Adaptive Service Desk, CRM and BPM Software

Steps for a Headache-free and Successful Implementation

General Considerations

• You don't need to wait for your company to complete a global CRM implementation to start providing excellent E-Support. Some companies are paralyzed by the belief that they must wait to adopt a complete CRM solution to all of their customer interactions, even though this will take months and cost millions of dollars (not to mention the 65% chance that it will fail altogether to provide the expected benefits). In fact, many companies have found that they are better off adding CRM components to their business one step at a time, and going with individual, best-of-breed solutions for each component, rather than going with a large scale ERP solution. This reduces the risk while providing quicker returns. Recent studies have shown that providing satisfactory customer support is viewed by management as the most important function of most CRM implementations, and for most companies, this makes implementing an effective support solution a logical first step of such a strategy.
  
  Even if the company has decided to go with a major CRM package that will take months or years to implement, it often makes sense to use an interim solution to provide E-Support, since the return on investment of a quickly implemented system is almost immediate. The availability of relatively inexpensive ASP support solutions makes this a risk-free choice, since there is no investment in infrastructure and the solution can generally be in production in a short time frame.
  
  For example, several current EnterpriseWizard customers signed up for the EnterpriseWizard ASP service in order to immediately provide an improved level of support while their company chose and implemented a more long-term, global CRM solution. They are still using EnterpriseWizard over a year later, either because their ERP implementation is still ongoing, or because they found its support component to be inferior in functionality and decided not to implement it.
• The most efficient support system is one that allows you to integrate and manage all your support communications under one interface. Adding Web support doesn't mean eliminating telephone support and reducing the options for your customers. It should mean empowering your customers to use the method of getting answers with which they are most comfortable. If they have been asking questions via e-mail, you will probably want to continue to enable this, so you want your new system to process and manage these e-mails more effectively.
  
  A knowledgebase type system that allows new items to be created by e-mail submission, web form submission, customer telephone calls, and even customer faxes offers many advantages. It permits you to gradually move from whatever kind of support you are currently providing to one that is less expensive and more efficient, while providing a single interface for your support staff to use. Ideally, all your support contacts should result in a new item, or ticket, being created (or updated) in the knowledgebase - this way, all staff can have access to the complete body of knowledge about outstanding support issues and can use this body of information when responding to customers.
• Excellent FAQs are fundamental to reducing your support costs, but static lists of FAQs are a thing of the past (actually, too many companies are still using them, but they are paying the price in high maintenance costs and slower response times). An effective system should be able to dynamically create FAQs and make them immediately available to your customers at your web site without any need for HTML editing or manual action. That is, as an item in the knowledgebase is resolved, if it is relevant to other customers, a qualified staff member simply cleans it up as needed and clicks a single button to have it automatically join the part of the knowledgebase that is accessible to customers searching for information at your web site. This should not mean copying, pasting, editing HTML, manually uploading or any other such action on the staff person's part - any effective knowledgebase software should handle all of this for you automatically. This is critical, since providing effective, timely, and well prioritized FAQs is one of the most important things you can do to reduce support incidents that cost you money.
• Ideally, you want the FAQ system to be able to prioritize the body of FAQs automatically without your staff having to manually put the hot items at the top of the list. The best systems will use customer feedback to prioritize and reorder the FAQs in the most useful sequence. For instance, if 30 customers look at a given FAQ and say it was helpful, that FAQ should immediately rise to the top of the list without your staff having to put it there.
• Since FAQs are so important, you also want to be able to customize the way in which items are displayed and to make the FAQ pages look like the rest of your web site, even though they may be generated from within your knowledgebase software program.
• You may want to consider restructuring the way you charge customers for support. For instance, if you currently offer free telephone support and receive most support issues over the telephone, you might want to move to a model where you offer free e-mail and Web based support, but charge for telephone calls. This encourages customers to search your web site first for an answer, then to submit their question via the Web, and if they really need to speak with someone, to call as a last priority. This can dramatically reduce the number of phone calls and your support costs.
• One way to nudge customers in a certain direction is to tell them that using your preferred means of submission will give them a better response time. For instance, if your customers currently ask questions by e-mail, and you want them to fill out a web form so you can collect more information from them (like their registration number, support contract number, or even just their name and address), you can lead them first to the web form, but still offer an e-mail option, with a caveat on the e-mail page that tells them they will receive higher priority and a quicker response to their submission if they submit the web form.
  
