The FT Word – June 2001
The FT Word
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Welcome
Welcome to the June 2001 edition of the FT Works Newsletter, a monthly review of trends in the support management arena. In this month’s issue:
· Establishing support in Europe – all your questions answered!
· Are you supporting a flawed product? Find out with just one “magic” metric.
Establishing Support in Europe
You have started to gain customers in Europe. The European sales reps are pressuring you to open support centers in each country (they may have promised it to a few customers already). Time to take the plunge? Here’s the when, how, who, what, and where.
When?
It’s hard to justify creating a support center with only a handful of clients (unless they are very large) but on the other hand waiting too long will keep you scrambling for a long time. A good rule of thumb is to open a center when it can keep two people busy full-time (one person is not a viable alternative for a center that must be open every day, especially in a geography where people take long vacations.)
Use sales projections for your planning, but take them with a grain of salt: customers don’t just show up magically, especially if you have long sales cycles. One thing that may accelerate your timeline is leveraging your European center into a Follow-the-Sun infrastructure. If you have lots of calls during the night, funding European support reps will eliminate night duty in the US.
With very low volumes, work out a short-term solution with the local sales team. Typically it includes using a combination of the local technical pre-sales staff and the existing support center in the US to deliver support to the European clients. Although not a viable long-term solution, it should give you months, maybe up to a year, to establish a proper support center.
The European sales team should be on your side to justify the investment in a European support center, as having a local center is a big sales argument. In my experience, your main challenge will be to delay the establishment of the center until there are indeed customers who need it.
How?
Effective support organizations have a global scope because global customers expect consistent service anywhere in the world and because it’s best to spread large infrastructure efforts to a large geography. Therefore, the European support center should report into a worldwide support group, even if it must forge strong ties with the European sales team.
Leverage existing processes and tools to the European center. You may need to scale them down and you may need to formalize some of them if this is your first center away from headquarters, but you should use consistent processes worldwide.
Who?
Recruit locally as soon as possible, even if you have people on staff who would relish or could be persuaded to work in Europe for a while. European support must have a European flavor, which is hard to achieve with American transplants, and it’s also very expensive to staff with expatriates. So use your US volunteers for short-term training and mentoring stints rather than permanent postings.
A special note about outsourcing. If you are outsourcing support in North America, then it probably makes sense to outsource your European support. Outsourcers that are strong in the US are not necessarily strong in Europe, so you should investigate both the European branch of your US outsourcer and local possibilities. If you are not outsourcing in the US because your technical requirements are too high, you probably won’t be able to find a good partner in Europe either, not to mention that managing an outsourcing partner from across the Atlantic is not easy.
What?
Although the European center will start small, think of it as a full equivalent of the US center(s) from the start. So if you have a second-line or backline group in the US, plan to decentralize it in the future, and hire appropriate staff to groom into it from the start. Don’t hide behind the notion that those tasks cannot be performed remotely (it’s fine to keep specialized functions such as support planning centralized). And just think of the opportunity to widen your recruitment area…
Setting up support centers in Europe raises the issue of languages: should we provide support in languages other than English, and if so which ones? Adding language requirements complicates things greatly, so proceed with caution. Consider your largest markets: can they accept support in English? Germany and France are typical exceptions, even if German customers usually speak good English. Whenever possible, delay implementing multi-lingual support.
Where?
The ideal location for a European support center would have good availability of qualified staff, a low cost of doing business, and great infrastructure, including easy access to headquarters. Typically companies expanding in Europe place the support center in the European headquarters, which has the obvious advantage of benefiting from whatever facilities investment exist, including good network connections to the home office, and should allow you to recruit, although probably not at low cost.
Today’s favorable locations include the UK (multi-lingual staff is readily available, at least in the London area), the Netherlands (except for high cost) and Ireland (best for lower complexity support and more affordable). Germany and France are not as good as labor practices are more restrictive and it’s harder to find multilingual people.
In any case, stick to one support center until you have dozens of staff. It’s easier to recruit based on languages than to open multiple centers.
Bonne Chance!
Are you supporting a flawed product?
We’ve all had that thought as we attempted to pacify an irate customer who’s questioning whether we even *have* a QA group (and not too politely either!), but are we overreacting?
Here’s a little-known, but incredibly handy metric to help you determine the health of the products you are supporting: the percentage of cases associated with bugs as opposed to user errors, issues with third-party products, “what if” questions, etc.. Here’s an example: say you get 100 cases, and 4 of them are caused by product bugs. Your percentage is 4%. If 40 of them were bug-related (we hope not), your percentage would be 40%.
What should the percentage be? I’ve found that 5% and under is a good number. Any higher and customers are not happy, escalations to Engineering are numerous, and the support staff is discouraged. It’s fine to go higher with a brand new product, especially a beta product, but by the time the first maintenance release comes around you want to drop down below 5%.
I recommend you introduce the metric to your Engineering counterparts and to executive management as a better way to gauge product quality than bugs per line of code or other product-centric measurement. And I welcome feedback on what your percentages are.
FT Works News
Does soft skills training work? was published by SupportWeek on 6/5. You can find the text of the article at
http://www.supportgate.com/supportweek/20010605/article1.html
Announcing The Complete Guide to Hiring Great Support Managers. 40 pages of no-nonsense tips and 566 pre-tested questions from which to conduct thorough and pointed interviews. Great for all of you who recruit for support managers and executives, and perhaps as a job-hunting tool too! Special introductory pricing of $100 for newsletter subscribers through 8/31/01. For more information, including how to order, go here.
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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