denotes premium content | Dec 5 2008 Feature
posted 1 Sep 2000 in Volume 4 Issue 1
Customer-focused knowledge
One of today's
buzzwords and hottest topics is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Most CRM
systems available today cover the three functional areas of service, sales and
marketing. The key driver for implementing CRM systems is customer retention,
and not gaining new customers. To retain customers, high quality systems are
required to make sure that every time the customer has a query or a problem, it
is resolved efficiently and effectively. In the case of high-tech companies, the
enterprise knowledge base plays a crucial role in effective customer service.
Most modern
customer support systems consist of a problem tracking system and an integrated
solutions database, which form the core of the enterprise knowledge base. In
high-tech companies, the knowledge base is available to customer support
personnel as well as development engineers. It is also becoming very common and
important to provide controlled access to subsets of the knowledge base directly
to the customer.
A typical ‘customer problem’ life cycle consists of three distinct
phases:
High
level business benefits
The introduction of a solutions
database and supporting search tools provides an organisation with certain
business benefits:
Knowledge transfer &
creation
In
many high-tech companies, it is very common that complex and intricate knowledge
about specific products is held in the heads of individual engineers. The
transfer of such knowledge into a common and accessible repository is often the
biggest challenge. When implementing a customer service system, some of this
knowledge is transferred when the system is being set up. The remainder needs to
be transferred when the system is up and running.
In order to make sure that engineers
continuously add to and update the knowledge base, business processes and rules
must be introduced. For example, a simple business rule can be invoked by the
system to insure that problems that take longer than one working day to resolve
can not be closed unless a ‘solution’ is created first.
Using a web or other application,
knowledge can be created as part of the workflow. This, sometimes, can be
captured whilst talking to the customer about a problem, that is, online and in
real-time.
Advanced products offer features that assist in the creation of
solutions. These include editable terms dictionaries, statement matching and
pop-up help windows. Statement matching allows users to take statements that are
created as part of a solution and match them with similar statements already in
the knowledge base – optionally replacing it with the statement already used in
order to maintain consistency.
Once a solution is created, it needs
to be authorised. Privileged users will be able to ‘publish’ a solution and make
it available to the world. Other users may require formal approval from
authorised personnel. This is normally handled by processes and workflow. Some
element of housekeeping is required to make sure that obsolete, out-of-date or
low-use solutions are removed.
When a solution is entered into the
knowledge base, it can be translated into specific languages, and may be
classified by type, status, or customer-defined properties.
Knowledge searching
Most products
provide a certain array of tools to enable the user to search for solutions. The
different types of searching that can be performed include:
Case Study
ARM may not sound an
immediately familiar name but it is highly probable that you use a product that
was enabled by the company’s technology. When you check your schedule on a
personal organiser or push the buttons on your mobile phone you are likely to be
using a product that contains a chip based around an ARM® microprocessor core.
The company is an
intellectual property (IP) provider that was established in November 1990 as a
joint venture between Acorn, Apple and VLSI. It designs and licences
power-efficient, cost-effective RISC processors, peripherals, and system-chips
for international electronics companies including Alcatel, IBM, Intel, Sony,
Texas Instruments and Toshiba, to use in digital electronics products ranging
from digital cellular telephones and smart cards to automotive systems and game
consoles. Since its opening listing on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq in
April 1999, this award-winning company has grown at an incredible rate, entering
the FTSE 100 in early 2000.
ARM’s rapid growth has prompted the
company to deploy the necessary technology to ensure it can continue to provide
quality support to its rapidly expanding customer base. As well as designing the
RISC microprocessor cores used in a variety of applications, ARM has dedicated
support and engineering divisions that provide the comprehensive, near 24x7,
support required by its customers to develop these advanced and complex systems.
The sheer penetration of its designs in the world's technology market means that
the company’s main support centre in Cambridge handles upwards of 400 calls a
month from 35-plus Silicon partners and even more individual developers with
design or product queries.
Although 400 calls a month does not
seem high for a typical support centre environment, ARM's support operations
fall in the ‘low-volume, high-complexity’ category. The support calls handled by
ARM engineers are often very complex. In order to resolve issues quickly,
sophisticated systems are required.
When the company first began
operations with just 12 staff in a barn in Cambridgeshire, ensuring that all
customer queries were being dealt with, and product issues and their resolutions
disseminated to all staff, was a relatively easy task. With the company now
employing over 450 staff in 12 offices around the world, this informal process
rapidly became insufficient.
John Thompson, Manager of the Global
Support Division at ARM, says: “Our customers depend upon our designs to get
their new products delivered to the market as quickly as possible, to give them
a critical edge over their competitors. If they’re experiencing any development
difficulties, we have to be available to provide a solution as soon as
possible.”
ARM
had chosen to implement a technology solution that enabled it to log and track
all support calls through a single, common database platform, to ensure that no
query was left unresolved, as well as providing staff with access to a library
of recurring faults and known fixes. However, ensuring that all staff could
access the solution quickly and easily from wherever in the world they were
located was proving a difficult challenge.
Thompson explains: “A number of our
staff are always on the road dealing with customer queries or providing
training. As such, we can have staff dialling into the solution from anywhere in
the world. Previously, our staff were required to download two megabytes of data
before they could even access the database itself – and that was costing them
time and the company money. We were also concerned that, if this continued, we
would not be providing our customers with the quality support on which we pride
ourselves.”
Creating a secure, easily accessible intranet
A custom built interface
to ARM’s support solution created a secure intranet that enables all users to
access the system via a standard web browser over dial-up and ISDN lines. As a
cost-efficient method of providing easy access to the main system ARM has been
able to deploy the solution broadly and effectively within the company thus
providing total visibility into its customer support activities.
ARM's cupport group
accesses the solution to log and track every customer call and contact regarding
a design or product query. These staff can also access a history of previous
cases to see if a resolution to that particular issue has already been
identified. In addition, sales representatives can access and interrogate the
system to track all cases relating to their individual customer accounts.
Should it be
determined that the problem is wider than just a support query, the support team
logs the issue within the database to be forwarded automatically to ARM’s
engineering division, who also have access to the system to log and track cases.
Once a fix has been found the system generates an automated notification to all
relevant customer cases that a resolution is now available.
Thompson says: "With the ease of
access that we now have we are able to disseminate technical knowledge and
problem resolutions around the company far more extensively and quickly than was
possible before. Our ability to access this information enables us to resolve
issues swiftly and efficiently - and that means our clients are able to get
their products to the market as quickly as possible."
Empowering customers over the
web
ARM is
now looking to facilitate further access to the solution by making it available
over the Internet. In addition, the company is considering extending its CRM and
eBusiness strategies to enable partners and developers to self-diagnose faults
and search for existing resolutions through the external web site.
Thompson says:
"Empowering the customer to resolve straightforward queries themselves will
facilitate their design process and free up our staff to deal with the more
in-depth, complex technical issues they face. This will increase both the speed
at which we respond to queries and the overall quality of our customer support,
particularly as we continue to grow."
Afshin Rabbani is managing director
of Princeton Consulting. He can be contacted at: arabbani@princecon.com
