The FT Word - February 2004

The FT Word

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Welcome

to the February 2004 issue of the FT Word. Please forward it to colleagues you think may enjoy it.

In this month's issue:

· industry standards for support staff productivity

· increasing problem solving success

· the latest FT Works booklet: Training Programs that Work

Industry Standards for Support Staff Productivity

Thank you to Dave Crowther for suggesting this topic.

Is there a way to tell whether your support staff is doing compared to the rest of the industry? If you've tried to answer that question you know that it's very difficult to make meaningful comparisons. So-called industry benchmarks are pretty much meaningless, especially if you happen to support highly complex products that may call for hours of work on a single issue. Try these three (pretty) easy steps.

Step 1: measure average cases closed

To get a meaningful metric, measure cases closed, not cases opened (or "grabbed"), not cases worked, not cases in the backlog. Cases closed provide the true measure of productivity. If you use a handoff method from tier 1 to tier 2, you can count as "closed" for tier 1 those cases that go to tier 2. But the tier 2 staffers serve as helpers to tier 1 staff, wait until the cases are actually closed before you include them in the metric.

Measure productivity regardless of vacations, holidays, training, and the like. This may seem silly since productivity on vacation day is likely to be 0, but over time it will allow meaningful comparisons amongst your staff members. In addition, it saves you from the horrible computations of how many days each individual was actually in the office.

Step 2: benchmark against yourself

Once you have data for a reasonably long period of time, say a month or (better) a quarter, you can use them to perform the ultimate, always correct benchmark: the self-benchmark. Simply compare the average productivity of the top performers (top10%) against the average performers.

By definition, the top performers will do better than average (duh!) What you are after is how much better. If the difference is modest, say 2:1, you're probably doing as well as you can under the current support model. (We'll come back to this point in step 3.) The most productive people often handle twice as many issues as the average staffers.

On the other hand, if you find wide differences, say 5:1 or greater, then you should be able to get the average performers to do better through education and coaching, and performance management if it gets to that.

Make sure you are comparing apples and apples in the self-benchmark. For instance, in a tiered organization tier 2 people may be 10 times less productive than tier 1 people since they only work difficult cases. And if you support different product lines you may also find significant differences between products. Feel free to benchmark across geographies, however, as long as they support similar products.

Step 3: investigate utilization rate, resolution model

The self-benchmark is a great strategy, but it won't help you if your low productivity is caused by the way work is organized within your support center.

First, check your staff's utilization rate. Are support engineers spending too much time in meetings, administrative trivia, or legitimate other tasks such as knowledge base maintenance? Most centers use a 70-80% utilization rate, that is, subtracting vacations, sick time, meetings, administrative overhead, training, and special projects, about 75% of the time is spent on case resolution. If your figure is a lot lower, scrutinize the other tasks support staffers are working on. Are they critical? If not, remove them entirely or reshape them downward.

Second, take a good, sober look at your resolution process. Common causes of low productivity include: an overly-tiered model (2 tiers should do it, really); authorizations required for routine tasks; insufficient technical knowledge; and poor backlog management. Top producers often find shortcuts around silly processes to boost their productivity, but why not simply abolish the silliness? Investigate and resolve case resolution issues to raise productivity.

And one last thought: the self-benchmark idea works well in other areas such as resolution time. Use it!

Increasing Problem Solving Success

Thanks to Jennifer Walker for suggesting this topic.

If your team supports complex products, problem solving is a key skill. How can you foster better problem solving skills? Here are some ideas.

Make sure everyone has solid product knowledge

Although good problem solving techniques help, support staffers need a minimum of product knowledge to leverage them fully. Give them access to training materials and time to do the training. Remember that support staffers need to understand how things break, so advanced customer training is not always the best fit.

Be inventive if standard training solutions are not available. Self-training is not a bad method for support staffers since they need to play around with the product, but they need time to do it as well as some basic training materials. Use the knowledge base as a training repository: create a training path for each category of staff that points to relevant documents in the knowledge base and voila. You have a low-cost self-learning system.

Define the problem

Even brilliant problem solvers won't get too far without a clear picture of what the customer is experiencing. Create a checklist to help everyone ask all the right questions for each category of problems (and make the checklists available to customers in self-service).

Even with a checklist, support staffers need to use effective listening skills to avoid tuning out, jumping to conclusions, or making assumptions. Get them training on listening skills if needed.

Finally, teach support staff the value of creating and recording a crisp problem definition for each customer issue.

Brainstorm possibilities

Junior staffers sometimes think that if they could have better technical skills they would know the recipes for solving each and every problem. Not so! Experienced staffers have deeper technical skills, to be sure, but their troubleshooting success is due more to proper troubleshooting techniques than pure technical knowledge. Here are some useful questions to help brainstorming:

Has anything changed? (if it used to work and it no longer works, something must have changed, whether or not the customer knows what it is)
Have you seen similar behaviors?
Have you seen opposite behaviors?
If you were trying to make it fail that way, what would you do?

Use logic

Once you have it down to a few possibilities, it's time to test them out. Remind staff to use the scientific model: change one variable at a time so they can prove with certainty what exactly fixed the problem. Ask them to reconstruct why the particular change helped.

Leverage the team

When in doubt, ask. Sometimes, just describing the problem to someone else exposes the problem (a neat trick for non-technical managers who can feel they are helping even when the technical details are way beyond them!) And discussing the problem with others usually helps, whether it's an ad-hoc conversation or a scheduled "hard cases" discussion, a great way to increase productivity in centers that support highly-complex products.

Record for reuse

A clear problem description combined with a straightforward resolution makes for a great knowledge base document. Go ahead, publish it!

Many problem solving weaknesses can be solved by some coaching and the judicious use of "hard cases" meetings. If you find that the problems are serious, invest in some training. It should pay off in much faster resolution times.

Training Programs that Work - a new FT Works booklet

The latest FT Works booklet is crammed with practical, low-cost ideas to create training programs in small to large support organizations. It answers perennial questions such as: should I create custom curriculum? Should I hire a support trainer? What technology helps training effectiveness? Should I translate training? and many others.

Training Programs that Work is described in more detail at http://www.ftworks.com. You can also purchase it online.

FT Works in the News

SSPAnews published an article I wrote entitled Can Self-Paced Training Work? on 1/27/04. Read it at http://www.thesspa.com/sspanews/012704/article1.asp

The Association of Support Professionals (ASP) is hosting its annual awards competition to honor the Year's Ten Best Web Support Sites. It's a great way to get recognition for a solid web site, and even if you don't win you'll get useful advice from judges like me. Don't hesitate to enter the competition if you're a small company. There are three special categories for small companies and the competition is not as stiff, so you have a good chance at an award. Details at http://www.asponline.com/04entry.pdf

I will be speaking at the upcoming SSPA conference in San Diego on April 6th. The title of the talk is "A Tailored Fit: Finding the Self-Service Experience That Works". Join me and hundreds of other support executives to share good ideas. Details at www.thesspa.com

Curious about something? Send me your suggestions for topics and your name will appear in future newsletters. I’m thinking of doing a compilation of “tips and tricks about support metrics” in the coming months so if you have favorites, horror stories, or questions about metrics, please don’t be shy.

Regards,
Françoise Tourniaire
FT Works
www.ftworks.com
650 559 9826

About FT Works

FT Works helps technology companies create and improve their support operations. Areas of expertise include designing support offerings, creating hiring plans to recruit the right people quickly, training support staff to deliver effective support, defining and implementing support processes, selecting support tools, designing effective metrics, and support center audits. See more details at www.ftworks.com

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