Managing Product Support Costs

It's not just the launch of your product that you care about. Your real goal is happy customers successfully using your product in ways that are profitable for your company. If your product isn't supportable, or you have miscalculated your support costs, that goal may never be reached.

Bring a seasoned expert in to bridge the gaps between product management and your technical support organization to maximize the profitability of your product(s).

Key Services

• Supportability audit
• Product support costs audit
• Beta support planning

Optimizing Contact Center Operations

Internal help desks and cost center customer service and support organizations want to preserve effectiveness with reduced expenses. Profit center-driven customer service and support organizations want to increase revenue. Either way, it's about creating and showing value.

Employees want to feel fulfilled in their work and their efforts valued. Customers, whether internal or external, just want the help they need. Technical advancements promise big ROI's but too often they come with hidden financial and emotional costs of implementation that can delay investment returns or or even prevent them from occurring at all. Through it all, the ever-changing landscape of the marketplace can make balancing all these priorities difficult at best, undermining that overarching mandate to create and show value.

Sometimes, it just takes another pair of eyes from outside the organization to help see a better way. Whether you're a small company establishing a contact center for the first time or whether you are a larger organization trying to re-focus or keep up with latest service and technology trends, if you're going to seek outside help, make sure it's from a person familiar with the landscape. You want to benefit from a depth and breadth of experience and expertise from an individual creative enough to help you forge effective new paths when the old ones no longer work or when you find yourself in uncharted territory.  

Drive the Results You Need

• Build customer loyalty
• Create effective work processes
• Improve employee satisfaction and effectiveness
• Create and show value in your operation

Areas of Expertise

Process Improvement

You know you need improved work processes when you become dependent on key individuals to get work done, making it difficult for those people to go on vacation, let alone allow them to be promoted. Tap into the expertise needed to design your work processes well, so that they support employees in their day-to-day efforts instead of hindering them. Get the help you need to implement new processes smoothly, with minimal adverse impact. Beneficial for smaller companies just reaching the point where standardized processes are needed for the first time and also for established organizations needing to update existing processes.

Interim Management

When you've got a team that needs management support, existing resources are already stretched too thinly, and you haven't yet found the candidate to fill a manager position long-term, consider taking on an an experienced manager part- or full-time on an interim basis to bridge the gap.

Customer Service Skills Development

Technical ability needed in a support organization and strong customer service skills needed to foster customer loyalty aren't always readily available as a combination. Get the help you need to hire and train for the right balance of skills into your organization, foster a customer service mindset throughout your department and effectively evangelize that attitude throughout your company. 

Leadership Development

Managing technology professionals is different than most other kinds of leadership; where else do you get a team of profoundly concrete thinkers doing what is essentially creative work? When you add the customer service component that is so vital in technical support organizations and most help desk operations, it can become a difficult tightrope to walk. When your managers need help, turn to a consultant and Certified Professional Coach with experience leading and teaching technical managers (and non-technical managers of technical groups).

Maintaining Business Continuity

Smaller businesses and customer-facing organizations such as technical support and customer service operations need to think about disaster preparedness and business continuity as much as the big guys. How will you continue operations? How will your customers reach you? How are your employees impacted, and what does that mean for your business?

These and other questions may affect you in ways you haven't considered. Windstorms, snow storms, earthquakes and domestic terrorism all bring different risks. When you don't have the staff or the in-house experience to work out how best to prepare for these risks, you need someone who understands emergency planning, disaster preparedness, and business continuity from a perspective that fits your specific situation.