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Guide to 7x24 Support Plans
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A Guide to 7x24 Support Plans
Publication date: 7/10
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Executive summary
Tech support has never fit comfortably into the constraints of a
9:00-5:00 workday, if only because technology companies almost always
have customers in more than a single time zone. In recent years, the
demand for after-hours coverage has crept steadily upwards. More global
enterprises, more users online at odd hours, rising expectations for
real-time response—whatever the reasons, it's clear that the
genie is out of the box. Support is now a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour
job.
The challenges of delivering this extended coverage aren't trivial.
Often, the new demand for 7x24 support comes from a handful of customers
who need after-hours support urgently but may not generate enough traffic
to justify the cost of full-scale staffing. For companies with global
customer bases, it's still common for country-level support organizations
to develop their own service policies and personal relationships; as a
result, transferring or escalating an after-hours call can create
friction about how the call "should" be handled. And for thousands of
support managers and agents, a 7x24 schedule is simply not a happy
arrangement. "Our support team hates the night shift," one manager
reports.
Yet somehow these issues haven't surfaced much in support-related
research, conference presentations, or online forums. To help start a
more active discussion of 7x24 support, the ASP has conducted a survey
whose results appear in this report, and we also created a 7x24
discussion thread on the ASP's LinkedIn
page, which we've excerpted from here as well.
- Levels of Service: Revenues, Satisfaction, Penetration Rate
- Pricing Models: Service Level, Satisfaction, Penetration
- 7x24 Service Delivery: Service Level, Satisfaction
- Lessons Learned
- How to Manage a Night Shift
- Define the Deliverables
- Historical Trends
Copies of the survey are free to ASP members in the
members-only area.
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