth to be our customer? How much effort did you have to put forth to sign up for a webcast? The list goes on and on. Ultimately, customer effort scores can help, capturing additional information about what was the most painful part of not only the support experience but the overall customer experience, so processes can be changed, employees can be trained, and technology can be modified to eliminate these pain points.


Figure 3: Support Compensation Linked to CSAT Results

Source: TSIA 2015 Support Services Benchmark.

Customer satisfaction scores have become a standard measure for how support organizations are performing. In fact, as seen in Figure 3, 18% of compensation received by support technicians, and 16% of compensation received by support executives, is based on satisfaction scores. This is an effective way to link compensation to performance and definitely puts CSAT front and center in the minds of service workers. But without additional detail on what is driving these results, improving satisfaction scores can be a constant guessing game.

The bottom line is that today’s customers are increasingly insisting on low- to no-customer-effort interactions. This is creating tremendous demand for improved and increasingly mobile self-service options. Companies need to stop thinking of promoting self-service as “deflection,” and instead realize that investing in more sophisticated and mobile self-help solutions can not only dramatically cut support costs, but ultimately deliver the low-effort support experience that customers are demanding.

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Support Technicans Support Executives

What percent of compensation is linked to CSAT results?


2015 SUPPORT SERVICES RESEARCH AGENDA

TSIA Research has a number of planned research studies and published research reports for 2015, capturing metrics and best practices related to areas of support operations with the highest interest. At the core of TSIA’s support services research is the Support Services Benchmark, an ongoing survey designed to help companies understand how they compare to industry peers with financial and operational metrics. The 2015 research studies applicable to support services members can be found in Table 1.

Table 1: 2015 Support Services Research Studies

Research Study Topic Timeframe

Core Benchmark Study Compares company's support organization business practices and metrics against the industry and corresponding peer group. Also provides insight into current industry and service trends that will affect the member’s organization.

Perpetual

2015 Global Technology Survey

Covers adoption, satisfaction, and planned spending for support services technology.

March 2015, findings released at TSW in May 2015

2015 Knowledge Management Best Practices Survey

Covers the people, process, and technology elements of knowledge management.

August 2015, findings released at TSW in October 2015

2015 Organizational Structure Survey

Survey on where service lines report within technology companies. Identifies the common practices for which service functions are managed globally versus being managed within each region or within business units.

August 2015, findings released at TSW in October 2015

2015 Social Support Survey This survey addresses supporting customers via social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) as well as via online customer communities or discussion forums.

December 2015, findings published as “The State of Social Support” in January 2016

Source: TSIA Research.

TSIA publishes research reports throughout the year. Some reports are created as new topics or case studies emerge. Table 2 shows the research reports planned for 2015 that are applicable to support services members.


Table 2: 2015 Support Services Research Reports

Research Report Abstract Timeframe

The State of Social Support: 2015

While adoption of online support communities is very high, with mature communities demonstrating immense value, interacting with customers via social media channels has yet to become a prevailing practice with enterprise technology firms.

January 2015

The State of Customer Success: 2015

This report focuses on the top issues facing customer success executives and provides guidance on how member companies are continuing to refine the charter of their customer success teams.

March 2015

Leveraging Analytics to Boost KM Success

This report looks at the role of analytics in improving and automating knowledge maintenance, with a focus on three areas: content gap analysis, knowledge usage analysis, and relevancy analysis.

March 2015


This report looks at the state of support services organizations in 2015. It focuses on the top issues facing support services executives and provides guidance on how member companies will meet those challenges in 2015.

May 2015

2015 Technology Heatmap This report provides a high-level look at adoption of key technologies across all of TSIA’s members.

May 2015

2015 Support Services Spending Report

This report documents adoption, satisfaction, and planned spending for technologies applicable to support services.

May 2015

2015 Top Installed Report This report lists the top installed solutions in the 24 categories of service technology covered by the TSIA Heatmap.

May 2015


Research Report Abstract Timeframe

The State of Multichannel Service: 2015

In this report, TSIA Research discusses the trends across phone, email, chat, web portal, online communities, and social service, providing data on cost and satisfaction by channel.

July 2015

2015 Support Services Organization Report

This report discusses the trends for support services organizational design, looking at existing and new service capabilities, new delivery models, where organizations are placing resources across the globe, the role of outsourcing, etc.

August 2015

The State of Knowledge Management: 2015

This report includes the findings of the 2015 Knowledge Management Survey, providing insight into KM tools, processes, and metrics.

October 2015

Source: TSIA Research.

TSIA RECOMMENDS

2015 is already shaping up to be a year of transition for TSIA support services members. As the shift to the cloud and outcome-based services change the fundamental charter and scope of support services, executives must pay attention to a variety of industry trends and developments to understand where people, process, and technology must be adjusted—and sometimes completely overhauled—to meet the needs of today’s more complex technology and more mobile and social customers. In particular, TSIA Research asks members to pay particular attention to these areas in 2015:

• Analytics and dashboards. Whether mining emerging customer pain points, the most cost-effective channels, or the most useful content for solving customer problems, analytics are playing an increasingly important role in uncovering meaning from oceans of disparate corporate content. If you don’t have a data scientist at your disposal, pay particular attention to conference presentations from other TSIA members about how they are leveraging analytics to uncover insight and drive performance improvements.

• Go proactive. Proactive support isn’t just about remotely monitoring customer equipment to detect errors. Today proactive support implies anticipating customer needs and expectations and delivering it in an automated way. This could include updates to support processes, self-service websites and tools, online community notifications, and more.


• Reduce customer effort. Companies have to do to more to understand the customer experience and how to improve it, particularly for support interactions. Introducing surveys, focus groups, or other mechanisms to gather input about the level of effort required to perform basic customer activities is key, but make sure the organizations has an appetite to change before starting a survey project—customers hate to give input on what needs to change and then never see any changes take place.

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State of support services