  You can use this tactic to gradually move customers away from an e-mail based system to a Web based system. This is useful because customers who submit a ticket directly through a web form can be asked to provide more information that can help solve their problem in one communication. This can reduce the number of contacts needed to solve problems, and therefore the support costs.
• For your customers to find the answers they need at your web site, you must make the information easy for them to find. This may seem obvious, but it is not always accomplished. The interface for customers should be easy to use, whether you allow them just to search for answers, or also let them register themselves as a user, login and submit their own tickets, track their own tickets, change their user information, and so on.
  
  Ease of use is essential for your system to lead to customer satisfaction, rather than sending customers (or potential customers) away in frustration. As a recent news article on a Jupiter Media study reported, "Jupiter also found that 2 percent of B2B companies have sites that include search engines that make it easier for customers to find exactly what they want quickly. Instead, most B2B companies employ static "frequently asked questions" links that provide lengthy lists of responses. Jupiter said that 70 percent of Web users will leave a site for good if they cannot find the information they want."
• Keep in mind as you look at software that there are some important benefits to using a pure Web based application, rather than a client-server based, "Web-enabled" product, to handle all your support issues. Among the benefits: 1) Easy software maintenance, since no client software is needed other than a standard browser, and the program can just be installed once on a Web server; 2) Complete access to the system for staff members who may be geographically dispersed; 3) No need for network infrastructure; 4) Pure Web based products were designed from the beginning to maximize performance on the Web.

Step by Step Guide

• Decide upon what, in an ideal world, you would like your new E-Support system to do. The answer of course depends upon your business, your customers, how Web-savvy they are, what they expect, what your competitors are doing, what kind of staff you have, and so on. If you have 2 support staff technicians and you only get an average of 3 calls a day, your needs will clearly be very different than if you have a support staff of 40 receiving 3000 e-mails a day.

• Do you want the system to provide dynamic FAQs for your customers to access, automatically prioritized by those that are most helpful, and displayed in a way that you choose?
• Do you want to let only your customers, or any unregistered visitors to your site, search through existing FAQs? Do you want unregistered visitors to see less information than registered customers?
• Do you want the ticketing system to be fully integrated with the knowledgebase?
• Do you want to let visitors and/or customers submit questions directly over the Web?
• Do you want new support tickets (questions) to be automatically routed to the appropriate support group or individual for handling?
• Do you want other automatic routing to be enabled so that a ticket passes through specific stages before resolution?
• Do you want to have your telephone support staff able to search the knowledgebase for answers while taking calls and also to enter tickets into the knowledgebase?
• Do you want e-mails submitted to a support e-mail address to be converted automatically into tickets in the knowledgebase and assigned and routed appropriately?
• Do you want the ability to page (using a beeper) support staff under user-specified circumstances?
• Do you want to be able to send e-mails to anyone under any user-defined circumstance (in other words, to be able to define an unlimited number of escalation rules)?
• Do you want to be able to have faxes sent to a given fax number converted into tickets?
• What do you want to happen when a customer submits a ticket? Should he receive an e-mail response, should he be able to log in again and track the progress on his ticket, and update the ticket if he has new information? Should he be able to change his user information?
• ble to reply to the e-mail and have it update his original ticket?
• Do you want to be able to simply publish tickets as they are resolved so that they join the body of FAQs accessible by customers, or do you need to route resolved tickets to someone for cleanup before potential publication?
• Do you want the whole system to look like the rest of your web site so your customers don't know they are in another program?
• Do you get a lot of repeat questions, so that you would like to have the ability to easily paste standard solutions into new tickets?
• Do you have existing support or customer data that you would like to import into the new system?
• What kind of reporting on support activity do you need?
• What different groups of users should the new system serve - potential customers, real customers, resellers, partners, support staff, management? Do you need to give these different groups different levels of access to the information in the knowledgebase?
• Do you need to be able to create your own fields, choices, saved searches, business rules, and so on?
• Do you want to use one knowledgebase for all your products and services or a separate knowledgebase for different products? Typically different knowledgebases may contain different fields, different look and feels, a different user base, different escalation and workflow rules, and so on.
• How many people do you expect to be using the system and do you want them all to be able to login and submit tickets or do you want some of them only to be able to search and print out FAQs? Be sure to consider your needs right now as well as your most optimistic future projections to be sure that the system you set up will scale as your business grows without breaking the bank and reducing performance.
• Do you need to integrate your support data with any other systems - for instance, to validate a user's registration number with data held in another back end database before providing support, to send staff time spent on tickets to a financial program for billing, to import customer data from a Sales Force Automation program, and so on? If so, you may want to look for software with an open API and/or the ability to run user-defined scripts that execute or make calls to other programs.

