Comments on: Savvy Support Model – No more ‘tiers’

By: Phil Verghis

Phil Verghis — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:37:41 +0000

Glad to see at least two organizations starting to use this model. Tony, you are right in that on the surface, it seems like just an upgrade of the front line folks. For this to work properly, the entire *culture* has to change. It means that the generalists have to be ruthless (and have the power) to ferret out and resolve issues that arise repeatedly. It means that what they do has to be valued as highly as the top folks. There has to be a robust knowledge management system in place (more than just technology).

In terms of cost, if you actually map out the cost to the customer and the waste and rework that happens over and over in typical reactive service desks/help desks, this model should be give you a substantial upgrade at a lower cost! Not a bad combination…

In the company I used to work at, I built this model and had people with master’s and Phds from top universities like MIT and Harvard (and of course amazing people who didn’t even have degrees) on the front line. They were compensated as highly as R&D and the customers noticed and loved it. Of course, we had a solid culture and knowledge management system behind it.

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:38:45 +0000

In this Savvy model, aren’t you in reality just upgrading the talent pool at the Tier-1 level? You are still going to have people answering the incoming calls, and they will still need someone to escalate the more involved issues to. That’s been my methodology over the past 10 years or so – to eliminate the automaton answering the calls, and to have a skilled person as the first point of contact who has the ability and the discretion to work calls to completion from the outset, which has given us a high same-day resolution rate. Those issues that are more involved get moved up to Tier-2, and we do our best to minimize user downtime in the escalation process, asking the T-1′s to alert the T-2′s to particularly sensitive or critical issues.

The difficulty in the model you propose is convincing management to invest the extra dollars necessary to have that T-2 capable person working the phones. Most companies want to hire the cheapest folks possible to answer calls. I left Corporate America for government contracting at least partly for that reason. In the contracting world, due to how our contract is structured, we have the flexibility to improve our talent blend to provide the best results, which then puts more highly-skilled individuals on the front lines. We do shadowing and job-sharing as well, to help develop the T-1 techs, but we find that maintaining delineated roles provides us a better sens of order, and more control over the customer experience. We also use this structure to provide promotion opportunities, which has allowed us to grow from our “farm system”, as it were, and reduce the turnover at the T-1 level.

I’m not saying that eliminating tiers is a bad idea – if that’s what works in your particular environment then go with it, by all means! This is, after all, about providing what the customer wants.

By: Bart Prine

Bart Prine — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:37:24 +0000

As usual Phil, you are RIGHT on the money there.. We dropped tiers some years back. Our desk is a mix of seasoned pros and a few newbies and more resembles a bull pin then a old style call center:
Customers call and get Sam who is the Office expert, but their problem is printers which is Joe’s specialty. Sam passes it but listens in for pointers. Next printer call, Sam has one answer available and Joe is now listening to Sam explain Word template issues, and so on… Bill the intern sometimes feels lost, but he is learning how to switch perspectives on a dime, depending on the crisis du jours.

I appreciate the news letter. keep up the good work