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Key Factor Of Success

Yuri Ritvin

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.

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