• Decide upon the total budget that you can commit to getting this new system in place. This budget will need to cover the cost of software licenses plus any implementation, customization, and training costs. You should also include the time that will be required of your in-house staff to assist or carry out the implementation.



• Decide whether or not you already own any software that can provide the functionality you want or whether you will need to purchase software. If you need to purchase software, it is a good idea to write down your wish list of functionality, then research the different software options and contact different vendors, keeping in mind your overall budget. See the sites mentioned above for a plethora of information.
  
  There are products available in all price ranges, so if you have a limited budget, don't automatically assume that you need to accept minimal functionality or develop a home-grown solution. For instance, you can currently get a full featured product like EnterpriseWizard with a 3 user license for free, and if you are a small company, this may well be sufficient for your needs.
  
  Also, be wary of the notion that you might be able to save money by developing your own system. Many of our customers tried that first and found it incredibly time consuming and ultimately unworkable. Months after having started their own development and having no system in place to show for it, they purchased or leased EnterpriseWizard and had it up and running in a day for much less money than they had already spent in development costs.



• Determine an ideal time frame for implementation - can you wait months for a new system, or do you need it yesterday? Are you about to launch a new product and to have increased support demands? Or are you currently developing and testing new products that are crying out for a Web based bug and enhancement tracking system to help get them to market more quickly?
  
  If so, you want a system that is quick and easy to implement and that allows changes to be made later, preferably without bringing down the system, so you can get it into production immediately and gradually refine the processes and customization after some initial experience.



• Think about how much your needs are likely to change over time and consider the importance of flexibility in the system you set up. Some companies may have in place a series of business procedures and rules that have remained stable over time. In this case, the ease of making changes may not be that important. Other companies may feel it is important to be able to change their procedures quickly and painlessly to move with changing market forces or customer needs.
  
  Many support systems may permit customization but make it so difficult (many of them requiring you to shut down the system to make changes) that you will want to finalize your needs as much as possible in advance to avoid changes later. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to get this kind of thing perfect the first time, and experience with any system gives you ideas for how to improve and refine it.
  
  Therefore it is helpful to take into account the ease of making changes dynamically when considering software products and implementation time. For instance, EnterpriseWizard can be customized and modified while live without any interruption of service. If you go live then decide you would like to add another field or change the choices on an existing field, this takes 5 minutes to do through the GUI and takes immediate effect on all new and existing tickets. This kind of flexibility allows your staff to experiment with different support practices and procedures to find the ones that are most effective.



• Consider what kind of ownership model you are comfortable with. Do you want to install, maintain, and run the software on your own web server and to buy a permanent software license, or would you prefer to lease the software on an ASP model? Generally ASP service means that the vendor hosts the software on its own site, doing all installation, upgrades, backups, and maintenance, but providing you with full administrative access to your system and ownership of your data.
  
  If your IT staff is limited and you don't already have the hardware to run a high performance system, this may be an attractive option. And it can be a very inexpensive way to get a high powered system up and running quickly . For instance, EnterpriseWizard's ASP service costs as little as $450/month (for 10 simultaneous users) and a new customer is typically up and running within a couple of hours of submitting an order.



• Once you have carefully considered these issues, your next step is to decide which software to use and whether to buy or lease it. If you have time, try to use each product you are considering live, whether by going through a live demo or by downloading and installing a trial copy at your own site. This should give you the information you need not only about functionality, but also about performance, ease of use, ease of customization, and so on. Consider whether you will be able to implement the product yourself or will need to purchase consulting, customization, and/or training services from the vendor.



• Once you have the software installed, revisit the questions above and make detailed decisions about how you want your system to work. Be sure to consult the appropriate staff who will be using the software to help define the business procedures and support practices you want to implement.
  
  If you are setting up this kind of support for the first time, you may want to seek advice and help either from the software vendor, or from helpdesk user groups and other helpdesk resources. If the vendor provides any tutorials or other forms of implementation documentation, it can be helpful to review them. And check out the software documentation to see if it provides insight that may help you get the best and most efficient implementation.
  
