Incentives for Support Partners
If you are using support partners the standard setup is to split the revenue with them (typical splits range from 25 to 50%) but a better idea would be to build a reward system based on performance. Say the partner usually gets 25% of the support revenue. What you may want to build is a system through which partners that escalate a smaller portion of their cases and/or achieve high levels of customer satisfaction get an extra “bonus” based on performance. The bonus would be a back-end (after the fact) payment, unlike the revenue split.
In most instances the issue will be measurement: how can you capture the escalation percentage, or customer satisfaction accurately? Focus on accurate measurements so that the incentives can work properly.
One measurement I like to focus on with partners is “Invalid escalations.” Basically, if your organization takes an escalation that is closed with a link to a knowledgebase article, available to the partner, that clearly resolves the issue, that’s an invalid escalation. If the partner says, “absolutely not, that’s a worthless unfindable article,” then you can look to see if they have a point. If they do, you don’t ding them for it, and you have a great opportunity to improve your knowledgebase for everyone’s benefit–even your own staff.
The nice thing about the invalid escalation metric, measured this way, is that (a) it’s very transparent, (b) it encourages good knowledge reuse behavior among your partners, and (c) it creates another great incentive for your team to capture and improve knowledge.
Best,
David