SUPPORT SERVICES RESEARCH TOPICS
The TSIA Research team is committed to maintaining content on a list of topics that are important to our Support Services members. Here are the Support Services topics that TSIA is pursuing in 2012:
|
TOPIC |
DESCRIPTION |
|
Account Services Organization |
Transforming support services to an account services organization |
|
Analytics Everywhere |
A key concept in Consumption Economics is leveraging analytic platforms to mine customer data and interactions for business insight. |
|
Benchmarking Technology Services |
Development of general concepts and unique TSIA approach to benchmarking technology services. Emphasis on the practice business application of benchmarking. |
|
Building Value-Added Support Offerings |
How support organizations build out value-added service offerings. |
|
Consumption Analytics |
The discipline of analyzing actual customer usage data to create new service offerings and sales opportunities. |
|
Contract/Entitlement Management |
Tools used to manage customer warranties and maintenance contracts, and provide fast and accurate entitlement for customers seeking assisted service. |
|
Converging Service Resources |
Tactics to leverage resources across traditional service lines to optimize cost structures and scalability. |
|
Converging SLAs |
How the blurring of traditional SMB and enterprise markets is changing the expectations of customers regarding service level agreements and the cost of support contracts. |
|
Customer Management Technology |
Tools for customer management, including incident or case tracking and customer relationship management (CRM) software. |
|
Customer Satisfaction |
Establishing customer sat process. Optimizing customer sat process. |
|
Customer Satisfaction/Enterprise Feedback Management |
Customer satisfaction and loyalty tracking, sometimes part of a larger Enterprise Feedback Management program. |
|
Enterprise Knowledge/Content Management |
Tools and processes for capturing, sharing, and retrieving tacit and problem-resolution data. |
|
Enterprise/Intelligent Search |
Search technology that leverages linguistic analysis to better understand customer questions, and the ability to reach content stored in any system to retrieve results. |
|
Field Service Scheduling/Dispatch |
Tools to identify the best resource for a field service appointment and provide routing assistance using GPS and real-time traffic updates. |
|
Learning Management Systems/Learning Content Development |
Technology used to create and distribute learning modules to customers or employees. |
|
Mobile and Video in Service |
New technology and processes enabled by new mobile and video capabilities offer dramatic improvements to productivity and operational costs. |
|
Multichannel Service and Self-Service |
Moving customer traffic away from more expensive and less effective channels toward channels with higher sat scores and lower cost, typically migrating phone and e-mail traffic toward chat and the online community. |
|
New Major Markets |
Delivering services in new major markets such as India, China, and Brazil. |
|
Online Communities/Discussion Forums |
Online communities for customers and employees. |
|
Organizational Design |
How service organizations are structured. |
|
Outsourcing |
How support organizations can best leverage outsourcing partners. Trends of bringing support centers back onshore. |
|
Proactive Support/Intelligent Diagnostics |
Technology used to analyze customer environments to identify failing components or to predict when outages will occur to allow preventive action. |
|
Revenue Recognition |
Changes in revenue recognition rules. |
|
Service Business Model |
Tracking and benchmarking margins and investment levels for a service line. |
|
Service Level Agreements |
Standards for SLAs. |
|
Service Revenue Generation |
Attaching services. Minimizing discounting. |
|
Support KPIs |
Best practices for the KPIs a support organization should use to manage the business. |
|
Support Pricing |
How to price support offerings. |
|
Support Scheduling Optimization |
Tools used to create schedules for multi-channel support environments using interaction volume history and employee skills. |
|
Support Services Optimization |
Optimizing overall cost structure associated with delivering support services. |
|
Support Services Resource Optimization |
How to optimize the allocation of resources across partners, Level 1, Level 2, etc. |
|
Talent Management: Support Services |
Developing support services employees. Retooling support employees with new skills for the world of Consumption Economics. |
|
Technologies of Social Media/Social Service |
Technology used to track and automate customer interactions via social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. |
|
The Changing VAR Business Model |
How cloud consumption models will impact the business model of service delivery partners and value-added resellers. How OEMs are helping their partners adjust to these new business models. |
|
Unassisted Support |
Tactics for helping customers support themselves without direct assistance from support service staff. |
|
Vertical Go-to-Market |
Restructuring the company to take products and services to market by vertical industry. |
Click here to read more about TSIA’s 2012 Research Agenda and the industry trends that are impacting technology services.