Support and Maintenance Portal

When you set goals for your Support organization your have the opportunity to state how you want to bring people, infrastructure and technology into action.

• Which product(s) do you want to support?

What do you know abofut the satisfaction levels of your customers? Are they satisfied on all levels? You have to ask them to get the picture. You have to execute on their complaints to get grip on the satisfaction levels.

Levels of satisfaction

• Functionality of the software
• Response times on Reported Support Issues
• Way of approach by Support Analyst (communication)
• Quality of the solutions provided (Bad fixes)
• Quality of the Self-Service options

Several ways to measure

Performance can only be measured when performance related data is available in the Support System.

Master Data

When you like to measure the performance for Individual Support Analysts, Teams, Departments, etc, you need to have this data as master data available in your Support System. So your organization structure needs to be somewhere in the Support System. Same counts when you would like to measure performance for Customers and Product (versions), service or feature packs, packages, modules, etc, as well.

Performance Data

Performance data is data that tells you how well you handled or are handling a reported Support Issue. The following aspects are important for internal and external usage:

Frequently in Second Line Support a reported support issue turns out to be an Enhancement Request. Of course the customer will state it is a defect. It depends on the policy of your company how to act upon it. From an economic point of view you should not give in unless you will loose the Support and Maintenance contract with this customer and thus income. Of course the customer could threaten you but he can not do this every time he does not get what he wants. So your customer will pick his fight carefully.

What you should do any way is to log an Enhancement Request for future usage. Such enhancements requests are very nice sources to improve your product further. When on the same area several enhancements requests are logged it is wise to consider it for future releases of your product.

An Enhancement request requires a bit of different approach than a defect. It has to explain the missing functionality in detail as well as the impact on the customer. Explain what the customer is capable of when the functionality is provided. Describe how much could saved by the customer within his business.

When you solve support issues and you want to be prepared for the future you need to know how much capacity is required on average to cover your Support activities. The calculation is easy but it requires effort to find the data needed for the calculation.

First step in the calculation

To calculate the capacity required take the amount of Support issues registered over the last few years:

       Year       Support Issues registered

• 2003                 2500
• 2004                 3000
• 2005                 6000
• 2006                 5000
• 2007                 8000
• 2008                 4000

Total                          28500

In total you handled 28500 support issues in the last six years. Now on average for this source you had to fix 4071 support issues a year.

Step two

How long on average does it take you to handle a support issue? To be sure about the amount of hours your require hour registration on support issues for a certain amount of time. Measure a year long to get a good average. Let's take 3 hours for this calculation.

So to handle 4071 support issues on average it requires 12213 hours on a yearly basis. The amount of hours required depend on the knowledge level of your Support team, the complexity of the software, the quality of the documentation and last but not least the quality of the software.  When Development has done a lousy job your require more support capacity to fill the gaps.

• 12213 hours / 8 hours = 1526.6 days
• 1526.6 days / 5 days = 305.3 workweeks
• 305.3 workweeks / 40 hours = 7.6 FTE on a yearly basis

Note! FTE = one fulltime resource based on 40 hours per week

Step three

You have different kind of Support Issues like business standstills, major problems, etc. When you have a major difference in the amount per kind or time spend spend per type your calculation have to be tuned on that situation.

So let say the outcome of your investigation is as follows:

Type of issue                            Average time spend in hours

• Business standstill                           8
• Major Problems                              4
• Minor Problems                              1

Type of issue                   Amount of Issues per type

• Business standstill                           10
• Major Problems                              1015
• Minor Problems                              3046

Step four

The calculation:

• (10 issues * 8 hours) + ( 1015 issues * 4 hours) + (3046 issues * 1 hours)=
• 80 hours  + 4060 hours + 3046 hours = 7186
• 7186 hours / 8 hours = 868.25 days
• 868.25 days / 5 days = 179.65 workweeks
• 179.65 workweeks / 40 hours = 4.5 FTE on a yearly basis

Note! FTE = one fulltime resource based on 40 hours per week