Resolution Times Decrease 75 Percent with
Appliance-Based Remote Support

John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
And, on the next slide we see, I think, a correlating metric in first call resolution rate. And that had a 9% drop, which I think is pretty significant, from 2003 at 53.8% to currently 44. Less than half now of calls are resolved on the first interaction. In the SSPA News every month we ask a question, and the question we asked last month was: in what area did your company make significant improvements in 2006? And, the responses were, 40% of people said that they were able to make a big difference in deflecting interactions to unassisted channel, pushing more customers to web self-service. We also had responses about service levels and customer satisfaction. But, we had zero members say that they were able to increase first call resolution rate or decrease average incident open time. So, we see that this complexity is really impacting our ability to deliver excellent service and I think that that is putting more pressure on all of us to find tools that can really streamline this process and make up for that jump in complexity.

So, on the next slide, I was going through the SSPA Benchmark data looking for some interesting information to use in this webcast and I came across this question that I had not used before. And, in the benchmark, we asked our members to rate the tools that are most useful for resolving technical support issues. And, I think that the findings here are really interesting. The single most useful tool for solving customer support problems is the ability to view a customer log file and that is something, of course, that is inherent in remote support solutions.

No. 2, is of course the knowledge base that we all know and love and the third, following closely to those two, is remote control. So, we see that remote support is including the No. 1 and the No. 3 most useful tools for issue resolution.

We know that about 65% of our members are using remote support today. However, the average satisfaction with the tools they're using is not that high. On a scale of 1-5 with five being extremely happy, we see that the average satisfaction for the remote support in place is only a 3.5. So, just slightly over the middle of satisfaction. So, I think that we do have some opportunity here. I think that there are a lot of new features and functions out there that a lot of companies are not taking advantage of. So, I'm going to close today with some tips.