Improving Customer Satisfaction by Implementing a Service Level Agreement (SLA)

An SLA is a type of service management system that establishes a two-way accountability for service, which is negotiated and mutually agreed upon. It is really a contract that documents operational and interpersonal relationships, establishes mutual expectations, and provides a standard to measure performance. Organizations that have such systems in place achieve higher customer and employee satisfaction ratings.

This free white paper explains how to get started in creating an SLA and pitfalls to avoid. The most common pitfall is creating SLAs that are too complex. If your SLA is more than 5 pages long, you are doing it wrong. Also, your SLA service level objectives must be realistic. You cannot write an effective SLA without knowing what your current performance measures are.

The following is the table of contents for the white paper:

Introduction

a) Purpose of the SLA

b) Mission of IT (This is not just between the Support Center and customers)

c) Customers covered under the SLA

d) Locations

e) Owner of the SLA document and communications path

f) Services covered. This is only a high level statement.

2) Service Goal

a) Overall goal

b) Specific goals

3) Definition of terms

4) Service delivery elements

a) Service coverage times

b) Environment(s) included

c) Environments excluded

d) Specific applications and network services coverage

e) Methods for requesting service

f) Customer responsibilities

g) Service tracking and reporting procedures

5) Escalation procedures

6) Telephone, Web and Email response times

7) First contact resolution by the Support Center

8) Reporting methods

a) Weekly management reports on the Web

b) Monthly performance metrics on the Web

c) Quarterly Customer Satisfaction Surveys results on the Web

9) SLA contract period

a) When the current draft is effective

b) When it will be reviewed

c) How to request changes

10) Examples of cases by severity level and case type

11) Sample of the customer satisfaction survey questions

See https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/ to access white paper.

Calculating ROI For Knowledge Base Software

Knowledge Management is the ongoing process of capturing, optimizing, and delivering information. It is not a one-time purchase of a new support center tool. Therefore to calculate the Return On Investment (ROI), you need to evaluate the cost of implementation and the cost of management. Quantifying the benefits in dollars can be difficult.

Most managers are able to forecast the costs, but struggle to forecast the savings. Companies struggle to put a value on customer satisfaction, job satisfaction, quality service, or even the intellectual capital that is captured into the knowledge base. In addition, before you can forecast an improvement, you have to know where you are. Some knowledge management vendors can help.

This free white paper demonstrates how to calculate future savings in dollars as a result of:

• Reducing the average call time in your call center
• Increasing the first call resolution rate
• Reducing the escalation rate
• Reducing the training time of a new support person

See https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/ to access white paper.

Help desks and customer service organizations that have successfully journeyed from being reactive to being strategic generally follow a similar path. Often the steps include the following:

> Develop a call reduction strategy. The most common approach to call reduction is root-cause analysis; a process designed to eliminate the source of key problems. Root-cause analysis, which ought to be undertaken monthly, categorizes calls by type and technology and then discovers common causes for those calls. Next it acts to diminish the number of future calls by refining user training or the development of new online help screens. For example, one help desk found that new employees called the help desk an average of four times per month, while those who had worked at the company for a year or more averaged only one call per month. By providing a half-hour IT orientation to all new employees, the help desk reduced call volume from new users by 60 percent. But don't overlook the obvious. Another help desk reduced incoming calls by nearly 5 percent just by informing callers how their problems had been solved. The next time users encountered the same problem, they were able to solve it without the help desk.

> Free agents to work on call abatement projects. Since abatement projects are the heavy-lifting task of call desk centers, they need to be undertaken well out of earshot of ringing phones. The most common excuse for agents being unavailable for planning is they are trapped in 911 mode. To release agents for call abatement, try to assign additional resources to staffing on the phones or else be prepared for a short-term increase in the call volume can be reduced. Contractors can be particularly useful as a stopgap resource for answering telephones while regular agents focus on call reduction efforts.

See the following link for a great White Paper on the topic:

https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/

A lot of software licenses are not used and become "Shelfware" because the needs of the purchaser changed or the software never delivered what the purchaser expected.  Often, the purchaser thinks that they know what they need as far as feature requirements, but after implementation they can not get their employees or customers engaged to use the application.  Also, in time their needs change and the product the bought has not evolved to meet their changing needs.

In summary, there is a lot of risk in purchasing software. Consider if the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model may help your organization minimize risk and decrease the lifetime TCO of an application.

