Results of Research:
e.Support & Knowledge Management

Conducted June 2001 by supportindustry.com
and STI Knowledge

survey technology provided by CustomerSat.com

View Executive Summary
View Graphs & Participating Companies

In June 2001, supportindustry.com and STI Knowledge conducted a study of important metrics focused on knowledge management and e.Support. The research was conducted using technology from CustomerSat.com and received over 150 responses from high level service and support executives. The results provide valuable data for support operations to benchmark themselves against other leading companies.

Email invitations to participate in the survey were sent to supportindustry.com and STI Knowledge members. Participants were primarily VP/Director/Manager of Customer Support responsible for the external support center, the internal help desk, or both.

The survey provides support professionals valuable data about leading trends happening in the marketplace. Key survey results and the executive summary are below.

Executive Summary and Analysis
Pete McGarahan Chairman, STI Knowledge

• 70.9% of respondents will see an increased demand for their services this year while only 36.2% will see an increase in budget.
  • The goal of e>Support and Knowledge Management initiatives is to assist the support team in addressing the gap between the continuing rising demand for their services and the shrinking support budget. I look at e>Support and KM as strategic initiatives that must be funded and supported by senior management if the support teams are going to become a value-add to the business. At the same time, we must continue to address the basics like Root Cause analysis and identifying the call types that can be targeted for elimination and e>Support solutions. We must shift our support calls from level-3 to level-2, from level-2 to level-1, from level-1 to level-0 and from level-0 to call elimination. Our target is lower cost per contact and higher customer satisfaction while continuing to improve the productivity of all of your customers who use technology to do their jobs.
    
    
• 81.8% plan to converge their e>Support and Knowledge Management initiatives
  • When we look at the magnitude and ROI of each engagement, a new potential comes into sharp focus: the power of integrating s>Support and Knowledge Management so that all customers, employees, partners, stakeholders can electronically access this business knowledge and put it to work for the bottom line. The challenge remains in maturing both initiatives to the point where they in turn both benefit from the integration. Also, as you continue to build the knowledge repository, you must be keenly aware of who your audience is and who the beneficiary of the knowledge is and you must structure the knowledge appropriately.
    
    
• 40% of respondents are currently benefiting from a successful e>Support implementation while 45.4% of the represented companies are currently benefiting from a successful Knowledge Management initiative.
  • I think it is important to realize that the break down of respondents according to size showed that 53.1% had less than 1000 employees and 46.9% had 1000 employees or more. The relative size of an organization has a great deal to do with the budget allocated to large corporate initiatives such as e>Support and Knowledge Management. In fact, 54.7% have no e>Support budget in the next year and almost 25% said that their budget is set at less than $250,000. This would not come close to fueling the estimated $20 billion dollar e>Support market by 2003 as predicted by IDC earlier this year. Also, 61.7% have no KM initiative money budgeted for the next year and 24.2% plan to spend less than $250,000 in the next year on a KM initiative. Based on their survey results, IDC estimates that the average KM budget will increase from $632,000 in 2000 to more than $1 million in 2002. Our figures fall lower than expected because of the represented companies with 1000 or fewer employees. Past data that emphasized larger companies showed an average budget of $2.7 million in 2000.
    
    
• The 2001 Support Strategy Projects list is highlighted by:
  • 21.8% Improve Service Level
  • 16.6% Implement Knowledge Management
• 16.0% Lower Support Costs
• 15.4% Implement e>Support
  • It's interesting to see two of the benefits of both e>Support and Knowledge Management initiatives as two of the most selected strategic project list. "Improving service levels" and "lowering support costs" are more the "what" you want to achieve whereas the e>Support and KM initiatives are more of the "how" these goals and objectives can be accomplished.
• 13.6% Call Tracking/Problem Management
• The backbone of any support organization: call tracking and problem management. This strategic project will always be one of the top five priorities of a support organization's initiatives because of the importance it plays in helping them perform their value-adds: problem, change, and asset management as well as networking and desktop management. It has been a very tough year for customers, fraught with acquisitions and mergers in the support industry tool market. As smaller companies look to implement their first off-the-shelf CT/PM system, other larger and more mature support organizations are looking at rounds two and three. The consolidation of vendors within the support industry will prompt more customers to look for replacement vendors and systems. They're frustrated with the fact that their system, in which they've sunk large amounts of license, consulting, maintenance and training dollars, will no longer be supported in coming months. I have actually seen small to mid-size companies begin to develop their own internal, Web-based call tracking because of all the recent uncertainty in the tool market, the vendors' lack of focus and lack of ability to migrate the legacy client-server technology to a true Web-based architecture.
  
  
• 31.7% cite lack of senior level sponsorship as the primary reason for their failed Knowledge Management initiative while 33.3% cite the same reason for their failed e>Support initiative.
  • The number one reason why strategic initiatives such as implementing an e>Support and Knowledge Management system fail is lack of senior level sponsorship. As I travel around the country teaching the Certified Help Desk Director's course, I strongly emphasize that if you are going to risk your career on the successful implementation of a strategic initiative, make sure that a senior level executive is willing to do the same. Senior level sponsorship is meant to help build consensus and support from other key senior level executives throughout the company. Having senior level sponsorship will only increase your chance for success. Senior level sponsors are there to assist you and your team in removing financial, political and cultural barriers. As you focus on delivering the project, please make sure that you have that 800 lb. guerilla on your side, pounding the table to make sure that your cross-functional team has the necessary funding, support and attention to see this project through to the end. In the words of Major Winchester from the old TV M*A*S*H days, "I do one thing, I do it very well, and then I move on".

