Infolink presentation at TSIA Silicon Valley’s Service Revolutions now available
Infolink is 1 of the nine “coolest ideas” in Service Revolutions at the TSW conference and presented at the live showcase on May 5, 2010!
Infolink presented our Service Revolutions concept before a live audience of TSW conference attendees, followed by a Q&A session with an esteemed panel featuring technology strategist and author Geoffrey Moore; Jim Spohrer, director of IBM University; and John Ragsdale, TSIA vice president of technology research.
Free eBook on the Benefits of Integrated Product Support
Integrated Product Support: Your New Competitive Weapon In The High Stakes B2B Technology Marketplace
How Growing Technology Companies Can Create Referenceable Customers, Bulletproof Their Products, And Beat The Competition Without Breaking The Bank
Today’s technology companies face many technical support challenges including increasing complexity of technology products, increasing cost of providing technical support, and the explosive growth of social media. This eBook will discuss these challenges and then show CEOs, operations executives, support managers and product managers of growth-oriented technology companies:
- Four traditional approaches to support: self-support, use of existing product engineers, building your own support department, and outsourcing to a call center, and why they fall short.
- How the integrated product support approach can cost-effectively provide you the type of support you need in order to offer the Whole Product that will help you attract and retain your essential Early Majority customers, continuously improve your product, and beat your competition.
Download Your Copy Today http://www.productsupportenvironment.com/ebook.asp
Best Practices: 6. WEB 2.0 AND COMMUNITY-BASED SUPPORT
Posted by admin in PSE Best Practices on October 29, 2009
In the Web 2.0 era of support, Infolink’s Product Support Environment (PSE) leverages community support tools, such as wikis, blogs and discussion forums, as great ways for user communities to self-support, but also for the company to nurture those users and learn from them. Moreover, the power of social networks for support is becoming more evident…they’re a great way to engage in user conversations and anticipate or even deactivate potential problems, which could damage a product’s or company’s reputation…How it’s all coming together: support is more integral to CRM than ever.
Cont’d PSE Best Practices: 5. REHUMANIZE SUPPORT
Posted by admin in PSE Best Practices on October 7, 2009
Let’s continue with our Product Support Environment Best Practices…
While the trend in the last few years has been for companies to provide more and more self-support through their web sites (and sometimes no support at all) and almost no direct human support, Infolink believes that the success of a technology product is highly dependent on the ability of a company to allow its users to “connect” with someone when they need to. Community Support is increasingly important, and has even become vital for some products. But in many cases, a company support agent on the other end of the conversation is still essential. Our PSE model integrates tools and a live support desk for maximum results.
So What is Product Support and why is it important?
One of the best definitions for Product Support out there was published by Microsoft’s Product Support Services unit in Wikipedia. Although it relates to the role of PSS within Microsoft, it makes for a perfect generalization:
“Product Support is a company’s business unit with primary responsibility for responding to end-user and partner requests for assistance with the company’s products and services.
PS must also give feedback to development groups for use in the development of future products or product features. PS identifies major issues with products, and works with the responsible product teams in order to create “hotfixes” for these issues, and/or make sure that the issues are addressed in service packs or future product versions.”
Additionally, at Infolink we believe that PS should also collaborate closely and even be part of professional services teams to assist end-users during product installation and deployment.
The support options in the Microsoft Wikipedia posting are also accurate for most technology companies: “PS usually offers a wide variety of support options, which may be free of charge to the user or may have varying prices. Options include assistance with:
- Basic usage
- “Break-fix” support
- Upgrades/patch installation
- Onsite and offsite consulting”
Infolink’s Product Support Environment puts all the elements in place: technology, people and processes that a company’s needs to meet its Product Support responsibility to its users. Responding to end-user and partner requests for assistance with a company’s products and services is a key part of the “extended” product the company sells. It is expected by users, and when lacking it represents a major risk to a company’s reputation and growth.
See more at http://www.productsupportenvironment.com
Infolink Success Story: Remote support of middleware product
Posted by techinnovationthoughts in General on September 8, 2009
Challenge
A client experiences a problem with one of their supporting software and they need help to improve the software’s performance, through better support and monitoring. The client wants to be able know how to react to alerts and reduce the number of issues that the software creates, as well as significantly reduce the time it takes to resolve issues raised by the product users.
