Planit's online Global Support Portal wins customer affection

The Portal is the same tool that the support service receptionists use when registering a customer's telephone call, with this opened up to customers in January 2010. "The new system means customers have the freedom to log a call whenever they want to, instead of having to wait until the support desk is open – so if they request support at night, it will be on the system and ready for actioning as soon as the support engineers log on the next morning," explains Planit's UK support & services director, Chris Aston. Customers say there are three major benefits of logging their enquiries through the Portal instead of telephoning: • The ability to raise their questions outside the support service's normal operating hours • The history and current status of all their enquiries is available for viewing through the Portal • Access to knowledge-base articles which may contain the answer to their query without needing to speak to an engineer. This uptake from telephone to Portal comes at a time when 85% of all customers receive an initial response from Planit's technical support engineers within 1 hour, whether their enquiries are registered through the Portal or by phone, and demonstrates an improvement on a year ago when 70% of customers got their first response within an hour. Mr Aston says the company has set improved response times as an important Key Performance Indicator, and helped engineers to achieve targets by showing them the actual elapsed time since individual calls were logged and how close they were getting to not meeting that target. As a result of this work, Planit is now one of the first companies in this industry to provide its customers with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for response times. The majority of queries can now be resolved without the need for an engineer to visit a customer's premises. "Remote technology means we can now log into our customers' systems and see their screen, just as if we were sitting in front of it." Solutions range from explaining how something can done, which takes just a few moments, through providing a temporary work-around, to creating Service Pack versions of the twice-yearly updates.