Customer
Support
Plan

Customer Self-Service Web
version 1.0

Author: Monica

Date: 19 January 2000

Table of Contents

MISSION: Customer Support	2

Short Term Strategy	2

Long Term Strategy	2

Customer Support Operations Plan	3

Phase I: Establish Customer Support Center	3

Formulate Operations Plan	3

Assign dedicated telephone number	3

Assign Customer Support e-mail address	3

Complete first draft of Customer Support Web page	4

Establish Customer & Partner Interaction Metrics	4

Develop Work Flow and Escalation Process	5

Establish Key Metrics of Customer Satisfaction and Operation Costs	6

Hire and Train Technical Support Staff	6

Phase II: Identify and Implement Web-Based Customer Support Center and Tools	7

Future: Customer Support Offerings Still in Development	7

Personalized Customer Web Pages and Software Downloads	7

Support Model Web Page for Customizations	7

YourCompany.Com Online Customer Forum and FAQs (USENET)	7

MISSION: Customer Support

Our commitment is to provide our customers and implementation partners with the best customer support package in the industry, while providing built-in incentives to minimize operation costs.

Short Term Strategy

Customer Support’s short-term strategy is two-fold. First, the Customer Support staff will place special emphasis on providing personalized, live telephone support to our customers, with the objective of getting six (6) “live,” referenceable customers. Second, Customer Support will assume a liaison role in coordinating optimal solutions for our customers, in concert with our project teams and implementation partners, throughout the project implementation and production cycle.

Long Term Strategy

To assist customers with their implementation projects, problem resolution, information requests, and product knowledge, our company will continue to develop and perfect Customer Support proactive Web-based tools for the “virtual” customer support center. These include a hypermedia knoweledge base, support models, customer personalized Web pages, project histories, software downloads, FAQs, and a customer USENET Forum.

Web-based customer support tools will empower customers to answer their own questions and meet their own needs online, without even having to pick up the telephone. A self-service customer support approach will significantly accellerate customers’ product knowledge, as well as enable Customer Support staff to focus on identifying and resolving issues of greater severity. Such an approach provides quality solutions with shortened response times and minimizes operation costs.

Customer Support Operations Plan

Customer Support’s strategy will be carried out by implementing a two-phase operations plan. Phase I will establish skeletal Customer Support, and Phase II will provide customers with the self-service Web tools needed for proactive issue resolution.

Phase I: Establish Customer Support Center

The goal is to establish a Customer Support Center to support production down issues. This is to be accomplished by November 31, 2000. The tasks involved include the following:

Formulate Operations Plan

Assign dedicated telephone number

Assign Customer Support e-mail address

Complete first draft of Customer Support Web page

Establish customer and partner interaction metrics

Develop work flow and escalation process

Establish key metrics of customer satisfaction and operation costs

Hire and train technical support staff

Formulate Operations Plan

This task was accomplished October 31, 2000.

Assign dedicated telephone number

This task was accomplished November 10, 2000.

Assign Customer Support e-mail address

This task was accomplished October 29, 2000. This address is a temporary repository of customer tickets.

Complete first draft of Customer Support Web page

This was accomplished October 27, 2000 and reviewed by Marketing. The page will be added to the company Web site by November 15, 2000.

Establish Customer & Partner Interaction Metrics

This task was accomplished October 24, 2000.

Contact Options

Customers can report their support issues to Customer Support via:

E-mail at Support@YourCompany.com

Online with 24-hour access to Customer Support’s comprehensive Customer Support Center at www.Support.YourCompany.com

Fax at 921-555-1347

Phone at 921-555-1340

Hotline Specifics

Customer Support staff will be backed by the expertise of skilled technicians 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, holidays and weekends.

Live support will be provided from 6 AM to 6 PM PST, Monday through Friday.

After-Hours Pager Support will be provided between the hours of 6 PM and 6 AM for Priority 1 and certain serious transitional implementation-production situations only.

Response Time Matrix

To ensure that customers’ needs are addressed in a timely manner, Customer Support personnel will prioritize issues according to the following escalation matrix:

Priority	Problem
Description	Response Time
1	CRITICAL – Production system down. Causing interruption in business processing. Needs immediate response.	1–4 hours
2	SERIOUSLY IMPAIRED – Production system slow-down.	1 business day
3	NORMAL – Development or Implementation problem.	2 business days
4	LOW – Information request.	1–3 business days

Implementation Partner Support

Support for issues reported by partners assisting customers on site, with base product installations and implementations, will be coordinated by Customer Support staff in concert with the designated Implementation Manager (IM). See Code Customizations Support section for limitations on support.

