With SupportCenter Plus 7.5 Professional Edition, the support server can now offer Multi-Tenancy through Business Units. This means that multiple SupportCenter Plus installations can be combined into one install, with one central configuration database managing input requests to multiple group data files. The result is lower total cost of ownership for customers requiring a central customer support system environment since we are able manage Customer HelpDesk installs on fewer servers. Response times for single server multi-tenant customer support management are comparable to a single-tenant install.
Multi-Tenancy can be used for companies with separate brands or divisions. Example: a automobile company has two divisions, one that sells motor cycles and another cars. In this model, multi-tenancy would enable the company to have one SupportCenter installation, while each division has a separate database and customization of the application.
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Each Business Unit may be defined the following way: Group of companies belonging to same verticle, companies in same geographies, companies dealing with same products, etc...Hence the business units can be defined based on your company's needs...  Value offered through Business Units for Customer Support Management:
Happy Customer Support, Team SupportCenter Plus |
Today’s customer support environment puts your company under greater pressure to reduce operational costs and offer business value by your support, your support process needs a service level management and automation of your SLA rules that can:
SupportCenter Plus meets these objective at ease:
Earlier on crossing the SLA defined only a mail can be triggered to the respective manager, now the automation starts at marking the trouble tickets as L1, L2 and L3 and directing to groups as G1, G2, G3 and switches of levels and groups based on escalation criteria.
The benefit of our First Response SLA is to capture the unnoticed tickets which is the first level of escalation for immediate attention. You can configure upto to four levels of escalations where actions automatically get attached to Support Representatives.
SupportCenter Plus gives flexibility and automation of escalation to different levels of tickets or support representatives. This improves the efficiency of your support process by 15%
Also get e-mails triggered on the status of your trouble tickets.
To counteract a significant waste of existing support resources as manual methods of SLA administration are employed SupportCenter Plus SLA actions automate SLA activities. Most important among these are real-time and over-time monitoring and predictive early warning to impending SLA breaches, and the ability to integrate support process and business needs of your customer.
Team SupportCenter Plus
I am not here to give you release updates and issue fixes, but talk to you about some nice features that have come up in the recent release of SupportCenter Plus - 7012. Of course, it's a follow up from What's Cooking Post.
First things first, Canned Responses are officially released in 7012. To know more about it, check my What's Cooking post here. I am going to talk two other simple features in this post.
Email Signatures:
We had some of our customers worried about typing the Email Signatures every time they type a reply. Our Internal customers - I mean the Support Staff of ManageEngine were the most demanding. We have come up with the option of adding Email Signatures to your replies.
To enable it, click on the Personalize tab in the top right, and add the signature on to the system. Check the Screen shot for better understanding.
Notifications to Account Managers & Primary Contacts:
This was one of the those features, which was asked by some of the customers. There was no particular way for the Account Manager and the Primary Contact of the customer to track the request threads, because there were no specific notifications given to them whenever there is a change in the request.
By Account Manager, we mean the person who manages a set of particular customers (clients) in your company and by Primary Contact we mean the person from your customer's company, who can view all the requests of his account.
Now SupportCenter Plus has come up with the notification option, by which notifications can be configured for Account Manager and Primary Contacts. Check the screen shot for better understanding.
Download the latest version of SupportCenter Plus here to enable these features....
Well, thats good for the starters, wait for the main course in Hot on the Plate - II for something special...
Gmail calls it 'Emails for the truly lazy'.
Nope, don't worry we are not starting an email service. We are just introducing Canned Responses feature in SupportCenter Plus. There are innumerous support questions which bog your support team daily. Although, its their primary job to reply to those queries but it's one of the most boring,tough and costly job to provide answers for repeated queries.
Reducing the response time in repeated queries and commonly asked questions will actually reduce the support costs considerably. Canned Responses are the best solution for this problem.
The Canned Responses feature in SupportCenter Plus will help you to add,manage and share predefined replies. It allows you add different variables like the name, request id , categories and all the other possible variables related to the request.
The responses you create can be made private or public according to your convenience. The public option will allow you to share the canned responses with the other support staff. Canned Responses can be accessed from the request view page and even new canned replies can be made from the same.
Canned Responses provide a personal touch and it helps you to customize your replies in a better way. The main advantages are the reduction of response times and savings in support costs.
That's one of the tasty additions that's being cooked for you by the Chefs in SupportCenter Development Team. Keep looking at this space to know more on What's cooking in SupportCenter Development Team.
I am not here to speak about the Bill Gates' book...but something more interesting than that.
We had so many requests, rants and even strong criticisms on the road map issue. So here we are coming up with the Road Map for SupportCenter Plus. The schedule given in the road map is tentative and may change based on priorities.
We are in the process of taking some big leaps in terms of product development. We like to know your feed backs, votes, suggestions on the road map…
Want to know what those big leaps are, check out our road map here….
http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/support-center/roadmap.html
Take this situation; I call my broadband customer care for a simple configuration of my MAC OSX for the Internet. I have to press 1, then 3, then 1 (etc. I think I have to press numbers at least 5 times) and at last I end up with a customer care guy, who haven’t heard of MAC OSX even in his previous life… err
I had to configure the same in my hometown with another broadband company but fortunately they gave me a printed manual with the Ethernet modem and I used it to configure my MAC with the connection. (But the engineer who came in for the installation asked me for Internet explorer with about blank screen in a MAC, even though I had given her Firefox).
In both the situations, the customer care executive and the engineer didn’t know how to configure the MAC, but in the second situation I had the manual which I could use. The whole point is the customer of the current world is smarter and warrants immediate solutions to his/her problems. The customer can help himself out when there is a simple problem.
The Customer Self Service Portal will help you in these kinds of situations. If at all the first company had a self service portal, in which I could have searched for the configuration settings provided in simple steps I would have saved my time, customer care executive’s time and the cost incurred by the company for the executive.
Why waste your time, cost and productivity when you can make it simple for the customer. Customer is not a moron, he is smarter than you. He is more inclined to solve his problems than you and so he will expect a faster solution.
SupportCenter Plus provides you an excellent Customer Self-Service portal in which you can create solutions for simple problems, classify them in to topics, sub-topics and in keywords. The user can search through keywords; find solutions for simple problems and even complex problems if the administrator wishes to allow them. The admin can configure what to show and what not to show.
The latest thing is that you can configure a template of solutions to particular accounts and those accounts can view only those solutions associated with them. It will be helpful when you have multiple products with multiple accounts associated with each product. It also reduces the amount of time used by the customer to search for his solutions.
(Click the thumbnails to see in detail)
How does it help me?
Common, it will save your cost, time and will increase your support representative’s productivity time. And above all it will reduce the number of calls and emails coming in to your support team considerably. You can find the difference when you deploy your self-service portal effectively. Just using the portal will not help. Use the portal diligently and efficiently. Get Smart and make your customer even smarter….
PS: So at last how did I configure my MAC? The next time I called I got hold of a smarter customer representative who helped me out. But it cost me one more call, one more day and some increase in my blood pressure.
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