In a recent customer engagement the ValueNetworks.com application was used to visualize the customer experience when submitting a trouble ticket to a global customer support organization in the technology field. One of the results was to show how the case was passed along within the support organization until it was resolved. The animated image shows how the case moved between individual participants of the support network during its 52-day life-cycle, which significantly exceeded the applicable service level agreement (SLA).

Of particular note in this example was that the solution for the customer problem existed as a document solution in the knowledge management system that all three participating service levels had access to. Case handling occurred in more than 10 locations in 6 countries before the documented solution was “found” and the case resolved to the “satisfaction” of the customer. Further network perspectives examined were case flow, teams, organizations, and regional involvement, whereby an enrichment of the data with the HRIS system for correlation with skill profiles is being considered.

Upon viewing this perspective of the customer experience, the customer support management admitted that it was a chilling experience to actually “see” how their support organization was behaving – and decided to evaluate a large number of cases to explore whether this was typical. Fortunately this case was not typical, however what became clear during the investigation was that it was an excellent example for demonstrating the low level of knowledge sharing happening within the organization and the inefficiency of the relevant processes.

The intended outcome of the ongoing analysis of the customer support environment is the definition of optimal workflow and monitoring/notification systems in preparation for the introduction and configuration of a new CRM system. When configured the new system monitoring will be based not only on traditional customer support performance indicators, but also on value network indicators. The indicators identified help calculate the probability of case handling failures in respect to SLAs and provide relevant escalation and notification systems.

The data involved was a flatfile extract from the custom CRM system in place, which was batch processed within the ValueNetworks.com application to calculate network indicators and was then subjected to statistical analysis and evaluation by ValueNetworks.com analysts.