Request a Free Needs Assessment your Help Desk or Customer Service Software Requirements

Giva provides some valuable tools to help you better understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of owning software applications and comparing it to the SaaS approach.

The purchase price of software licenses and annual maintenance fees you pay a vendor are a very small component of the true TCO.

Hardware, databases and related purchases are important to consider, but they are not as large as the actual labor required to manage and maintain the application and the infrastructure. Gartner Group estimates some of these costs and Giva will provide them to you in an Excel spreadsheet if you request a TCO analysis.

Labor is an enormous component that is always over looked and universally underestimated due to human bias. It's often hard for IT people to admit that an outside vendor can do a better job and be more cost effective. The fact is that SaaS vendors have enormous scale and efficiencies of building, managing, maintaining and hosting an application for 100,000s of users vs. your company trying to do the same for your IT department which is of course many many orders of magnitude smaller.

When your CIO says, "we have plenty of IT people to do all this work", respond by saying, "Let's look at your list of IT projects for the last 12 month...are you ahead or behind schedule?" Invariably, you will find that they are significantly behind schedule on many key revenue impact projects because the IT dept is spending a lot of time just to keep the infrastructure up and running instead of focusing on strategic projects that impact/generate revenue to the company.  As you well know, a help desk/customer service organization does not generate revenue for a company.

Request a Free TCO Comparing Your Help Desk or Customer Service Software vs. Giva

Here are the Last Few Reasons You Should Purchase a Help Desk/Customer Service Software Package.

Of course, with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can save you a lot of money and SaaS vendors can get you up and running faster than deploying software on your own infrastructure. Our main point is that building your own help desk or customer service application really makes little economic sense. There are many products that are commercially available. Surely, there are a number of products that can meet your needs. We see many companies live to regret trying to build and maintain a product on their own.

Reason Four: You will have access to patches, updates, user groups, updated documentation, and technical support when the product is released and when you need it.

Reason Three: No matter how good the training, and no matter how great the documentation, sooner or later you will need to call the vendor’s technical support. This need usually arises at the worst possible time and inevitably involves a customer. Developers are busy people and you have to ask yourself if the in-house developers will be available when you need them. Most vendors have help desks that are open 24/7 and are literally waiting for your call.

Reason Two: Updates. A purchased product is continually updated, debugged and readied for your immediate use. With an in-house product your staff will usually be debugging the update after it is installed. This is not fair to your staff, your customers, or your boss.

Reason One: You can purchase, train on and implement a purchased product in a fraction of the time it takes to design, code, document, train on and implement an in-house product. A software development project can easily take on a life of its own and by developing an in-house product you are competing with paying customers. Unless you work for one of those unique companies mentioned earlier and unless your help desk can command the resources it needs, when it needs them, the chances are that in-house development will be prohibitively costly, time consuming, frustrating to train on and difficult to implement.

See our white papers at https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/

Here are the next few reasons to buy a help desk or customer service application vs. building your own:

Reason Seven: Help desk software packages can be easily customized to meet your support operation’s unique needs. You won’t get this capability in an in-house product without a great deal of extra work and time.

Reason Six: The product you purchase will have voluminous documentation that is both technical and end-user oriented. It may even have CBT disks available and will certainly have on-site as well as off-site training programs available to train your staff. An in-house product will rarely have such documentation.

Reason Five: The documentation and training will be at least three times better with a purchased product than it will be with an in-house product. You will not have to compete with the internal documentation and training staff that get paid to serve paying customers.

See our white papers at https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/

In a poor economy, we get this question a lot. What should I do, build or buy a help desk or customer service application?

What Do You Get With A Purchased Product?
The short answer is, a lot. Help desk software vendors spend millions of dollars and months of effort in determining what features go into their products. In addition, their sales, marketing, and technical support staffs have an intimate knowledge of help desk operations, trends, and requirements.

Here are the Top Ten Reasons You Should Purchase a Help Desk Software Package:

Reason Ten: The product already exists and you won’t have to spend time, money and political capital negotiating with a development executive to liberate already scarce resources.

Reason Nine: The vendor you choose has an understanding of how help desks work and what they need in a software package. Developers don’t always have this understanding and explaining it to them can take time, and time is money.

Reason Eight: Almost every help desk software package in the world can be purchased in modules. You can add and delete modules based upon your business needs and budget.

See our white papers at https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/