The cause of the client’s problem was an IBM product called MQSeries, a messaging platform that handles messages between different applications. It is generally used to handle customer service applications, web portals, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. After the product was installed, messages would not always communicate across applications properly, which meant alerts would be sent out to the executives of the company, often in the middle of the night, as many as 200 times per week.
Solution
Infolink took control of the issues by providing a group of well-trained staff to remotely support the client’s site and to figure out how to help prevent problems and handle issues created by their software.
Our staff began by analyzing the issues and discovering their support software generated a couple of hundreds alerts, but most of the alerts were duplicates, and harmless ones at that.
After determining that duplicates were the cause of the problem, the staff applied a method called “tuning” to the supportive software. So when the duplicates were found, they were removed and reconfigured. This prevented those duplicates from creating alerts in the future.
The tuning method helped reduce duplicates from a couple of hundred times per week to only twenty actual problems that needed real attention. We also made sure that we recorded the client’s problem and put it into our databases, so when it came up in the future, we knew what to do to fix the problem.
Alert tuning combined with a professional user support team soon made a huge impact. After seeing a big difference between having issues coming up and not being able to respond to them sometimes for days versus having our team handling and responding to the same issue in a much shorter timeframe, the client was impressed and completely satisfied.
A year and a half later, we spoke to an executive of the client’s company, and learned that he was very pleased with the results and our performance.
“The fact that I’m not being called at 3 am is the most important thing to me. I don’t know what you are doing but no news to me is good news,” said the executive.
By accomplishing our goal — to significantly improve service levels and eliminate support as a source of risk — we were able to extend our contract with this healthcare company for over 6 years.
The end result was that we showed our team has the ability to resolve a client’s problem much more quickly than if they have to do it themselves.
For more information visit http://www.productsupportenvironment.com
PSE Best Practices: 4. BEST-OF-BREED TOOLS
Posted by techinnovationthoughts in PSE Best Practices on August 26, 2009
The Product Support Environment selects and implements just the right combination of best-of-breed support tools based on a technology company’s support requirements. The environment MUST include the customer portal, case management system, chat and remote support capabilities, as well as community tools used for nurturing the user base. A key element is a Knowledge Base to organize and accumulate the solutions to customer problems. It will not only make the support function much more efficient for support engineers and customers, but provide the basis for ongoing improvement of the product.
PSE Best Practices: 3. SUPPORT GOALS THAT ARE RELEVANT TO TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES
Posted by techinnovationthoughts in PSE Best Practices on June 27, 2009
When providing support to users of their products, technology companies have slightly different goals than other companies do. In order to grow from 10,000 to 1,000,000 users companies must make sure they get some serious word-of-mouth referencing, and they must also make sure that potentially (and hopefully) “explosive” growth can be handled well. Infolink’s Product Support Enrivonment offering is focused on supporting technology companies and their users. As such, we focus on those support goals that are specifically relevant to those kinds of companies:
• Increased positive customer support experiences
• Reduced risk of customer defection due to bad customer support experiences
• More reference-able customers
• Improved ability to absorb growth
• Reduced total cost of support by exploiting new channels
• Use knowledge to improve the product going forward
As any other part of your product cycle, support must be planned and managed…sometimes that is all it takes to go from a C- to a A+ user experience.
PSE Best Practices: 2. PLANNED ENGAGEMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION.
Posted by techinnovationthoughts in PSE Best Practices on June 15, 2009
A five-phase process is followed by Infolink to implement our client’s PSE and get it up and running. The whole process normally takes from 4-8 weeks, and allows us to go from Identification and Assessment of the requirements, to Implementation of the PSE tools, Transitioning from the current support structure and running a Pilot phase and finally going Operational.
PSE Best Practices: 1. NOT JUST TOOLS, NOT JUST PEOPLE.
Posted by techinnovationthoughts in PSE Best Practices on June 15, 2009
Infolink does not deliver just tools, nor just people. We believe technology companies require a combination of good support tools, processes and people, which together comprise the Product Support Environment. Self-help and community resources should be available to those users who can and are willing to self-support, but other channels must be available to those users who would rather interact with a support agent. Those must include e-mail, phone, chat and remote live support. Our PSE delivers the best combination of services and best-of-breed support technology.