I second Warren on this.. Maybe a good start would be, to send out, or at least make a survey available to the customer to rate responses – especially or at least the initial response.. After all the initial response really decides where that ticket may be headed to through its lifespan.. And then use the information received from that survey to feed the SLA..
For e.g. in Warren’s particular case, if Warren was asked a couple of simple questions.. 1) Did our initial response meet your expectation (assuming that our expectation has not yet been disillusioned by the reality that we are currently facing).. Yes/No 2) Did we understand your problem and use all the information and data you provided to understand your problem? Yes/No I think the answers to these two questions would be very useful to validate both, the response time AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, the quality of that response. If both the answers are Yes, everyone's happy... If one is Yes and the other is No irrespective of which is yes or which is no, it could indicate a communication problem, either from the customers side, or from the support side, either of which is not a good thing. The SLA may not have been broken, but it might need a supervisor to be involved at some stage, to understand why that communication problem happened, and if needed get the customers supervisors involved too, in the event the customer is not relaying the problem correctly... If both the answers are No, AND there is no other response from your team within the defined SLA period, it pretty much means the SLA has got killed. This is the problem area that needs to be addressed. The AND clause is to eliminate a human possibility that some agent may have not seen something initially and 5 minutes or a reasonable amount of time after responding, realizes that, and responds back with a rejoinder, saying “Oops... Didn’t notice that.. my bad.. here’s my follow up response..” Perfectly acceptable to most of us... Another response rating for that second response and if you have at least one yes, we are good to go again... Maybe it may not be possible to implement this exact model in a real world, but the closer we get to a model like this, I think both BMC as well as its customers would have a lot to gain and a happier future together... Just my 2 cents... Joe From: Warren R. Baltimore II Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2012 7:49 AM Newsgroups: public.remedy.arsystem.general To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Support - An open letter to BMC ** Jay, First, thank you for your reply. I'm concerned that you are focusing on this one incident. What I experienced yesterday has become indicative of support from BMC. 1st Level support is often times an exercise in futility. If you have been following this thread (as I am sure you have), then you will see that there have been many comments that reflect a general feeling of disappointment with the overall support experience. The problem is not the individual that I first dealt with. As I said, I have no doubt that he is a hardworking person. The problem is one of process. The very tool that many of the BMC applications is built around is not used in an effective manner by 1st level support. The SLA is designed with one thing in mind, speedy responses. The problem with that is they don't have to be effective responses. I personally would prefer to wait longer if I knew the first response I got back was one that indicated an understanding of my issue and environment (all information I try to supply). I do not want this to be about the tech in question. It is my belief that he did his job within the process that he and his co-workers have been following for some time. And there in lies the problem. I would like to point out on the positive side that I included his manager on my initial response and did receive a VERY quick response. He moved me on to a Senior Engineer, and I am hopeful that we will be able to resolve the issue. Again, thanks for the reply. I hope that this discussion leads to improvements within the support structure. Sincerely, -- Warren R. Baltimore II Remedy Developer 410-533-5367 _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug12 www.wwrug12.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
