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ASP Forum
Overseas Escalation?
"Our support organization is transitioning from one U.S. location to
multiple, global locations. Issues will be escalated to specialists
across the globe. In the past, with only one support office, the
original support engineer retained ownership, using a 'touch and hold'
model. Will it make more sense now to switch to a 'front-line/back-line'
escalation model for global support?"
—Kate from Kansas City
Dear Kate,
We utilized resources around the country (USA) and in Europe. We
have established the concept of a case owner and an activity owner.
The case owner is responsible for the overall resolution of the
case—keeping it moving forward, communication to the customer,
etc. The activity owner may interact with the case owner or may
interact with the customer—whichever will provide the customer
the best support. This way if the case needs to move to multiple
activity owners—the customer may not see that at all or at
least they see the same person, the activity owner so that they
don’t feel shunted from person to person.
—Tom Frizzi tom.frizzi@extensity.com
Director, Support & Development
Extensity
404/239-2168
Touch and hold is a good model that gives the customer a feeling of
continuity and familiarity, and also provides a good safety net of
quality control that reduces the risk that a ticket just vanishes into a
black hole in the back-office machinery.
It does however depend on some assumptions being met:
1. That the workload/inflow is low enough per agent for them to hold
without it slipping into a pile of backlog that they will never have the
time to follow up on. If the individual original agent has little spare
time to follow up on re-routed tickets, it swiftly snowballs into a mess
that can only result in customer dissatisfaction and the demoralization
of the agent.
2. The originating agent has a better knowledge of the specific customer
than the secondary agent. If the secondary agent has the better customer
knowledge, then the customer would prefer staying there rather than just
with whomever got the ticket first.
3. The originating agent puts it all together in the end. If the
originating agent is no more than an initial touch, then the customer
gets very little value from their continued involvement unless they
somehow put all the pieces together and wrap up the ticket with a
flourish and a smile.
—Matthew H. Loxton matthew.loxton@mincom.com
Support Operations Manager/Product Support
Services
Mincom
303/446-9000 x22568
What do your customers want? Have you asked them?
Typically, customers the world over want the same thing—someone
who can resolve their issue as quickly as possible without
accountability being passed from person to person. If you are
introducing a new support model with existing customers, it is
perhaps even more important that the underlying 'touch and hold'
model not change. Develop a strong local presence (perhaps regional
if that makes sense) of support engineers who can handle most issues
close at hand. Keep in mind cultural issues like face time that
should be factored into your staffing models.
With the right people, processes, technology, your customers can feel
like the world revolves around them, instead of being shunted around
the globe.
—Phil Verghis phil@verghisgroup.com
President, The Verghis Group Inc.
Global Service Delivery Consultants
617/395-6613
800/494-9142 (toll free)
The touch and hold model works well if the original support engineer
can continue to provide value while the product specialist gives
technical suggestions. In a worldwide setting, you typically have two
good reasons why keeping the original support engineer works well:
(1) time zone differences and (2) language differences.
Because there's little you can do about these two factors, I would
encourage you to develop a worldwide, geographically-distributed team
of product specialists who can communicate more easily with your
support engineers and your customers. Sure, there are tasks that
simply must be done close to the Engineering team, so a remote product
specialist may not be able to accomplish certain tasks that require
close cooperation with Engineering. And it will take time to develop
that level of competency away from headquarters, but hire with that
goal in mind.
Bottom line: stick with your "touch-and-hold" model.
—Françoise Tourniaire
FT Works www.ftworks.com
650/559-9826
[Any other advice? Send an email to membership director Jane Farber at jfarber@asponline.com, and we'll
post your feedback.]
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