IT Support and Service

1. Customer Service & Support
Name: Anand Shah

2. • Find out missing letter
2
Ice Breaker
D H I
G K ?
J N O

3. • What is Support and Service (SAS)
• Why do we need SAS
• Key Styles & attributes of support resource
• Examples & Activities
• Best Practices and standards
• How to improve SAS
• Challenges to SAS
• Summary
3
Agenda

4. 4
Support and Service is not Everyone’s cup of tea!

5. 5
Honesty

6. 6
Customer is GOD

7. • In spite of the differences, the terms ‘customer service’ and ‘customer support’
are frequently used interchangeably. Even Google search does not recognize the
distinction. It treats customer support and customer service as the same
keyword string. Type in ‘customer support’ and you will get results for
‘customer service’.
• All businesses have an element of customer service but not all need customer
support
• Customer service = give your customers value for their investment in your
products or services
• Helps understand customer, define company, and impacts your bottom line. A
typical business hears from only 4% of its dissatisfied customers
7
What is SAS?

8. • At some point every member of staff is involved in customer service, whether
it’s the designer improving customer experience; a developer fixing a bug or the
front line support staff taking the calls, answering the tweets and replying to
emails.
• customer support to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of
a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble
shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product.
• Product (primarily one time cost) Vs Service (subscription with
daily/monthly/yearly recurring cost)
• Support driven development - Injecting humility, accountability and
responsibility into the development process by making sure the creators are
also the supporters. If I’m going to build this, how does it affect me later when I
have to support the user?”
8
What is SAS?

9. • Accelerates Product Knowledge: Nothing can throw light on the strengths and
weaknesses of your product better than a customer/user. As they are the people who use
the product and analyse it keeping in view
• Helps Improve The Product: The collaboration between the maker and the user of the
product makes it perfect. This is what Support Driven Development offers i.e. the
collaboration.
• Makes The Developer More Active And Involved In The Product It is a normal
human behaviour that when a person has to support his own work, he tries to give it the
best shot and as soon as they know they are lacking somewhere, they find the way
around to fix the issues coming up. These two factors together make the develop more
active and involved in the product.
• Improvise Support Mechanism: Developers with the technical knowledge bring new
ideas to automate support mechanism to the best possible level. This enhances the
quality of support provided to customers and improve the ways of Support as well.
• Brings Happy Customers: With a constantly improving product, great attention, and
quality Support, the Support Driven Development brings happy customer.
9
Why Support Driven Development?

10. • Service
• Tata sky
• SaaS
• PaaS
• IaaS
• Support
• Aqua guard
• Mobile
• Car
• IT Support
10
What is SAS Examples?

11. • Competitive edge
• Opportunity to interact with customer
• Capture valuable feedback
• Input to market demand and industry trend
11
Why?

12. • ITIL
• COBIT
• CMMi
• SixSigma
• Lean
• Problem Management
• Incident Management
• Multi line support
• War or Implementation room
• Metrics management
12
Best practices and standards

13. • Business leads technology and not vice versa
• Business goals must be centric of all architecture development and technology
selection.
• Defense department cannot use non-secure or open source technology. They
cannot have non-citizen working on the project nor overseas sub-contractor can
work on the project.
• Mission critical system cannot afford to have downtime or low performance of
the system
• Technology stack must be compatible with each other for seamless
communication and transition
13
Dos and Don’t example

14. • Understand support operation w.r.t. environment, downtime, Public Relation
impact, Loss of Data impact, Security breach, SLA
• Acknowledge
• 24*7 access and communication channel
• Handbook, FAQs, Dos & Don’t
• Minimize manual activity on Live server
• Security Access control
• Regular Maintenance (Wardrobe concept)
• Release Management
• Troubleshooting decision tree
• Root cause analysis
• Decision analysis report
14
Support operational efficiencies and effectiveness

15. 15
Challenges to SAS

16. 16
Why?

17. • Forward proactive planning
• Selection of right technology
• Improve Customer Experience
• Improve Business Benefits
• Right first time
• Value added service
• Voice of Customer
• Voice of Process
• Eliminating waste
• Heterogeneous Infrastructure
• Change control management
• Service level management
17
Challenges to SAS

18. • Future orientation
Styles and Attributes
• Flexibility

19. • Out of the box
Styles and Attributes
• Alternative Thinking

20. • Trial & Error
• Failed over & over and hence
succeeded!
Styles and Attributes
• Detailing
• Eye for detail

21. • Multiple View Point
Styles and Attributes
• Win-Win

22. • Confidence
Styles and Attributes
• Positivity

23. • Observation
Styles and Attributes
• Listening

24. • Reasoning
Styles and Attributes
• Questioning

25. • Passion
Styles and Attributes
• Versatile

26. • Seize opportunity
Styles and Attributes
• Clear our plate

27. HOW TO IMPROVE SAS?
27

28. • Disciplined and focused approach
• Religious & detail reporting and logging
• Gain customer business domain knowledge
• Interact with customer/users who is using or knowing the system
• Look out for system improvement areas and present
28
How to Improve

29. • Keep track of your ideas at all
times. Many times ideas come at
unexpected times. If an idea is
not written down within 24
hours it will usually be forgotten
• Pose new questions to yourself
every day. An inquiring mind is a
creatively active one that
enlarges its area of awareness.
• Engage in creative hobbies.
Hobbies can also help you relax.
An active mind is necessary for
creative growth.
29
How to Improve

30. • Avoid rigid, set patterns of doing
things. Overcome biases and
preconceived notions by looking
at the problem from a fresh view
point, always developing at least
two or more alternative
solutions to your problem.
• Be open and receptive to ideas
(yours and others). New ideas
are fragile; keep them from
breaking by seizing on the
tentative, half formed concepts
and possibilities and developing
them.
30
How to Improve

31. • Keep your sense of humour
active and ongoing
• Be alert in your observations.
Look for similarities, differences,
as well as unique and
distinguishing features in
situations and problems.
• Learn about things outside your
specialty. Use cross-fertilization
to bring ideas and concepts from
one field or specialty to another.
31
How to Improve

32. 32
Different types of SAS

33. 33
Different types of SAS

34. • Any input, feedback, questions?
34
Roundtable