Yikes. Based on the number of emails and calls I’ve been getting recently, the economic downturn has started affecting a number of really good service & support executives. This ranges from “I see the writing on the wall, what’s available?” to “We downsized two weeks ago, and I’m looking.”

Often people ask for advice on what to do. If  you think I can help you in any way in your job search, feel free to reach out and contact me.

What about the rest of you who still have jobs? Here are three tips:

1. Read the article titled ‘What to do in tough times’.
2. Give back to the professional community by speaking/participating/becoming a local chapter officer in conferences, seminars or local chapter meetings. (If you are in the New England area, you shouldn’t miss out on the First Wednesday Group.)
   Yup, I’ve heard all the excuses. You really want to, but don’t have the time. Work (and more work), family — heck what about all the things you want to do for yourself but don’t have the time? My only observation is: you may be superb at what you do and your company may value it highly. At a point when your paths diverge, the better connected person will always have an edge.
3. Stretch out. Use your knowledge of customers and company wide processes to see if there are other ways you can help out your organization. (This is how I ended up running a 15,000 server network, global operations and most of IT in addition to Global Services at my last corporate gig.) Have you considered working internationally? Why not?

From the October 2008 Verghis View newsletter. (Sign up at home page.)

Many of us in the technology world have been witness to two “once in a lifetime” events. The first was the dot com bubble, where huge growth was pursued at all costs. That was followed by a big bust when it became clear that profitability mattered after all.The second event is the most extraordinary financial crisis since the Great Depression in the US.

Despite billions of dollars and euros being spent to ease the liquidity crisis, financial institutions are still hoarding cash because they don’t trust each other’s financial stability.In addition, billions of dollars of shareholder value are being wiped out as rumors of corporations’ possible demise enter cyberspace and ricochet around, taking huge chunks out of their stock price.

For a recent example, look no further back than September 6, 2008, when several web sites mistakenly picked up a Chicago Tribune story about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy. In reality, United had filed for bankruptcy in December, 2002 and emerged from bankruptcy in early 2006. But some sites reprinted the 2002 story, thinking it was current news. UAL shares opened the day at $12.16 before plummeting as low as $3 before trading was halted.

So what does all this have to do with support? A lot, it turns out. Unless you operate purely in a break-fix model, much of what we do involves gaining our client’s trust and becoming a true partner with them for their success. Last time, I wrote about how to manage in tough times. This time it seems to be a perfect time to revisit what being a trusted advisor is all about.

I recently re-read Clients for Life: Evolving from an Expert-for-Hire to an Extraordinary Adviser by Jagdish Sheth and Andrew Sobel. In it, they interview CEOs and advisors to see what distinguishes a client advisor - an irreplaceable resource - from a tradable commodity like an expert.

• Experts are specialists; advisors become deep generalists with broad perspective.
• Experts are for hire; advisors have selfless independence.
• Experts have professional credibility; advisors have deep personal trust.
• Experts analyze; advisors synthesize.
• Experts supply expertise; advisors are educators who provide insight and wisdom.

As we explore the shift from a tiered model of support to a Savvy Support model, one of the key attributes will be a transition from frontline staff being break-fix experts to valued advisors. Under Savvy Support, routine/ simple/ known issues are taken care of either by eliminating the problem in the first place or solving the issues via self service. This approach frees the support staff to handle more difficult, unknown problems. The more they focus on resolving these, the more likely they are to become client advisors.

There you have it: how to move from being “hired hands” to “client advisors.” The faster you make the change, the more your clients will trust you and call on you — in good times and bad.

From the August 2008 Verghis View newsletter 

With many economies around the world sputtering, most of you are helping prop up balance sheets by slashing discretionary spending, renegotiating contracts and putting off purchases.In this kind of atmosphere, it is tempting just to make the necessary cuts and hope that you will be spared further scrutiny. Making cuts is always painful. I was part of one of the biggest IPOs in US history (at the time) followed by the dot-com crash and our eventual return to profitability with great margins. Just about anybody can manage during good times. It’s during tough times when the great stand out from the merely competent. Here are a few non-traditional ways you can stand out.

