SUPPORT SERVICES ON-DEMAND WEBCASTS

Service organizations are under increased pressure to generate incremental revenue, and enterprise support teams are now realizing they must borrow from consumer industries and master the introduction of sales into inbound service interactions.

Giving customers technical support and selling products or services are disciplines companies keep separate for the simple reason that the skills required are very different. Success in selling to support customers has been elusive and often disappointing, necessitating a rethink of the traditional approach.

Join TSIA and SYKES in this live webcast where we discuss the science behind creating the right environment where support and sales can successfully exist in harmony. We’ll look at the problem and why it exists, and the five components necessary to sweep aside failure and build a strong revenue stream from inbound customer support transactions.

Attend to learn:

• How to select the right people for success
• What training and development your team needs
• The importance of team management in achieving goals
• Which metrics matter most, and where conflicts exist
• How to provide incentives and avoid rewarding underperformance

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In Consumption Economics, TSIA’s leadership defines the brave new world of technology services, with a number of key trends forcing companies to alter their service strategy. For technology buyers, these trends have serious implications.

In this webcast, hear from TSIA's John Ragsdale about the impact to your core technology infrastructure from key Consumption Economics (CE) trends:

• Cloud computing and consumption based models. Business users are flocking to cloud technology, often due to limited—or difficult to work with—IT resources. But there are risks in the cloud model, leaving some companies moving back to on-premise.
• Mobility computing. The mass adoption of smartphones and tablet devices is changing the face of service, with implications across service disciplines. Field service, however, is seeing the biggest impacts, with field technicians making rapid advancements in on-time arrivals and first time fix rates leveraging mobile tools.
• Enabling technologies for CE. Idea storming, click stream monitoring and sentiment analytics may seem like tools in the domain of marketing, but there is a wealth of information sitting unused—or going uncaptured—that could help inform product decisions and service strategy. Hear about the technologies necessary to enable the Consumption Innovation phase described in CE, and which elements are available today.

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Since 2005, TSIA has been tracking—in our widely-followed Service 50 index—service revenue and profit trends in the technology industry. And the trends have very clearly pointed to an increasing reliance on both service revenues and profits to sustain the health and growth of technology product companies.

Listen as Thomas Lah identifies the latest observations and trends for the technology services industry. Key areas he will cover will include:

• Overall revenue and profit trends for technology companies
• Service revenue and margin trends
• How business models for hardware and software companies are shifting
• The growing influence of cloud computing on the financial results of the S50

TSIA aggregates the financial performance of these fifty companies each quarter from the public record. We identify service revenue and profitability trends, and provide critical observations based on the current quarterly update of 50 of the largest global providers of technology services.

Listen to this informative webcast and get the data you need to stay abreast of the latest industry trends!

Your customers are increasingly online and demand responses in real time — often via their mobile devices and social media. With 70% of online consumers expecting companies to try harder to provide superior customer service, how can technology services organizations compete?

The answer comes within a customer-centric social enterprise - where customers communicate with the front line who, in turn, have access to the rest of the organization to support them. Join John Ragsdale, TSIA's VP of technology research, and Nikhil Govindaraj, VP of Products at Moxie Software, for a breakthrough webcast on the value of collaborative customer service.

Register to gain a competitive advantage by learning how to:

• Capitalize on the convergence of internal operations and client-facing operations 
• Crowd-source answers from anywhere in your organization
• Integrate internal collaboration tools into customer service solutions for real-time insights and faster resolution
• Enable knowledgebase updates directly from collaborative content 

Plus, hear preliminary results for 2012 planned spending on online communities and social media from the just-completed annual services technology survey.

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It makes sense that putting knowledge at the fingertips of employees accelerates problem resolution, and we know that great self-service should deflect calls and increase satisfaction.

Still, companies struggle to determine if their knowledge management (KM) program is delivering sufficient results, and those shopping for knowledge tools question the potential for improvement to guide project budgets.

Effective KM continues to be a top inquiry subject from TSIA members and according to TSIA data, record KM spending is planned for 2012-2013, so we’re taking a good hard look at the numbers:

• What metrics are impacted by effective knowledge management?
• How do customer satisfaction and loyalty factor in?
• What results are successful companies seeing?

Listen as TSIA’s John Ragsdale along with Consona’s Duane George explore the answers to these questions and more. You’ll get solid advice on best practices for calculating the business benefits of a knowledge program.

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As the wild popularity of sites like YouTube have proven, video is an incredibly powerful communication medium, with the added appeal of being able to access the videos using any mobile device, from any location.

