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Q:  What is Next in the Evolution of Customer Technical Support?
 
While the first wave of customer technical support technologies automated the support environment with help desk and CRM applications, most requests still require a person to resolve the problem.
 
Today's support issues are increasingly more complex and the resolution of those issues often cross organizational boundaries. Increased call complexity along with a 20 percent increase in call volumes annually (Gartner) compounded by personnel turnover rates up 50 percent annually (Gartner) requires collaborative, multi-party person(s)-to-person(s) solutions to decrease costs, improve service levels and enhance customer satisfaction
 
The next wave of customer technical support technologies will leverage investments in existing support solutions, as well as promote the introduction of optimization and multi-party collaboration workspaces. All internal and external support resources, including professional services, partners, vendors and any skilled resource within the required domain, will utilize these workspaces. Enterprises that implement this collaborative, multi-party support strategy stand to gain enormous business advantages. Following are the capabilities that the next wave of support technologies will need to deliver in order to facilitate a more cost-efficient and collaborative support environment:

• Person-to-person(s) collaborative workspaces providing richer, multi-party interactions among various internal and external support resources. For example, a collaborative support delivery solution can facilitate dialog between an internal support professional and an outsourced vendor to resolve a particular problem in the most cost-and time-efficient way possible.
• Multiple, integrated problem workspaces allowing customers and/or support resources to collaborate efficiently. The workspace must provide many rich interaction services including synchronous and asynchronous messaging, phone integration, file sharing, desktop sharing, state-of-the-art diagnostic tools, resolution summaries and billing and tracking capabilities.
• Dynamic routing of service requests to the best resource based on business rules. For example, the system should direct requests to an internal support person when appropriate, while an outsourced provider handles those issues that can be efficiently addressed by a third party.
• Enhanced visibility and optimization of overall support business via active service contracts. An active service contract enables support managers to easily measure and report on multiple service contracts and service level agreement (SLAs) in one centralized location and provides insight into the allocation of all support resources at any given time.
• A management control center that defines the business relationships and service levels between the disparate organizations including time zones, service levels, skills, costs and other agreed business terms and conditions.
• An open architecture for integrating existing systems and tools is key. Information such as knowledge and solution process, must be provided and captured at every stage in the problem history.