1. Love your clients and partners! Yup, with few exceptions, most of your clients and partners are under the same pressures you are. Everywhere they look, they, too, are being hit by reduced services and increased fees – from checking in baggage on planes, to rising food and oil costs, to cost-cutting pressures at work.This is a perfect time to pick up the phone and call or even visit – not just email – your clients and partners and see what you can do for them. Find out how they are being impacted during the downturn. Ask if there is anything you can do to help them succeed in their business. Revisit procedures and policies, offer training. Wouldn’t you like it if someone came to you and offered that kind of help? How many have?
    
2. One of the most overlooked ways to save money is to take a close look at your recurring costs and standing purchase orders. One of my clients just saved over $250,000 a year in maintenance fees. How? They had inherited a contract from another department, but until they made the time to look at it, they didn’t realize they were paying for equipment and software that hadn’t been on the books for two years. Think about it – where else can you get that kind of savings without significant pain?
    
3. Be ready for good times. The larger your organization, the more likely ‘use it or lose it’ money will become available at the end of your fiscal year. These funds must be used quickly and will be awarded to those who are prepared. Have you created a prioritized list of what you want and need? Reach out to your suppliers and partners. Give them a heads-up so they’re ready to help when resources free up. Savvy clients and prospects have already reached out to me this way, and they will get a priority in scheduling.
    
4. One final note: Think big, think bold. If you have been running a support center for many years, you’re probably already running a pretty tight ship. Have you reached a wall in terms of efficiency and productivity gains? Well, this is the perfect time to start planning and implementing dramatic changes in the way you do support. Frankly, most support centers are little more than optimized break-fix centers. What an incredible waste of time for our customers – and a morale-killer for our staffs. Why isn’t most of our time spent working with customers to make them more successful in their business? That’s how to deliver real value.During tough times like these, senior management often looks for dramatic change. Some start with changes to the corporate culture, and take time to get used to. For example, consider getting rid of Level 1/2/3 support models and embracing Savvy Support. This conversion takes time, but pays off in a big way.

There you have it. Quick tips to help you stand out during tough times.

Speakers and topics for the October 7 “Voice of the Customer” retreat will explore a range of leading-edge topics in customer satisfaction and customer interaction, according to the organizers of the event, which will be held at a country club resort outside Boston.

The agenda includes the following speakers:

• Marlene Bessette, vice president of customer loyalty at Xerox, on how her company uses satisfaction data to identify and cultivate customer champions.
• Tina Taylor, vice president of global customer care at GE Fanuc, on using satisfaction scores to measure the results of internal process improvements.
• Dale Troppito, managing partner of The Gantry Group, on a new research study that explores best practices in pay incentives for high customer satisfaction scores.
• Matt Tippets, product manager at Parature, on using a Web forum to solicit and prioritize customer-inspired product innovations.
• Ann Walker, support team manager at The MathWorks, on a way to integrate customer feedback into the product development cycle.
• Peter Holt, director of worldwide technical support at Progress Software, on capturing and acting on “outside-the-box” customer feedback.
• Renee Bochman, senior director of global customer care at Endeca Technologies, on how to link internal knowledgebases and external community expertise into a single Web portal.

“Technology companies are wrestling with all the challenges of empowering their customers,” says conference co-producer Jeffrey Tarter. “We’ve brought together a group of people who have implemented very successful solutions to these challenges, and we know the discussions will be extraordinary.”

The “Voice of the Customer” Conference will take place on October
7 at the International, a world-famous golf resort and spa in Bolton, Mass. The registration fee is $285 per person.

Additional program information and registration is available at:
       http://www.first-wednesday.com/support_conference.html

From the August 2008  Verghis View newsletter (sign up from home page)

With many economies around the world sputtering, most of you are helping prop up balance sheets by slashing discretionary spending, renegotiating contracts and putting off purchases.In this kind of atmosphere, it is tempting just to make the necessary cuts and hope that you will be spared further scrutiny. Making cuts is always painful. I was part of one of the biggest IPOs in US history (at the time) followed by the dot-com crash and our eventual return to profitability with great margins. Just about anybody can manage during good times. It’s during tough times when the great stand out from the merely competent. Here are a few non-traditional ways you can stand out.

1. Love your clients and partners! Yup, with few exceptions, most of your clients and partners are under the same pressures you are. Everywhere they look, they, too, are being hit by reduced services and increased fees – from checking in baggage on planes, to rising food and oil costs, to cost-cutting pressures at work.This is a perfect time to pick up the phone and call or even visit – not just email – your clients and partners and see what you can do for them. Find out how they are being impacted during the downturn. Ask if there is anything you can do to help them succeed in their business. Revisit procedures and policies, offer training. Wouldn’t you like it if someone came to you and offered that kind of help? How many have?
    