  Note that figuring out how you want things to work is probably the most important step for a truly successful implementation. If the software you choose is easy to use and flexible, actually implementing your procedures is the easy part. Deciding what they should be is another matter, and the software can't really do that for you.
  
  For instance, EnterpriseWizard was designed to be very easy to customize and flexible enough to handle almost any business procedure, with the idea that this way, customers could easily do their own implementation and customization. And most customers have done just that, with perfect success.
  
  We have also found, however, that some customers will end up with a "better" implementation if one of our professional services staff members helps them with the "procedures planning and business practices" part of the implementation, sharing our experience on the kinds of support procedures that have proven to be most effective and the most efficient ways to set them up in EnterpriseWizard.
• Customize the software (or have someone else customize it) to meet your specifications.
• Import any existing data, and create at least some initial FAQs. Remember that the FAQs can be the most effective means of reducing your support costs and your customer satisfaction. Who wouldn't rather find the answer immediately in an FAQ than submit a ticket to even the most efficient support operation?
• Be sure to train your staff and provide them with some simple documentation on how to use the new system.
• Have your staff test the system, by entering new support tickets as customers and then processing them. This way they will understand what the system looks like from the customer's point of view as well as their own. Make any refinements needed after this testing, then you are ready to go live!
• Once you have everything in place, it's time to provide the appropriate access to the new system from your web site. Have those responsible for your web site create links into the new system and edit your support pages to make your new capabilities clear to your customers.
  
  It's a good idea to also provide an e-mail link for customer feedback on the new system and to actively solicit this feedback, especially in the beginning. Try to put such links at several points in the new system, for instance on the main support page and on the FAQ page. This way, you are more likely to learn quickly how the system is working for those it is supposed to serve and to be able to make any needed adjustments.
• Once you go live, schedule a review of the system for 30 to 60 days out (sooner, if you have very high volume or receive negative customer feedback). At that point, invite feedback from staff members using the system, review any customer feedback received, agree upon changes that will improve the system, and make those changes.
• To be sure your system meets changing needs within your company, your customers, and your product lines, revisit the system periodically, say every few months or so. Each time, consider feedback from customers, partners, and support staff, and look for any changes that can be made to improve functioning.

The Rewards of a Successful E-Support system

• $10-$40 is saved on every occasion when customers can find answers at the web site, rather than having to telephone a conventional call center.
• By continuously adding customer-driven content to the FAQ site, you achieve a snowball effect, increasing the percentage of customers who can help themselves without increasing your support costs.

Improved customer relationships

• Empowering your customers to find the answers they need at your web site without having to wait on hold on the telephone or submit a ticket and wait for a response is the fastest way to increase customer satisfaction and forge better relationships with your customers.
• A useful site becomes a focal point for the community it serves, and the company is seen as the centrally important player in that community. The better the site, the better the reputation of the company.

Increased traffic and attention at your site

• A useful site is soon 'bookmarked' by repeat visitors and it attracts an ever-wider audience of prospective clients. That increased audience frequently leads to press attention, and may lead to word-of-mouth recommendations.
• More current and useful material holds greater interest. Visitors who find something useful on your site will spend longer looking at each page and look at more pages. This allows you to present more branding and marketing information.

Increased advertising revenue

• More people means more money. If your site carries paid advertisements, the increased popularity and attention paid to your successful customer support site will generate increased advertising revenue and entitlements.

24/7 Operation

• Online support scales itself according to demand. How many companies can afford to staff a conventional customer service desk through 3 shifts every day? With an online system, you can still page support staff in emergency situations and you can be gathering customer questions at times that are convenient for the customer.

Relieving IT staff and making the best answers available to everyone

• Qualified staff can concentrate on more fruitful, strategic projects because the repetitive, time-consuming work is all automated. Furthermore, their knowledge is recorded and shared with everyone, rather than restricted to the customers they deal with. Once you populate your knowledgebase, you can always give customers the best answer for a given question.

Improved perception of investors, shareholders, and partners

• Impress your partners and investors by being on the cutting edge of support. With an E-Support offering, you will be more attractive to potential partners, since they will have 24 hour access to information and support. Such a system also demonstrates to your investors or shareholders that you are at the forefront of technological advance and that you take customer support seriously.

Revisiting the Barriers to Implementation

Four Principles of Success

Case Studies