Quallaby Vastly Improves Global Customer Support While Cutting Costs
From its world headquarters in Lowell Massachusetts, Quallaby Corporation delivers highly scalable service-level monitoring and management solutions to network service providers (NSPs) worldwide. Notable customers such as WorldCom, Maaiah, and France Telecom use its flagship software product PROVISO V2 to collect data across very large systems and use it as the basis for monitoring and reporting on network performance to determine whether promised levels of service are being delivered.
"Deutsche Telekom needs to guarantee bandwidth and performance for customers whose networks they manage," says Steve Coskie, Quallaby Director of Professional Services. "They use our PROVISO product to guarantee service levels, for capacity planning, and for recording network statistics such as packets in and packets out."
Big, Ugly, Expensive
Previously, Quallaby had used another product to manage its rather mammoth customer support functions -- but there were problems.
Quallaby wanted to move its support mechanisms to the web so employees worldwide could easily share critical information about customers and respond quickly to urgent customer needs. "We never had an online support system before. We attempted to go that route once with another supplier, but it was too painful," Coskie recounts.
He describes the solution Quallaby initially adopted as "big, ugly, and expensive. The user interface was unwieldy, and it clearly required extensive customization to be useful or effective. We didn't know that when we bought it. Getting that customization would have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars more. We had that product about a year and a half when I found that my internal people weren't even using it for call tracking or to feed our knowledgebase, and those were the key reasons we had bought it. I also found out that if we wanted our activities to become web-enabled, that would cost us an ungodly incremental sum of money. Enough was enough, so we started looking for alternatives."
Quallaby examined Support Fusion's hosted service which promised to simplify, modernize, and add robustness to the Quallaby customer support operation worldwide. Coskie felt the web-based service would enable internal staff to work more efficiently . . . but beyond that, he was convinced that Quallaby customers could identify and solve a wide variety of performance issues on their own - if only Quallaby's support program could feed its knowledge base.
Support Fusion's solution could not only help Quallaby monitor more aspects of its customers' operations more easily and less expensively, it could also grow in lockstep with growing customer needs.
"We've found Support Fusion to be a better solution that costs far less than we were paying in annual maintenance for our predecessor system. The difference was huge --- $30,000 dollars a year," Coskie says.
When Support Fusion demonstrated the program to Quallaby in 2002, Coskie was impressed. "Its simplicity, flexibility, power, and ease-of-use were all huge for us," he recounts. "It was a quick, easy choice."
Deployment was swift. "It took very little time to create logos and color schemes consistent with our image. In a half-day, Support Fusion was up and running. It was pretty amazing. The other program took months," Coskie says.
Support Fusion In The Real World
From enhancement requests to bug-tracking, all customer interaction with Quallaby's support organization is tracked via Support Fusion. A Quallaby customer can easily access the customized Support Fusion interface to open a case online. All authorized Quallaby constituencies, inside the company and at customer sites, see the full history of the case and its status.
Coskie likes how the program enables his company to leverage critical data instantly among authorized personnel around the world.
"There are several screen views," he says. "As Administrative Manager, I see one view. Support reps see another, and sales reps have yet another showing the history of the account. Customers have a separate view into system.
"For me, the value is in statistical analysis. I want to see how long a case is in a specific state, and how long it takes from the time a call comes in until it's resolved. I also want the ability to examine each specific stage closely. Incoming calls are usually picked up by our support staff in about 15 minutes. Close to 60% of our support cases are resolved when customers first interact with the online system. It's nice to see those statistics because if you're responding quickly and solving problems quickly, customer satisfaction rises."
Coskie says that when Quallaby launches a customer with the program, it is customized "so all supporting documentation from our professional services organization is part of the customer record. Our support staff has access to all projects executed for the customer, with the complete history of each. Every bit of information we might need is right at our fingertips."
Enabling Users to Help Themselves
Support Fusion delivers unexpected insights into customer behavior. Authorized customer employees can access the Support Fusion knowledge base anytime, gaining access not only to their history but to any issue ever reported by a Quallaby customer.
"Now and then," Coskie recounts, "I look at some of the statistics Support Fusion provides, particularly call volume. One customer made about 15 calls to us over a year-long period, but had done several thousand knowledge base searches during that time.
"I followed up with the customer to see how things were going. They said about 80% of the questions they had, they were able to solve quickly by themselves, through the knowledge base."
Adding to the knowledge base is key to enhancing its ability to help customers quickly. "As we solve problems or come up with workaround solutions for customers," Coskie says, "if it's deemed useful to the global community, we sanitize it so it's not customer-specific, publish it to the knowledge base, and then all users can leverage that solution."
This one feature, Coskie says, has saved countless hours of support staff time and has helped Quallaby focus more on developing new innovations and enhancing service to NSPs than on fighting fires which weren't significant.
Nonetheless, Quallaby is only beginning to exploit what it has from Support Fusion.
"So far, we use only a small fraction of the actual power behind Support Fusion. We use the KISS principle--if you keep it simple, everyone will use it. That's our approach with both our internal people and our customers."
Coskie says that about 90% of all queries to Quallaby's customer support organization are made through the web now, using Support Fusion.
"Before we had Support Fusion, 100% of our support was by telephone, which is far more labor-intensive," Coskie notes. "Even with a small support staff, we have improved our customer response time and quality as well as performance accountability.
"It's funny," Coskie says, "until mid-2004, we didn't have a support organization, specifically. We had our professional services consultants deployed around the world handle support issues. Our company has exploded recently so we've put a dedicated support staff in place, though for the last five years we managed without one. Support Fusion has enabled us to grow our support staff slowly. It's been great."
Quallaby's customers have embraced Support Fusion. "When a new customer comes on-board, we spend about 30 minutes on a conference call going through the Support Fusion process. It's always very well received."
Support Fusion's real-time history tracking reassures clients that technical issues are addressed promptly.
Occasionally, Coskie finds things Support Fusion does not offer. "I had to get a report for a meeting one afternoon, and I needed some statistics Support Fusion didn't provide out-of-the-box. They turned the capability around for me in 35 minutes. I can enter a simple question like 'how do I?' or 'what about?' at 9:00 at night. Often my phone will ring at 9:15 with the answer. Their responsiveness is amazing," he says.
Coskie says he has dealt with "a slew of these products and home-grown systems" over the past 25 years. "It has always been a nightmare," he says. "Upgrades are a hassle, support is a problem, and getting the product to do what you want is a problem. But with Support Fusion it's been great. Their people are a pleasure to work with. We now use it globally in Germany, France, the UK and Singapore, and we're looking into expanding it into other parts of our operation beyond support. It's a no-brainer. It gives us more time to focus on real customer issues, not support tools. It's the one thing I never have to worry about."
Steve Coskie
Director, Customer Support - Quallaby Corp.
posted by Jim at
9/18/2006 01:55:00 PM
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