Friday, January 15. 2010Providing Perfect Support......John Linton
We have spent a considerable amount of time reviewing our support processes over the past three months against the targets set and are generally happy with the improvements. Answer times for 'support' have continued to fall and we are 'in sight' of the current objective of answering any support call within an average of two minutes during the extended support telephone answering times which will be a very significant achievement. Similarly sales answer average answer times have reduced and are getting closer to the two minute average which is the current target. Provisioning support remains at an average close to 20 seconds. Steve will go to Colombo this weekend to continue the 'quality' review of the support and sales processes which are harder to measure but which are more important than the logistical processes. We have continued to slowly build the number of personnel we have in Sri Lanka and are now approaching 50 people - if you care to you can see the 'faces' and qualifications of the people employed by going here: http://www.exetel.com.au/staff-sl.php One thing you might notice is the very high level of qualifications practically all the support personnel have which follows the previous Exetel Australian standard of only having IT degree/diploma qualified personnel providing technical support to Exetel customers - something that is, as far as I know, highly unusual (possibly unique) in support operations around the world. The Australian personnel and their qualifications can be seen here: http://www.exetel.com.au/staff.php The main reason that we made the decision to move support to Sri Lanka was the impossibility of retaining degree qualified people to work in support positions in Australia for long enough periods for them to become truly useful as they all wanted to 'progress their careers' faster than we could provide those opportunities and they regarded 'support' as an 'entry level' position rather than the career it can be for people who wish to do that. We could solve this problem in Sri Lanka by paying our support personnel so well that they are happier to spend longer in support and therefore becoming more knowledgeable which meant that we could solve the problem of continuing knowledge loss as competent support personnel move to other positions either with Exetel or with another company. We also could pay 2 - 3 times more than other multi-national companies because we didn't want the problem of training people and then have them leave for more money elsewhere. This approach could not be done in Australia because we couldn't afford to pay help desk engineers $A90,000 a year in their first year as a support person....but you should be able to guess at what 'quality' of graduate you could get if you did that. So providing support from Sri Lanka gives Exetel the opportunity of hiring a much higher qualified level of support engineer and, in theory, retaining their services for longer and therefore being able to have a much higher standard of person at the end of a telephone line or replying to an email in Sri Lanka than could ever be possible in Australia. The key issue is one of training and rapidly increasing each individual's in depth knowledge of not only the systems within Exetel but the vagaries of the different broad band and other services in Australia - particularly the differences between the various carriers that Exetel uses. We are slowly developing better ways of doing this than we ever had in Australia but it is a never ending task and we have a very long way to go....almost certainly for ever. We are gradually extending the support hours provided to Australian end users and before the end of this financial year expect to provide telephone and email support 24 x 7 x 12 with 2 minute or less average answer times. The ongoing issue will be the retention of highly trained people and the constant improvement in transferring knowledge to new employees which we are now working on in several innovative ways. Provision of support and other services from Sri Lanka has come a long way since we first made a decision to try and make this happen four years ago and the speed of development has increased much more rapidly since we opened our offices there some 18 months ago.Interestingly our first two Sri Lankan personnel will reach the fourth anniversary of their employment with us in a few weeks time. Our major issue now is to work out discretely measurable ways of measuring the quality of the service we provide to Australian customers on an ongoing basis. While perfection may not ever be possible to achieve it is going to be very interesting to see how close we can get to it. Trackbacks
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John
I think one of the frustrations that technically experienced customers have is when they are treated as ignorant. It might be of value to have a system for flagging which customers have more know-how. For example, after the first service issue, the staffer dealing with the issue could flag the customer for high, medium, low or unknown expertise. Cheers Comment (1)
I disagree with this approach. Fixing a problem needs to follow the same process whether the customer is knowledgeable or not.
Asking the question 'have you unplugged all other devices' is an appropriate question to ask. If it seems demeaning then that is due to the customers ego getting in the way of resolving the problem. Replying with a simple and courteous 'yes' is all that is required. When Exetel request the supplier to investigate the issue, the supplier will only do that if Exetel have verified with the customer that all the procedures have been followed. That wouldn't be the case if we assume the customer checked some things themselves. Comments (2)
That may be of assistance but you should submit it as a suggestion via the user facility.
You might be surprised at the number of "highly technically competent people" who make the stupidest of mistakes/omissions in their own 'diagnoses'. Comments (5)
The biggest problem in the Indian call centers is that the staff that where trained by the big US tech companies are now highly sought after. Staff turnover is as high as 30% and many highly trained staff are investing their wages in their own start ups...
You are a great pioneer and there will be many more companies setting up in SL thanks to your generosity. Comment (1)
Well John, Michael Malone is reading your blog Pat yourself on the back. If I wrote a blog and he was a reader, I'd be pleased with myself.
I totally agree with the thoughts of trying to find Australian support people. I put myself in that boat of 'too good' for support so would never have considered it. If the renumeration was $90,000 I would have consider it but I'd do it for a year or two then get my my 'career' back on track. Similar proposition for working in the mines. I hope that the Sri Lanka staff remain with the company for a long time. How do the overly qualified staff keep their brains active? Comments (2)
1) If that were the case it is odd that the poster doesn't have an iinet IP address.
2) Trying to aim for perfection, in anything, means that your brain is never anything but fully utilised....mostly over fully. Comments (5)
Perhaps iiNet buy their office IP from another party, given they don't sell any real corporate products.
Comments (3)
That's a touch unkind.
Comments (5)
It's not intended to be unkind of course - just an observation.
Their SHDSL tops out at 2048/2048, they don't offer Ethernet services and so on. iiNet seem to be very squarely focused on the residential market. The iiNet definition of a "large business" is 25 employees or more - that's not a definition that seems to be well aligned with Australian business in general. Comments (3)
I didn't realise that iinet was so far behind the basic requirements for business solutions but then I have never thought about them as a competitor in the provision of business services.
Thank's for the update. Comments (5)
If you really want to measure the quality of the service you provide to Australian customers, google "Larry Kaeto" your customer service manager.
I work in IT Support and I've always beleived it to be a noble profession, despite what most people think of us. If these stories are true and you either support them or look the other way, then you have defracated on everything that I beleive in. Regards, Lupco Trpeski Comment (1)
1) Larry has nothing to do with support within Exetel.
2) Support is one of the key elements in any techical product providers success/failure 3) If your life includes accepting random comments as something to rely on from unverified sources then it will be shorter than it could be. Comments (5)
General observation (which I could be wrong), but have most of the managers/team leaders quals only Diplomas and the "workers" have Degrees? (Minus James' BA..)
Funny thing is I have seen a lot of that combination where I work as well Having a Graduate Dip/IT myself Comment (1)
I am an ex-Exetel ADSL customer who has recently signed up for a new mobile service from you. The process was less than smooth, which surprised me, as I remember your online member tools as being very good.
As a suggestion for improvement, I would suggest revamping the new customer mobile signup page as it's quite clunky to use. It also wasn't clear whether I needed to fax the attached PDF or not. After signup was complete, I waited a few days waiting for some kind of status update email. I ended up calling provisioning and was told they would now port my number across - not sure why it wasn't automatic as I had provided all the details in the signup form. Also, I had to request my username and password three times before it was finally sent (shouldn't this be on the welcome letter that comes with the SIM card?). Hopefully you can make some improvements to the signup process to elimiate the need for a new customer to contact support at all ... Comments (3)
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