As I blogged in June, I had an "Aha!" moment at the IQPC Remote Device Monitoring and Management Summit that I refer to as the
"Remote Services vs. Human Touch Value Paradigm". What I heard from the companies in attendance is that by providing service remotely and therefore decreasing the number of times a technician goes on-site to fix a problem, there is a perceived reduction in value delivered by the service team.
While there are external challenges and changes, such as this, that need to be considered when deploying remote service solutions, there are similar internal changes that evolve when moving to a SaaS model. Customer support is an internal group that will see significant changes in their roles and responsibilities. I see them as morphing from "fire jumpers" to fire preventers" - let me explain...
In a typical on-premise product installation, a support engineer's profile consists of:
- Product specific subject matter expertise
- Fire jumpers, ready to leap into the firestorm
- Intimacy with their software product within a customer's environment
- Focus on fixing customer problems, but be as proactive as possible
- Focused on customer satisfaction
Their day-to-day activities consist of solving one problem after another, documenting the case remedy for future use, and on to the next problem. Basically a break / fix treadmill. As well as an engineer can know a customer's environment (as it relates to their software), there are still major challenges from a hardware perspective, numerous 3rd party components, infrastructure, and configuration settings - making a support engineer's job very difficult and mostly reactive.
Some believe that the role of customer support will be minimized with the advent of SaaS. An excerpt from a recent blog article by Jeff Kaplan challenges this notion by stating that "neither Google nor Amazon offers this form of customer support where customers can receive support from a real person." More significantly, in this "faceless persona" model, Jeff comments that "by omitting a customer support capability from their offerings at this stage they are running the risk of driving away customers who don't want to put up with continuing service quality issues."
I agree with Jeff. With SaaS, support is as important as ever - it's just the daily activities that will change. Instead of having to navigate through the intricacies of a customer's environment, the support engineer will be working with a known set of configurations, a standard level of software product, and a deeper understanding of the base environment. Much of the on-premise mystery will disappear, as the SaaS technical staff is responsible for the full environment, from configuration, 3rd party components, and basically managing the entire technology stack. The number of software upgrade support cases will decrease since the vendor is also responsible for patch and upgrade activities.
It's almost a changing of the guard, moving from being "fire jumpers" into "fire preventers". As less and less break / fix issues are reported, customer support can become even more customer centric and proactive, which will drive greater customer loyalty, which will help in driving growth and profitability.