2. One of the most overlooked ways to save money is to take a close look at your recurring costs and standing purchase orders. One of my clients just saved over $250,000 a year in maintenance fees. How? They had inherited a contract from another department, but until they made the time to look at it, they didn’t realize they were paying for equipment and software that hadn’t been on the books for two years. Think about it – where else can you get that kind of savings without significant pain?
    
3. Be ready for good times. The larger your organization, the more likely ‘use it or lose it’ money will become available at the end of your fiscal year. These funds must be used quickly and will be awarded to those who are prepared. Have you created a prioritized list of what you want and need? Reach out to your suppliers and partners. Give them a heads-up so they’re ready to help when resources free up. Savvy clients and prospects have already reached out to me this way, and they will get a priority in scheduling.
    
4. One final note: Think big, think bold. If you have been running a support center for many years, you’re probably already running a pretty tight ship. Have you reached a wall in terms of efficiency and productivity gains? Well, this is the perfect time to start planning and implementing dramatic changes in the way you do support. Frankly, most support centers are little more than optimized break-fix centers. What an incredible waste of time for our customers – and a morale-killer for our staffs. Why isn’t most of our time spent working with customers to make them more successful in their business? That’s how to deliver real value.During tough times like these, senior management often looks for dramatic change. Some start with changes to the corporate culture, and take time to get used to. For example, consider getting rid of Level 1/2/3 support models and embracing Savvy Support. This conversion takes time, but pays off in a big way.

There you have it. Quick tips to help you stand out during tough times.

I’m helping put together the second Boston area Voice of the Customer retreat on October 7at the luxurious International club near Boston. We have a stellar group of speakers and panelists.

The first keynote will be by Marlene Bessette, VP Strategy and Customer Loyalty, Xerox. “Your ideal customers aren’t just satisfied—they become evangelists for your company.” Marlene spoke at one of our First Wednesday Group roundtable meetings and she was a huge hit with her depth of knowledge and passion for the subject.

The second keynote will be by Tina Taylor, VP Global Customer Care, GE Fanuc
By using Net Promoter “willingness to recommend” scores, GE has developed a continuous improvement process for support.

Sign up for the retreat now - contact me for a $50 discount code per person.

Interesting factoids from some of the talks - from Sean O’Driscoll, former GM of Community Support at Microsoft, now on his own. One observation was that the search tool (e.g. Google) gets most of the credit for the content that you (or your customers) have created.

Another presentation was from the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon Church). Interesting factoid - the average age of their online knowledge base volunteers is 70!

The Euro Cup is going on, and it is wonderful to watch different communities celebrate as they win.

(taken from the June 2008 Verghis View newsletter)

Major philosophical differences exist between managers who run large-scale operations - ones with a massive number of incoming calls - and operations with a lower volume of quite complex calls.

One big disparity revolves around metrics. High volume support centers generally concentrate on metrics that show how smoothly their operations are running. These managers know that slight changes in efficiency make a significant difference in a unit’s profitability. The folks running complex support centers, on the other hand, tend to dismiss Six Sigma and focus on things like customer satisfaction or loyalty.

Is there a happy middle ground?

I spoke recently with Geetha Panda, Hewlett-Packard’s worldwide head for service delivery excellence. She explained a pre-emptive escalation model they’ve developed in their Bangalore service delivery center. The model was based on a study of the relationship between output metrics (customer SLAs and KPIs) and the input metrics that directly or indirectly affect them.

This derives from Six Sigma, in which you focus on the things that you have control over (e.g., staff availability), and ignore the things that you don’t (e.g., customer satisfaction). By ensuring a good end-to-end understanding of the implications of decisions made along the way, a strong alignment is created. This reduces variation and unpredictability, which in turn helps ensure that the outcomes are more likely to be statistically “in control.”

Geetha cited one example of how this approach has transformed HP’s Bangalore center. They took over an exceptionally high-profile, at-risk account from a native English-speaking center, and successfully converted them into fans again. She credits their pre-emptive escalation model for this win. In fact, the model has been so successful that HP is now extending it to other centers around the world.

