ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS
Developers gain from support pain
Apr 10: CHE GOLDEN finds out how
a software developer shares knowledge between sales and engineering
departments to speed up product development time.
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| Asgard's David Watters
- The best thing about ieSupportManager is that it is designed
for support |
Products are constantly evolving to customer needs. It may not seem
that way--ever moaned about the new ring pull style opening on
tetra-packed cartons of milk? It looks like an inferior design
compared to the old one, but the new design is there because some
bright spark ran Avonmore customer services and suggested it.
Software is no different to any other product. It might take a
genius to invent it but, to make it commercially viable and to gain
market share, it has to deliver what customers want. For Asgard
Software, a Dublin-based company that develops specialist software for
the transport and logistics industry, its customer care-staff form a
direct channel to the needs and wants of its customers. If Asgard
can harnesses the knowledge gathered at the frontline by customer
care, its research and development team (R&D) can turn nuggets of
information about customer wants into must-have products.
But how to do it? 'As a company we are expanding rapidly and we
already had a bespoke support system,' said Sharon O'Sullivan,
business development manager for Asgard. 'But our customer base is
doubling and we will shortly be taking on new staff to cope with
increased business. We needed to upgrade our systems quickly so they
could cope with increased business, but we couldn't afford to lose any
information.'
 We
needed to upgrade our systems quickly so they could cope with
increased business |
Asgard's customer support manager David Watters went shopping for
software that could help capture customer information which would then
be rolled out to the rest of the company, but it wasn't easy finding
the correct product.
'We had a look at a few packages that had been built specifically
for knowledge management, but the prices being quoted were
ridiculous--£40,000 in one quote,' he says. 'We considered developing
a bespoke system ourselves, but we just didn't have the resources and
it probably would have cost us close to £40,000 anyway, so there were
no financial incentives to go down this route.'
Watters had a prior relationship with a company called ieComputerSystems
and he decided to take a look at a new product it had developed called
ieSupportManager.
'The best thing about ieSupportManager is that it is designed for
support, which was the most crucial part of the company that we needed
to upgrade,' says Watters. 'It is also very intuitive--using it is
similar to using an Internet search engine. Customer support staff are
already quite technical, so I trained them on it myself in a couple of
hours, which helped get us working on it as quickly as possible.'
Simplicity was important to Watters and the company wasn't looking
to reinvent the wheel. It needed a simple, uncluttered repository that
would allow staff to enter and access customer information. With
ieSupportManager, call-centre staff can look up customer calls and
link into ancillary information to give them a complete customer
history at their fingertips. E-mail packages can be filtered through
the system and logged in customer histories, so Asgard now encourages
all its customers to get communicate with it via e-mail, so
that vital information can simply be stored at the touch of a
button, instead of being staff keying it in themselves.
'The key features of this system for us are knowledge retention and
speed of turn around time, which was an issue for customers,' says
Watters. 'Now when people call with a problem, staff can search the ieSupportManager
database in seconds for a possible answer. If customers communicate
via e-mail they can cut and paste screenshots into the message so our
staff can see exactly what the problem is and get to work on it.
'When an answer is found, the customer e-mail containing the screen
shots and the answer to the problem is filed away for future
reference. Not only do customer get a faster response time, but it
also flattens the learning curve for new staff. It makes our business
processes much more transparent and new staff can be working the
phones within two days with all this information to help them, as if
they have been working here for months.'
| I
can see which customers take up the most time and which
products generate the most support calls |
The application helps Watters manipulate data so he can view it
from any angle and, he says, the reporting capabilities are terrific.
'I can categorise information in any way I choose and generate just
about any report I can think of,' he says. 'For instance, by defining
my categories I can see which customers take up the most time and
which products generate the most support calls. These types of reports
can help me see how maintenance contracts are being affected ,as well
as giving me an overall view of how support resources are being used.
Its made me a lot more organised as a manager!'
But while the product was designed specifically for support it has
become invaluable as a knowledge-sharing tool in other parts of the
organisation.
'The R&D and the support teams are interdependent within this
company,' says O'Sullivan. 'We develop our products based on customer
wish lists. In the past, passing this kind of information along within
the company has been done informally, via e-mails or memos and it
wasn't very efficient. Now the development team can log onto IE
Support Manager and find out exactly what customers are saying.
Recurring problems can help them identify bugs, while general feedback
helps them to refine their quality assurance process and testing.
This speeds up the whole development process, which means our products
will get to market much more quickly.'
The application is increasingly becoming a central repository of
company, as well as customer information. Information such as R&D
white papers can be saved on the system as well as any new information
documents the department generates. The sales department is now being
trained on the system as well. Referrals form a large part of Asgard's
business and the information on ieSupportManager helps the sales
people chase business armed with good information.
Best of all for Asgard, this life changing software didn't cost it
a penny. 'We offered ourselves as a beta site for ieComputerSystems,'
says Watters. 'The system has been up and running now for six months
on our NT network and so far we haven't had any problems.'
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