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COLLABORATIVE SUPPORT ENHANCES THE TECHNICAL SUPPORT EXPERIENCE

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Collaborative Support, commonly referred to as “Swarming”, speeds up issue resolution times.

IMPLEMENT A COLLABORATIVE SUPPORT MODEL TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION

Poor technical support service significantly impacts the long-term viability of software and hardware technology providers by harming profitability and customer lifetime value. Customer experience has increasingly become the critical differentiator in ensuring businesses maintain competitive advantage and positive brand image. Ensuring your support infrastructure provides its customers end-to-end seamless customer experience is of top priority. In addition to reducing customer frustration, speed of resolution is equally important for strong customer experience. Collaborative Support, commonly referred to as “Swarming”, speeds up issue resolution times resulting in, not only an improved customer experience, but also higher employee satisfaction levels and retention rates. This whitepaper explores how Swarming can effectively solve complex and challenging B2B technical support requirements.

WHAT IS SWARMING?

Agile, Swarm team, and Swarming are very common terms often used in the software development world, but the benefits of those techniques are ripe for use in the technical support center. A collaborative support team is not broken down into tiers but is grouped into pods, based on the either product line, complexity, entitlement level or other business needs.

Over the last several years, the Consortium for Service Innovation has been leading the development on “Intelligent SwarmingSM”, making it a viable alternate to the tiered support model. At its core, the goal of Swarming is to accomplish the following:

1. Ensure support tickets are routed to the appropriate point person for producing an efficient solution.

2. End-to-end ownership of the ticket by a single point of contact, responsible for leveraging help from others who are knowledgeable/competent, as necessary for problem solving.

Intelligent SwarmingSM is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation™.

Swarming: Tiered Model vs. Collaborative Support

In a tiered model, a case is technically advanced, or escalated up the tiers towards a solution. As a ticket moves within a support team, it is not uncommon for information to be lost or have a loss of rapport between the customer and the engineer. This break in information leads to frustration, resolution delays, and inefficiencies.

Tiered Support Model

Engineering

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Level 3

Level 2

Level 1

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High ValueCustomer

BasicSupport

ComplexIncident

Collaborative (Swarming) Support Model

Time & Urgency

SupportIncident

EngineeringBackLine

MidLine

Knowledge

Swarming

Solution

FrontLine

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Swarming model can be an effective means for ensuring employee retention and performance for businesses, resulting in mitigated risk and less operational disruption.

The Swarm model pushes the solution towards the problem using a collaborative approach that prioritizes the client experience through a single point of contact. The purpose is to engage the most appropriate or relevant skills on a problem to reduce customer effort, improve the quality of customers’ touch points, and ensure the same outstanding experience each time they call for support. The model also helps to boost efficiency and knowledge management.

THE UNIQUE BENEFITS OF SWARMING

Swarming provides significant gains for enterprise B2B companies, driving results that are both employee-facing and customer-facing. Given below are some examples of how Swarming improves business operations.

The table below shows a summary of benefits of Swarming

According to a recent TSIA study1, implementing a single-level Swarm system correlates with higher levels of employee satisfaction, resulting in 86% employee satisfaction compared to 77% for multi-level systems. Additionally, the same study found attrition levels declined from 19% to 11% with a single-level Swarm application.

In summary, Swarming model can be an effective means for ensuring employeeretention and performance for businesses, resulting in mitigated risk and less operational disruption.

SWARMING IN ACTION:

Sutherland developed and executed Swarm technical support models for several global B2B clients. The actual structure and inner workings of a Swarm deployment vary based on several factors including, but not limited to:

1. Type and complexity of the product being supported

2. Service entitlements of the customer (based on service offerings)

3. Longevity of the support engineers (important for effective culture change)

4. The maturity of the CRM and collaboration tools used (important for measuring effectiveness)

Here we provide a high-level description of a typical Swarm deployment for an enterprise-grade B2B software application.

1 TSIA Support Services Benchmark from “The State of Support Services 2018” by Judith Platz

Swarm Improves Swarm Reduces

Speed and accuracy of solutions provided to customers

Case advancement and number of escalations

Resolution time, especially for known issues

Backlog per Technical Support Engineer

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) / NPS / overall customer experience

Number of engineers and SMEs touching each case

Employee morale Customer effort and headache

Engineer retention and skill development Engineer attrition

Knowledge transfer and knowledge retention

C-Suite escalations

86%

Single Level

77%

Multi Level

11%

Single Level

19%

Multi Level

Employee Satisfaction

Employee Attrition

EMPLOYEE IMPACT

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Swarm Team Members

A successful Swarm deployment requires thoughtful consideration and action, starting with selecting the right team members for productive outcomes. Typically, there are three distinct positions (excluding management). While the total number of team members varies based on case volume and complexity of issues within a given Swarming deployment, the framework for a successful team typically includes a collaborative mix of engineers and a team lead.

FRONT-LINE ENGINEERS

The front-line focuses on critical issues and issues that can be resolved within 24-48 hours. They typically take 5 to 15 minutes to assess if the ticket can be resolved by themselves, based on their knowledge and availability of documented solutions. If they cannot quickly find the necessary answers to solve the case, they transparently advance the case to the mid-line. They may assist by requesting the customer for the appropriate log files or additional information.

