Customer support department of a Hi-Tech organization
striving to be efficient should always evaluate the customers' measure
of satisfaction regarding the support activities in the field. This
feedback sometimes can bring surprises for management layer who
considered that all factors were taken into consideration and the
customer should be satisfied, but in fact, the customer is
disappointed and is looking for alternatives to this "good" support.
As result the company losses a lot of money and for mid-size and big
companies the loss reaches literally millions of dollars per year.
What is it about ? It's a knowledge preservation (Know-How) factor a
disregard of which is very costly for the support giver and very
painful for the support receiver.
The modern Hi-Tech companies' products, once hardware oriented, became
during time passing heavily software based utilizing the modern
complex operating systems and databases with tight cross-platforms
relations, with huge amount of tunings and configurable parameters per
component. The nature of the many companies business approach - to
tailor solutions per customer - adds and multiplies diversity of the
mentioned technical aspects into the systems' complexity. Support
staff learning a specific product, passes much difficulties on a way
to be called real experts. This learning period takes in average 1.5 -
2 years and people should stay in a mode of continuous learning also
after this because of new versions, additional components, new
equipment, changed procedures introduced all the time as a requirement
of the business to be competitive in the modern fast-changing market.
So, after 1.5 - 2 years of these people service, the company can
hopefully count on them as on experts, meaning the lion's share of
mistakes, damages and project delays caused by their incompetence
already happened in the past (during the mentioned first years).
Utilizing a hierarchical structure of support Tiers, the company plans
to minimize further delays, mistakes and damages in the field in hope
that a corresponding next Tier has all the relevant knowledge and
tools required for the task performance. But this next Tier is also
consists of the people who needed to pass all the steps of study and
to gain necessary experience to be ready to carry out the pertinent
tasks.
Most of companies doesn't practice the "expertise level" assessment
mechanism to see objectively the personnel's skills degree. Very often
people with poor skills and abilities are appointed to be team leaders
and managers of support units and damage from these promotions, based
on solely personal links inside the company, is multiplied
drastically.
If the company doesn't try to measure of an expertise level in an
objective way, many experts leave the company when see that there is
no fair promotion or challenging options for their professional
development. And each time, when a real expert is leaving, the
corresponding area - he was responsible for - is suffering very long
time. It's like illness of the company's body. And the remedy against
this illness is only one the knowledge preservation. How to achieve
this ? How to prevent such a negative impact of one person's absence
on the business results ? How to stop losing millions of dollars each
year and prevent further losses of even more considerable amounts of
money ?
By implementing a concept of the knowledge preservation. And, first of
all, by recognition and understanding this concept as a key factor of
the success. The rest will be easy and an interested company will
build the knowledge preservation program where real experts will find
real appreciation incentives and compelling (non-virtual) career path.

And a use for a few saved millions of dollars per year can be found, I
guess, very easily.