Let Milestones Professional Make Your Case

One of KIDASA's customers, who manages support accounts for a major software developer uses Milestones Professional to track and monitor customer service requests and generate presentation reports to management.

His use of Milestones Professional has been instrumental in retaining a major customer contract.  How?  By ensuring that both his management and the customer management understand where support bottlenecks are and how they are being addressed. 

Using Red, Yellow, Green stoplights, management can tell at-a-glance where trouble spots lie.

If you are in a support role, you might be interested in reading this customer story and downloading the schedule and template.

What needed to be accomplished.

As a support account manager, one of my tasks is to track, manage, and monitor the service requests that my customer submits for various issues they run into with our software product line. The goal is to ensure the average time to resolution for each issue is acceptable. If and when it’s not, I need to take proactive measures to determine why and do whatever it takes to bring it back down to an acceptable level.

Problem at hand.

In preparing for a recent quarterly review meeting with my customer, I noticed some of the data showed an unexpected increase in the average time to resolution. This is extremely dangerous! If this data gives my customer the impression my company’s support is worsening, it could easily jeopardize their willingness to renew a key support contract. I wondered what could have caused this trend. Was it because my customer lacked the appropriate training? Was my company’s support staff impacted by a recent layoff? I just wasn’t sure.

Milestones Professional the tool for the job.

 I decided it was time to import all my customer’s service request data from Excel into Milestones Professional to take a look for any trends.

Using a calculation column to compare the difference in “support queue time” vs. “customer contact queue time” for closed service requests, I was able to solve the mystery. It appears an overwhelming majority of the service requests involved a customer contact that was slow to respond to support’s recommendations. In other words, these service requests often sat idle for days or weeks without a response back to support. This significantly raised the overall average time to resolution. To show this factual evidence to my customer, I simply used a stoplight column to display a red symbol (circle) for every service request where the customer queue time was greater than the support queue time. And luckily for me, I was able to simply copy and paste the actual schedule from Milestones Professional into a Microsoft PowerPoint slide to show my customer the big picture analysis.

Vindicated by Milestones Professional

Wow, what an accomplishment! Without Milestones, my meeting/presentation could have turned into a difficult situation where my customer blamed the product and/or support for this negative trend. Thankfully, I was able to present the evidence in an easy to understand format and convince my customer that their response time was the primary factor that increased the average time to resolution. Kudos to Milestones for analyzing the data, working extremely well with Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, and as always…for being the best software available to present and convey time based data.