John Linton
.....not least because it is almost impossible to define what "support" actually is or how good it is.
A long time ago in a company far, far away and after listening to various experienced people talk about what "support" actually meant in the context of supplying broadband services I suggested that a broadband suppliers obligation to its customers in defining where "support" ended was in the provision of an at designated speed service to the customer's 'network boundary' which, for the purposes of that definition would mean an ability for the supplier to ping the customer's modem at an agreed acceptable speed of return. This was in the days when most customers had to install a 'software client' to connect their crude ADSL modems to their ISP's service and that client was opsys dependent and modem hardware dependent and was more difficult by a large margin than today's plug and play devices so it was decided that actually helping the customer configure their interface (hardware and often software) would move the boundary point back to getting the customer to be able to ping a nominated site at an agreed return speed would be required.
I have never changed my mind that a steady "link light" was all that was required and that 'touching' the customer's modem (let alone anything the 'other side' of the modem) in any way or assisting in the configuration of the modem itself in any way was not within any realistic definition of providing support for a broadband service. In practice I never saw these guidelines adhered to as almost all support engineers have an engineer's innate characteristic of demonstrating their engineering knowledge by going far beyond such an arbitrary (if totally reasonable) boundary and most customers know how to 'plead piteously' for additional "support"....particularly female customers.
As modem hardware became more sophisticated and 'software' add ons became things of the broadband stone age this stricture should have become easier for support engineers to adhere to but it didn't prove to be the case. Over the years, and that is now well past nine, I have given up on attempting to 'enforce' that very reasonable definition of what constitutes a broadband supplier's responsibility of providing support to a customer and I don't see anyone else in Exetel making any effort to restrict "support" to only ensuring the customer is connected at the correct speed. So, over the years, I have slowly changed my personal, and in Exetel's case, the company's view of what is included in support for the broadband services we provide.
I have talked with a number of broadband providers, both in Australia and in the UK, about what support 'boundaries' they employ in providing telephone support to their customers and have found no consensus in any aspect of doing that. There don't appear to be any actual boundaries set down in black and white beyond everyone I spoke with having objectives for both call answer times, call abandon times and quantities and for call talk times. I haven't found any company that measures customer satisfaction with the experience of their calls; not because they don't regard it as important but because they haven't found any meaningful way of measuring it (beyond the mechanistic aspects of wait times, resolution times etc).
As a person brought up in business life with quotas and targets it is an inevitability that I will think of any aspect of Exetel's performance in terms of black and white numerical measurements. When we transferred the residential support functions of Exetel to Sri Lanka we realised that their would be a knowledge loss and other issues to contend with that we believed could be ameliorated in the medium term by deploying larger 'numbers' of people and that would mean we could offer longer support hours and shorter wait times in the shorter term and the knowledge loss would be addressed over time. To a large extent that has proven to be the case:
1) Support on week days has double form 8 hours a day to sixteen hours a day
2) Support is now avaialble 8 hours a day on weekends and public holidays
3) Call wait times have reduced by 40%
As the number of support engineers has continued to increase the average number of 'months on the job knowledge' per engineer has obviously not increased (a mathematical impossibility in a rapidly growing 'head count') but it is now beginning to increase as the number of support engineers that have been with Exetel in Colombo for 12 months or more to increase. So one of the issues we addressed while I was in Colombo for the November review was how we would set the expectations for support in 2010. The simple to measure call wait times, number of abandoned calls etc are not difficult to plan for and we will continue to aim at reducing those times/amounts along the path we put in place at the start of operations. How to measure the improvement (assuming there is any) in the quality/effectiveness of the support provided still eludes me; as does 'controlling' the breadth of the support provided on topics that we should not be addressing.
So, any ideas on how such a thing can be done would be welcomed.