Archive for September, 2009
So What is Product Support and why is it important?
One of the best definitions for Product Support out there was published by Microsoft’s Product Support Services unit in Wikipedia. Although it relates to the role of PSS within Microsoft, it makes for a perfect generalization:
“Product Support is a company’s business unit with primary responsibility for responding to end-user and partner requests for assistance with the company’s products and services.
PS must also give feedback to development groups for use in the development of future products or product features. PS identifies major issues with products, and works with the responsible product teams in order to create “hotfixes” for these issues, and/or make sure that the issues are addressed in service packs or future product versions.”
Additionally, at Infolink we believe that PS should also collaborate closely and even be part of professional services teams to assist end-users during product installation and deployment.
The support options in the Microsoft Wikipedia posting are also accurate for most technology companies: “PS usually offers a wide variety of support options, which may be free of charge to the user or may have varying prices. Options include assistance with:
- Basic usage
- “Break-fix” support
- Upgrades/patch installation
- Onsite and offsite consulting”
Infolink’s Product Support Environment puts all the elements in place: technology, people and processes that a company’s needs to meet its Product Support responsibility to its users. Responding to end-user and partner requests for assistance with a company’s products and services is a key part of the “extended” product the company sells. It is expected by users, and when lacking it represents a major risk to a company’s reputation and growth.
See more at http://www.productsupportenvironment.com
Infolink Success Story: Remote support of middleware product
Posted by techinnovationthoughts in General on September 8, 2009
Challenge
A client experiences a problem with one of their supporting software and they need help to improve the software’s performance, through better support and monitoring. The client wants to be able know how to react to alerts and reduce the number of issues that the software creates, as well as significantly reduce the time it takes to resolve issues raised by the product users.
The cause of the client’s problem was an IBM product called MQSeries, a messaging platform that handles messages between different applications. It is generally used to handle customer service applications, web portals, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. After the product was installed, messages would not always communicate across applications properly, which meant alerts would be sent out to the executives of the company, often in the middle of the night, as many as 200 times per week.
Solution
Infolink took control of the issues by providing a group of well-trained staff to remotely support the client’s site and to figure out how to help prevent problems and handle issues created by their software.
Our staff began by analyzing the issues and discovering their support software generated a couple of hundreds alerts, but most of the alerts were duplicates, and harmless ones at that.
After determining that duplicates were the cause of the problem, the staff applied a method called “tuning” to the supportive software. So when the duplicates were found, they were removed and reconfigured. This prevented those duplicates from creating alerts in the future.
The tuning method helped reduce duplicates from a couple of hundred times per week to only twenty actual problems that needed real attention. We also made sure that we recorded the client’s problem and put it into our databases, so when it came up in the future, we knew what to do to fix the problem.
Alert tuning combined with a professional user support team soon made a huge impact. After seeing a big difference between having issues coming up and not being able to respond to them sometimes for days versus having our team handling and responding to the same issue in a much shorter timeframe, the client was impressed and completely satisfied.
A year and a half later, we spoke to an executive of the client’s company, and learned that he was very pleased with the results and our performance.
“The fact that I’m not being called at 3 am is the most important thing to me. I don’t know what you are doing but no news to me is good news,” said the executive.
By accomplishing our goal — to significantly improve service levels and eliminate support as a source of risk — we were able to extend our contract with this healthcare company for over 6 years.
The end result was that we showed our team has the ability to resolve a client’s problem much more quickly than if they have to do it themselves.
For more information visit http://www.productsupportenvironment.com