Brand loyalty is often dictated by the experience one gets from using a product or a service. These days with competition escalating, enterprises are spending greater resources on ensuring customers are satisfied with the products and services they have purchased. Satisfied customers will more likely be repeat customers.

One area of the enterprise that has gotten considerable attention lately is customer service and support (CS&S). Managers responsible for ensuring the CS&S operation meet pre-set standards of operations have their work cut out for them. In addition to ensuring that the staff is adequately trained and capable of delivering quality service to customers, they must be able to identify talent and keep them.

Enterprise Innovation recently spoke to Manish Sinha to discuss the operational challenges that a support service organization must face as part of day-to-day operations. Sinha is Managing Director for Microsoft’s Customer Support and Service organization. He carries the same burden and responsibilities as CS&S managers grappling with the challenges of ensuring customer satisfaction long after the software package has been installed and the Sales Rep has left the building.

The right skill sets for the right service

According to Sinha, there are three types of customer service and support delivered today — customer service, business process outsourcing, and technical support.

You call a customer hotline number and go through the motion of pressing a series of keys to get to what you want. This process usually takes two to three minutes, and in that time you expect to complete the transaction. We call this Customer Service and it is often associated with a call center operation. The skill sets required for an individual to be effective include good language skills, good communications skills, adherence to a vendor prescribed script, and people management skills.

Business Process Outsourcing is another service that lumps together backend processes such as payroll processing, document transcription, human resource and accounting. Unlike customer service, BPO services do not require communication skills. However, service providers are expected to have a greater understanding of the client’s business, and identify where exceptions are happening.

Technical Support service provision typically requires immediate remediation. The client has an immediate problem that needs to be resolved. Often the systems involved are very complex. The client has its own internal organization that would have to be diagnosed and resolved internally before calling on outside help.

By the time the technical support agent gets the call, a number of technically competent professionals would have tried to solve the problem. Technical support professionals (TSP) have depth of knowledge, are certified in specific areas of technology, have access to a database containing historical data that can be referenced to diagnose a problem, and are able to communicate to the client intelligently.

TSPs know how to ask the right questions or be able to guide the client so that they can piece the problem together. The best technical support professionals excel in diagnostics.

Diagnostic ability, said Sinha, is a rare trait and support organizations spend a considerable amount of resources to train their staff in diagnosis and problem solving. In many cases, product knowledge and communication skills are not enough. To be able to ask the right questions and in the right order are often important in coming up with correct diagnosis and problem solution.

Today, the number of technical support professionals is small relative to the demand. IDC estimates the worldwide demand for support services to reach $23 billion worldwide by 2009. What compounds the problem is the perception among TSPs that technical support is not a cool, fulfilling and profitable profession to be in. Many would rather go into software development or project management. Those who would take up the job of technical support specialists typically do so for a short period to get the necessary training, competence level, recognition and connection.

As a result, companies like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM are unable to hire, in the numbers required, the right technical support professionals. And even then, churn rate is very high for these professionals. The end result is that the quality of technical support delivered in the Asia Pacific region is not on par with the more developed markets — for now.

Sinha believes that educational institutions in the Asia Pacific must wake up to the requirements of industries. They need to develop curricula and teaching methodologies that reflect the needs of businesses, so that companies do not have to expend considerable resources to train graduates to adapt to the markets they enter.

Some universities in Australia are now requiring their students to undergo psychometric testing to determine their aptitude towards certain disciplines to guide students in their choice of profession. In most parts of Asia, career choices have not changed for many years. People chose their profession based on what is popular or what parents and friends are leaning towards. Careers are often chosen after graduation.

Technical support is evolving from merely solving problems based on visible symptoms or results to identifying the root cause or causes of a problem and determining the best course of action to take to solve the problem and to stop it from recurring in the future. This requires not ordinary field engineers but diagnosticians who take on root-cause analysis prior to making recommendations on the best course of action.

In the near future, enterprise customers will pay for this type of service geared towards identifying potential problems and offering steps to avoid or minimize their impact. CEOs will be more than happy to pay for this because it brings security, peace of mind, and an understanding that what you put in place today minimizes your risks in the future.

As governments and private businesses continually invest in IT infrastructure, enterprises are burdened with the task of retraining fresh graduates to develop specialist skills that would enable them to become product employees within the organization.

This should not be the case, said Sinha. It is incumbent upon the education system to revamp its curriculum and education model so that it reflects the true conditions of the market. In the area of technical support provision, the industry needs graduates who have the basic skills of the trade — to be analytical in mind and process.

This is the foundation of proficient technical support professionals. Fortunately, some universities in more developed markets are taking the first steps towards this model. Unfortunately, the pace of adoption is slow, and in many other countries, non-existent.