As I reflected on my conversation with Geetha, I wondered why many in the support world - especially those who run lower volume, high complexity support centers - tend to dismiss Six Sigma. I would guess it’s the apparent focus on process and metrics to the exclusion of everything else. Think about it. Complex technical support inherently has a “people first, process second, technology third” hierarchy. Six Sigma’s priorities seem to be process first, followed by people and then technology.

But is that really true? A careful analysis of Six Sigma shows it’s not. In fact, one of its key tenets is gathering input and suggestions from those actually doing the work.

Are you successfully using any aspects of Six Sigma in your support organization? Let me know. I’m particularly interested in lower-volume, high-complexity support organizations using Six Sigma.

I’m looking forward to the second Voice of the Customer conference on October 7th at the lovely International golf club in Boston. This conference, put together by the First Wednesday Group,  is for service and support professionals and received rave reviews last year.
The keynote will be by Marlene Bessette, VP for Corporate Strategy and Loyalty at Xerox, someone I have the privilege of calling a friend. The title will be called ‘Creating Customer Passion’.

In my April newsletter, I wrote about how companies are beginning to relalize that the ‘tiered’ support model is counter-productive to customers and to staff. Given the number of responses to it, I’ve decided to reproduce it as a blog for a more widespread discussion…

————— (From the April 2008 edition of my newsletter, The Verghis View)

Ah, is there any part of the service experience that is more reviled by savvy customers* or by upwardly mobile support staff than the dreaded ‘tiered’ model of support? It made sense back when our customers didn’t know much about technology, and we knew best. When we first built these models, we put friendly but clueless support people on the front line to protect expensive resources (who often were the reason the problems existed in the first place) from ’simple’ questions.

From a customer’s point of it, the tiered model is horrible. They’re always forced to start at the bottom answering basic questions. There is no acknowledgement of their expertise or the context of their query. For example, all calls are treated pretty much the same, whether they are calling because they can’t print a document to read on the plane, or if they’re having trouble printing a proposal for a multi-million dollar project that is minutes away from the submission deadline. Every caller has to jump through the same hoops until someone determines the context and urgency of your issue.

From the staff’s point of view, the tiered model is treated as a necessary rite of passage. Traditionally, rookies had to spend a certain amount of time dealing with repetitive, low-level questions, then either defect to another group at the first opportunity, or if you survive, move up to Tier 2, which offers more interesting, less routine work.

One of the emerging best practices in support involves getting rid of tiered support for live calls completely. In this emerging model, callers who need assistance are connected with a highly skilled generalist, someone who understands both your business and the context of your call. He or she is paid just as well as the experts they may escalate to, because their skills are as just highly valued by customers. These professionals need to know a lot about the customer’s context and bring the right level of resources to resolve that particular issue.

I call this type of support ‘Savvy Support.’

To accommodate this change to a ‘just in time’ model, support tools must deliver more than just traditional CRM touches. To connect with people who have talents and interests not encompassed by their job description or title, these tools must also layer in context and social networking aspects as well as nuanced linguistics capability. This ’savvy support’ approach will force us to break away from the ‘if this person has a title they must be good’ mentality and embrace the ‘everyone has talent, most of it is not apparent in titles and traditional organizational charts’ mode of finding out who has the right skills that can be applied at the right time to the right issue.

This Savvy Support model works both for the customer and the support team. The customer gets a knowledgeable advocate who can help them resolve issues on the first call (if they even need to speak to a person). Support staffers win because they love to solve problems, rather than be enforcers of procedures and rules. This model is exceptionally customer friendly because the important metrics are things like customer impacted minutes, not internal efficiency metrics like time to answer.
However, a couple of prerequisites are required for this approach to work.

• The first prerequisite is leadership, because conventional support wisdom must be turned on its head. Leaders will need to work with HR and other departments to implement changes in compensation, reward and metrics.
• The second prerequisite is a support team that relishes solving new problems, rather than becoming complacent. It will no longer be enough to be good at handling routine (or known) problems. In the Savvy Support model, recurring issues are ruthlessly eliminated and fixed so they don’t reoccur.
• The third prerequisite is a solid organizational culture of sharing knowledge, such as Knowledge Centered Support.

Are you ready to learn how to get out of your comfort zone and smash your tiered support model? Call me at 617.395.6613 or toll-free at 800.494.9142. Another way is to attend my upcoming June 5th workshop, “Be the Voice of the Customer”