Mobility and Video are hot trends in service; with Innovative service operations leveraging video in multiple ways:

• Video-enabled knowledge management is having huge impacts on customer self-service success, as well as enabling mobile field service techs to improve first time fix rates.
• In learning, video is the primary driver behind the shift from classroom to distance learning, with huge revenue potential for education services. While video interactions for customer support may not be the norm, early adopters are reporting success, and the video call center agent is just around the corner.
• There is an element of social collaboration as well, as employees leverage mobile devices to share expertise or reach out for real-time assistance from peers around the globe.
  

Join TSIA’s John Ragsdale for this fun and informative look at how mobility and generational trends are making mobile, video, and social collaboration the latest “must have” technologies for service, as well as a discussion about selecting mobile devices for employees. What are the pros and cons of consumer devices such as the iPad versus ruggedized devices purpose-built for field employees?

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The services industry is experiencing a mega trend. The next wave of tech is a shift from on premises business models to cloud business models resulting in significant changes to the profitability of most services business models. TSIA launched at the 2011 Technology Services World conference in Las Vegas a new book entitled Consumption Economics: The New Rules of Tech, by J.B. Wood, Todd Hewlin, and Thomas Lah. The key premise of the book is the change that is occurring in how customers buy and adopt technology. The implications to support and field service organizations is huge given the revenue from the existing business model is based on a paid up front basis vs. a cloud based model that is paid on a subscription/consumption basis.

On March 29, I want to invite you to join me, Sally Foster, as I discuss the impact on support and field services organizations of consumption economics.

Tune in for this informative webcast, as I discuss:

• How customers tastes are changing: Value and Simplicity rule
• Why you need to lead the change in your company vs. be told to change.
• Services Convergence paves the way forward
• How the Support and Field Services organizations can change how they are thinking about supporting a customer in view of the consumption economics business model dynamics.

Register now to learn how the cloud is reshaping the future for support and field services.

Planning to finally pull the mobility trigger in 2012? You are not alone! TSIA research shows that field service organizations, many of whom have been sitting on the fence for the last few years, are now pulling the trigger in droves. In fact, almost half of field service organizations are now deploying mobility in their operations, and 40% of technology firms have budget for new or additional field service mobility in 2012-2013. It's time to move, or risk getting left behind.

Join TSIA and ServiceMax for this insightful 30 minute webcast on the 5 key forces that are driving this trend. John Ragsdale, VP Technology Research, TSIA and Susan Tonkin, Product Marketing Manager, ServiceMax will discuss why 2012 is the year for a mobile revolution in Field Service, lessons learned from previous mobility efforts, and how you can leverage mobility to not only create new efficiencies in your field service operations, but also drive new revenue opportunities.
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What is the greatest resource you have? There are many options, but we say the clear winner is knowledge. Knowledge lives in many forms and in many places within your organization and is ever changing. You must harness that collective expertise wherever it resides, and be able to distribute that expertise to the right people at the right time.

Service organizations that support technology products deal with both common and unique issues:

• How to provide answers to their clients’ questions quickly and effectively.
• How to provide a level of support that meets the expectations of their paying clients.
• How to capture all their organizational knowledge so it can be put to good use.
• How to reduce the cost of providing service while improving their customer satisfaction ratings.

Hear from TSIA’s John Ragsdale how key metrics impacted by effective knowledge management have direct links to customer satisfaction and loyalty, a driver behind increased KM spending. Early results from TSIA’s 2012 Services Technology survey indicate 2/3 of technology firms are making additional KM investments this year.

Also hear from Simon Yelsky, VP Product Management and Customer Support for RightAnswers, as he discusses how one company is taking a different approach to helping clients resolve all of these issues by creating a knowledge culture and making knowledge their most valuable service asset. Simon will also address how service organizations are collecting knowledge, employing automation to help them maintain knowledge, and utilizing this knowledge to better serve their customers and reduce their support cost.

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Canon USA knows that field service agents, with their face-to-face interactions with customers, can have a major impact on customer satisfaction and incremental revenue. A key differentiator for Canon has been arming their field agents with a robust knowledgebase to shift to a preventative and proactive service model and become more profitable as a result.

Attend this TSIA webcast to hear Brian Wrage, Director, Technical Support & Technology Systems at Canon USA, tell the story of how they have avoided some of the failure statistics of field services and turned it into a strategic advantage. Plus, hear his planned improvements for 2012, including a full transition to mobile!

Attend this informative collaborative discussion to learn:

• Field Services trends and best practices, including operational metrics
• Tactics for streamlining field service management
• Tips on obtaining tacit knowledge from the field
• Strategies to achieve sustainable and predictable revenue streams

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