Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Bill Rose, SSPA:
Let's look at the next slide; it focuses on, "Support Efficiency Creates Measurable Economic Value." I know that at SSPA we've been talking about this for some time now, but it's well worth discussing again, and that has everything to do with the pressures that are being placed on your customers to reduce their maintenance fees. And so what we find is that there are companies out there that we have classified as "fee defenders" and other companies that we classify as "frequent discounters." And what we found is that those companies that are fee defenders, they basically go out and say, "We don't want to discount our maintenance services, and here's why." So they defend the fee that they charge. Those people deliver better service. They deliver better service than the other group, which are frequent discounters, which have a tendency to go out and discount their maintenance and service and support. So let me just show you a couple numbers here, and maybe this'll help you to kind of see this, though. Here's some numbers that we know a lot about, right? Time to resolution, resolve time, and response time. The blue bar on top are the frequent discounters and the light blue bar on the bottom are fee defenders. Now, this is interesting to me because it basically says those people that defend - the blue bar underneath, light blue bar - those people that defend have better resolution times and better response times.

So let me back that up with one more slide, and this is going to show the same thing again; it basically says that when you look at call abandon rates and first call resolution, the same thing happens. Right? Those people that defend - that go out and defend their maintenance pricing are in fact delivering better service than those that don't. Okay?

Let me just look at the big picture perspective, the next slide. I titled this "Increase Service Offerings and Perceptions of Those Offerings." It's kind of interesting to me because if you look at this kind of timeline, if you will, on the left, it says "fewer service offering features" and on the right it says "more service offering features. I think we find ourselves in a position where we constantly have to keep adding new ways to deliver service, and remote support does that, all right, it's another way. It's another - it's not going to necessarily replace something; it may in fact be just add on to.