For any ticket that needs help, they collaborate within the Swarm team to expedite resolution. They continue to own the ticket without escalating the case, thereby continuing positive rapport with the customer. This minimizes information loss and customer frustration. Constant communication between team members via chat and collaboration tools also helps other passive participants to accumulate knowledge, normally gained only from years of experience.

In sum, the front-line is critical to successful Swarm deployment for two primary reasons—efficiency and expertise. By empowering the first line of customer support to be both efficient and experts in their fields, companies can better manage customer experience and satisfaction.

Sample measures of success for front-line:

• Initial Response Time (SLA)

• Follow up response time (SLO)

• Quality of initial response

• 1 & 3-day resolution %

MID-LINE ENGINEERS

The mid-line primarily focuses on resolving cases that typically take 3-7 days to resolve and require more in-depth client collaboration or collaboration with engineering to resolve the case (low and high complexity). The mid-line also focuses on actively contributing to the knowledge base, internal FAQs and tech tips. Additionally, the mid-line team focuses on assisting the front-line team as a part of the Swarm team.

Sample measures of success for mid-line:

• Follow up response time (SLO)

• 3 & 7-day resolution %

• Case documentation quality

• Solution accuracy

• Quality and quantity of knowledge base articles created

The front-line is critical to successful Swarm deployment for two primary reasons—efficiency and expertise.

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BACK-LINE ENGINEERS

The third and final group of engineers typically included in a Swarm team is appropriately

named, the back-line. The primary function of the back-line engineer is to solve cases

that often take more than 7 days to resolve, involve a hardware bug or a pending

investigation. A case identified as a confirmed bug is still worked at the front-line, since

no active investigation or troubleshooting is involved.

The back-line focuses on cases that require more in-depth collaboration with engineering

to resolve the cases with both low and high complexity.

In a typical outsourced support model, the back-line is usually a part of the Product

company and has direct access to not just engineering, but other functions including

technical publications, professional services, product line managers, sales, sales

engineers, and partner management.

Sample measures of success for back-line:

• 15 & 30-day resolution %

• Solution accuracy

• Bug report quality

• Case documentation quality

• Quality and quantity of knowledge base articles created

TEAM LEADS / TEAM MANAGERS (TLS/TMS)

The most important role of the TLs/TMs is to facilitate collaboration across the entire

technical team and remove roadblocks. They are often the first person to jump on hot

issues to make sure engineers are moving a case in the right direction.

The TL / TM works closely with all Swarm members to ensure:

• Cases are being technically progressed

• The entire team is focused on customer satisfaction

• Case reassignment and escalation management

• Alignment of resources to case load/complexity

• Host the daily/weekly stand-up meeting to determine team status

• Identify and highlight training requirements

• Quality Assurance in case management and customer communications

• Review cases (both inflow and closure) for key trends

• Provide reports and/or inputs on reporting metrics for management

A case identified as a confirmed bug is still worked at the front-line, since no active investigation or troubleshooting is involved.

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SUTHERLAND’S RESULTS

Sutherland customers have achieved a variety of promising benefits through our Swarm deployments. To date, our experience with Swarming deployment on behalf of clients shows quick, significant gains as well as long-term improvements in the health of the technical support centers and customer satisfaction levels.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In order to continue to be an effective means for problem resolution, Swarming requires committed management and a competent vendor to make it successful.

Our experiences with collaborative support have led to the following insights:

1. Swarming is not just a process change It is a change in the culture of not just customer support, but also teams that provide back end support to the Customer Support team. Celebrate early successes and reiterate the vision of Swarming to enlist support of all stakeholders.

2. Encourage engineer engagement When engineers are a part of the process defining team, they are empowered to contribute and change processes

3. Rotate roles Front-line, mid-line and back-line assignments are “roles” not strict designations. Rotating engineers within these roles helps improve the overall strength of the team.

4. Focus on post-Swarm feedback Asking for help is not a replacement for reducing individual research efforts. “Post Swarm” feedback works to educate the team and enforce best practices.

5. Implement the right tools Tools that encourage and facilitate collaboration, including live chat rooms with search-ability, SME engineer availability, and CRM integration are critical to successful Swarm deployment.

66%# of Customer Escalations

15%CSAT

30%Backlog

10%Employee Attrition rate

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As a process transformation company, Sutherland rethinks and rebuilds processes for the digital age by combining the speed and insight of design thinking with the scale and accuracy of data analytics. We have been helping customers across industries from financial services to healthcare, achieve greater agility through transformed and automated customer experiences for over 30 years. Headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., Sutherland employs thousands of professionals spanning 20 countries around the world.

Is your organization ready for a new model of process transformation that puts exceptional customer experiences first? For more information on how we can help you transform your process to optimize the customer experience, please visit us at www.sutherlandglobal.com, email us atsales@sutherlandglobal.com, or call 800-388-4557 ext.6123.

GETTING STARTED WITH SWARMING

Customers are your most valuable asset, and that value increases when you keep them happy.If your mission is to improve customer experience by ensuring they talk to the right engineer who can solve their case, we invite you to learn more about our Swarming model.

Contact us at Tech.Transformation@sutherlandglobal.com to get a custom review of your technical support and learn how Sutherland may be able to improve the way your customers see you.