Summary
The purpose of this survey was to learn more about the realities of what support organizations are doing with e>Support and Knowledge Management implementations and what their plans are for the future. What we've seen is that e>Support and Knowledge Management are on everyone's mind and in everyone's plans for the future, but not necessarily in everyone's budget. We've also seen why people are migrating toward these initiatives and what they're hoping to gain from them. There are no Silver Bullets for successfully implementing these e>Support and Knowledge Management initiatives. You must only plan the work and work the plan. And, oh yeah…some money would help!

An e>Support strategy uses Internet-based tools and services that deliver customer care for any client, anywhere, at anytime. The ideal tools and services automatically eliminate problems, prevent service calls, and reduce customer support requirements with automated remote repair capabilities. This means that they increase the frontline professional's productivity by reducing talk time and improving the accuracy and speed with which they can determine the root of the problem and apply a solution. The best remedies include a variety of cost-effective options that enable the customer to access support on their terms. These solutions include access to knowledge bases, request fulfillment, self-service support portals, e-mail, live chat, Web collaboration; enterprise interaction management, and automated problem resolution.

The drivers behind the industry migration toward e>Support are the continuing increase in demand for more complex services, failure to meet the needs of the service level needs of the business, inability to quickly and accurately diagnose problems, and failure to retrieve quality resolutions consistently. Another catalyst is customers' willingness to adapt to a self-service model.

The goal of e>Support Strategy is to put customers in direct contact with the right resources or most cost-effective way to solve their problems while providing them with direct access to the information they need. We must eliminate unnecessary, repetitive customer contacts and middlemen that add no value to the customer experience. The value is in lowering support costs throughout the organization, enhancing the customer experience, and positioning the support organization to provide business continuity. Business continuity is defined as the uninterrupted use of technology to accomplish business goals and objectives, therefore creating value. Additional benefits are an aggressive Return On Investment, the improvement of the customer perception of the support experience, personalization of the support solution and experience, increase of first contact resolution, reduction of call-backs, status calls and repeat calls, and the broadening of the problem types handled by frontline professionals.

So far, we have learned that to be successful with an e>Support strategy you must know why people are calling your Support Center so you can determine what problems, inquiries or requests can be handled by a particular e>Support solution. You can achieve this by practicing good Root Cause Analysis. Targeted problems - targeted e>Support solutions - yield better returns and sustainable success. Knowing 'the why' will help you to design an effective integrated e>Support strategy that will reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. By formulating a well-defined e>Support strategy and preparing your organization with processes and skill sets that are aligned with that strategy, you will create a solid foundation for e>Success.

Knowledge Management is not a technology nor is it an application. Knowledge Management is not a project. It is a journey. Knowledge Management consists of multiple technologies supporting the strategic sharing of a corporation's information assets and intellectual properties. Success has been accomplished by emphasizing people & process over tools and technologies.

Senior management is now realizing the importance of managing knowledge to solve business problems. They are beginning to take leadership roles in knowledge management programs in their organizations. It has been proven time and time again, that Knowledge Management initiatives need senior level endorsement and sponsorship. We have seen no organization be successful in implementing Knowledge Management initiatives that are being led solely by the Help Desk or the Support Center. As senior executives involve their organizations more fully in Knowledge Management initiatives and begin to implement pilot programs, employees will learn the programs' benefits, adapt to the processes and technologies, and work more effectively in these newly collaborative and content-rich environments.

In most cases, technology has not been the main reason for failed implementations of Knowledge Management projects. We have found that cultural, political and people issues are more likely to sabotage initiatives' success than are technology issues. The employee's fear of sharing knowledge and basic distrust is rooted in the belief that by sharing what they know, they become expendable. Employees think that if everyone knows what they do then their knowledge is commoditized and their market value is reduced.

Employees need to feel like they're getting more out of the Knowledge Management initiative than they're putting in, they have to love working at the company and feel they have job security. Often, it's a matter of trust. Trust supports the knowledge management process by giving people confidence to propose new ideas and recognizing their contributions when these ideas succeed. In contrast, a lack of trust encourages workers to hoard knowledge that could help a company to reach its peak potential. And neither technology alone nor toothless mission statements will persuade employees to trust the overall organization, their managers and each other, whether the person is in the next office or halfway around the globe.

To be effective, trust must be ingrained in the culture of the organization. It can flourish when the entire company communicates a constant, consistent message of respect for employees and their ideas, gives them ample opportunity to provide feedback to others and integrates them into the decision-making process

By integrating knowledge management software with e>Support solutions, frontline professionals can quickly find a consistent set of answers for helping customers. At the same time, it enables customers to retrieve the same information from the company's Web site or resolve their own problems by utilizing the self-service support portal with all of it's e>Support components available and ready to use. In essence, frontline professionals now have more time to assist customers with more complex issues instead of rehashing old ones. This alone will increase your support team's moral, increase job satisfaction and reduce turnover. You might even find that you are promoting more of your team to other business units based upon their newfound respect and knowledge in supporting the business. They also can be repositioned to support the Knowledge professionals, the revenue drivers, the business goals and objectives and to provide true value for the business and it's customers.