Resolution Times Decrease 75 Percent with
Appliance-Based Remote Support

John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
And finally, when it comes to optimization, clearly there's come additional tools that we need beyond how we're doing things today because the existing systems in place in most support organizations is simply not adequate to meet the increasing volume and the increasing complexity that we're seeing.

On the next slide I have some data for you from the SSPA Benchmark Database and we ask our members how complex are the products that they support. And we see that back in 2003 members were pretty evenly split. Forty percent said that their products were moderately complex and forty percent said that their products were highly complex. But, look at the change in just three years, and in 2006 we have about 2/3 of members saying that the products they support are highly complex. Very few, only 10% say standard, and the moderate group has dropped from about 43% to about 25%. So, clearly the products that we're giving our consumer and our enterprise users are much more complex and that definitely impacts their need for support as well as the service level that we're seeing.

On the next slide, I think this complexity is having a direct correlation on the service level we're delivering and I have a couple of examples of that. The first is average talk time. We see during that same period when complexity increased so much, we see that the average talk time of a tech support incident has grown from 13.3 minutes up to 14.6 minutes. And, if you think about what the impact of that is, reps that are taking longer on every call are taking fewer calls per shift and that means that customers are holding longer for an agent and the average service level, and the customer's satisfaction level, can be impacted.