Code Customizations Support

For customers that are on maintenance, Customer Support will support all customizations that have been developed exclusively through certified developers and/or consultants, and are ultimately included in a future release of the product. Base product support includes fixes, enhancements, and new releases. However, support varies under the following circumstances:

Customizations added exclusively to customer’s version of a product, that are performed by on-site consultants, but are NOT included in a future maintenance or release of the product, are supported on a non-billable basis only to the point of system acceptance. The customer will assume all support for these customizations beginning from post-acceptance testing going forward. Additional support after acceptance testing is available on a billable basis and subject to the availability of resources, which will include fixes and enhancements.

Customizations added exclusively by customer or implementation partner to customer’s version of our products, or to base code, are supported only on a billable basis and subject to the availability of Customer Service consulting services.

Develop Work Flow and Escalation Process

This task was accomplished October 24, 2000.

General Ticket classifications

Code approved Change Requests

Documentation errors

Product how-to, questions

General product information and sales lead questions

Customer Support Web site access issues

Support Roles and Responsibilities

Primary Customer Contact (PCC): Each customer will have up to three PCC’s responsible for reporting issues to Customer Support.

Implementation Partner (IP): Third-party certified partner at customer site, who assists in implementation.

Customer Support: Customer Support Center staff that coordinate support for resolution of issues.

Implementation Manager (IM): Project manager assigned to a specific customer implementation project.

Work Flow and Escalation Flowchart

Temporarily, until formal Customer Support and defect tracking systems are installed, much of the ticket and defect tracking will be performed via email and Excel spreadsheet.

Establish Key Metrics of Customer Satisfaction and Operation Costs

This task was accomplished October 24, 2000.

Measure response time from initial customer report to resolution, according to criteria in Response Time Matrix.

Measure volume of reported issues by (1) Contact Option, (2) Priority, (3) Customer, (4) Product Group, and (5) time of day/night.

Measure periodic customer support operating costs incurred by customer in labor hours offset by license revenue.

Cost as % of revenue and/or cost per client engagement

Customer retention and repurchase rates

% of customer sites serving as references; new business from customer referrals

% of incidents solved without personal contact (by problem category)

% of incidents resolved on first call; calls/issues

Issues per client/project/installation/module

Average and longest time to close incidents

Telephone service level (average and longest hold times, abandon rates)

Call lengths

Email and other response times; # emails per incident

Employee turnover

Training hours per employee (initial + ongoing)

Time to resolve escalation outside support

Speed to reduce most-common problem types

Conduct periodic surveys via Web Site, telephone interviews, and customer site visits, regarding level of quality of customer support provided.

Hire and Train Technical Support Staff

Train Customer Support staff on YourCompany.com products (accomplished November 3, 2000)

Recruit, hire and train initial Technical Support Engineer by January 31, 2001.

Evaluate staffing levels based on above Customer Satisfaction metrics on quarterly basis.

Recruit, hire and train additional Customer Support Engineers, one additional engineer each quarter, if metric justified.

Phase II: Identify and Implement Web-Based Customer Support Center and Tools

The goal is to implement the Customer Support system. The tasks involved are as follows:

Evaluate and Purchase Customer Support System by December 15, 2000.

Arrange for Customer Support system demos by December 31, 2000

Install Customer Support System by January 31, 2001.

Train Customer Support staff on Customer Support System by March 31, 2001.

Future: Customer Support Offerings Still in Development

Personalized Customer Web Pages and Software Downloads

Personalized customer web pages are a great way to showcase Your Companysoft.com products as well as customize customer support. Personalized home pages will be maintained as a repository of customers’ historical data, which will assist customers significantly with their installation of Your Companysoft.com products through the post-implementation process. Downloadable software fixes and customized enhancements, specific to the customer’s environment, will also be available immediately through “push” technologies.

Support Model Web Page for Customizations

To assist customers with their Your Companysoft.com customizations, Support Model includes a comprehensive library of shared customer customizations. This page is hyperlinked to the Customer Support Center home page.

YourCompany.Com Online Customer Forum and FAQs (USENET)

Forum: Customers can ask questions and share information in real time with other customers and YourCompany.com developers through an interactive forum via YourCompany.com’s board.

Bulletin Board of FAQs: Customers can readily obtain answers to FAQs and post questions and answers to each others’ complex product adaptation issues, that are not readily answerable or would otherwise involve billable consulting support.

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Software Project Management Kit For Dummies	Customer Support Plan Example

Customer Support Plan

Software Project Management Kit For Dummies

Greg Mandanis

2000-01-19

IDG BOOKS WORLDWIDE, INC.