Supporting our Customers

On a SIMI lecture from Gabriel R. Bitran I learned that there are 4 characteristics where service differ from normal 'goods'.   One of them is 'Simultaneity'. Services are simultaneously produced and consumed, you cannot put service 'on stock' to deploy when the market or conditions ask for it....

You might know that it's cold in the Netherlands.   We experience the first winter since 11 years and this means that the temperature ate night is -10 degrees C.  In these conditions many people suffer from problems with their car (e.g.  a frozen lock or doors or a dead and broken battery).   When this happens, the majority of these people call the ANWB/Wegenwacht to get help.  The process is that a mechanic 'on the route' is dispatched to the unfortunate car-owner to get him/her back on the road... (in 2009 till now, 6th of Jan they helped 20.000 car-drivers...).

And here I would like to come back to the characteristic from 'Simultaneity'. Because of this unexpected cold winter week, the demand on the service organisation is HUGE but.... it is very difficult to set mechanics 'on stock' to be deployed these 2 weeks.  You simply cannot clone mechanics to expand the team for these conditions.. 
As a result of this characteristic, there is a risk of a growing backlog (wait-time) and as a result less happy customers  (waiting in cold cars...).  The way the ANWB handles this situation is by making sure all resources are on the road early and making longer days. As a result, the number of people on the road and the number of cases per mechanic increase so the capacity is larger during this period.

In support we know similar situations.  When introducing a new product version (e.g. eBus V12/Db v11)  or on period- (year) end we see and increase of activity on the customer side. This often results in more calls to handle by support and development, with the same amount of engineers (no we do not keep the on stock ;-) ).   There are a few ways we anticipate on this...

• By preparing, build experience and share this with the Oracle community so you can also avoid problems to happen.
• By making sure we have the customers with 'pain' on our radar.  There is a team of people running a monitoring program where they, during the migration or go-live,  keep a close watch on the customer to make sure we understand what is expected and fix what has priority.
• By keeping a close watch to the process and KPI's and adjust the process or resources when needed (you might have to wait a bit longer on a solution for non-urgent issues)

Nowadays there is a lot of discussion going on about Twitter, a 'new' micro blogging tool that keeps the web 2.0 community busy. As you are interested in the web and weblogs this might not surprise for you ;-)

Looking at it from some distance I can distinguish 3 groups of people using this Twitter.

First and largest group is 'the community', people twittering around, giving some insights in how they spend their day and sharing more or less interesting information like photo's or other content.

The next group is the content-providing companies like  BBC and  The New York Times.  More and more they find Twitter as additional stream to inform 'the world', replacing the email alerts they used to send to give a quick update to the community.

Group 3 are the service providers who use Twitter as service tool to their customers. For example Southwest Airlines is informing their customers on flight information.
I also see some companies starting to use twitter as a way of open-door for service related questions. 
In the past we used to call this the reception desk but in a globalizing world it has been replaced by web-based tools.   Starting with mail, followed by MSN/Chat and now we seem to have set the next step Twitter.  

There is a lot of movement in this area and because of this growing demand, large enterprises are starting to build Twitter-like features in their enterprise applications  (we are testing Ora*Tweet). Ideally you would like to connect your business applications to this communication instuments to automate sending info and capturing/routing incomming messages.

A lot of work ahead for the tech-guys and a lot of new ideas to be explored for the business innovators.....

In this post I was wondering if WE@Oracle Support can be of better service if we would open en service-twitter channel (in parallel with MetaLink and the phone) for catching user-questions... 
Looking forward to your suggestions.

Hans

http://twitter.com/hwiggerm

In February I will enjoy a short break and we planned to go on a ski-trip.  Since the hotel is in Austria and we will go by car we will need to have snow-chains available in the car.  I do not expect to use them but you are expected to have them in your car 'just in case'.

I called a large retailer with a shop near by asking if they where on stock (it seems that my car has a 'difficult' tire-size).  The guy on the phone was enthusiast and told me that he would reserve a pair so I could come to get them during the weekend.  So far so good !

When I went to the shop on Saturday... guess you know what comes next ... the same guy could not remember the call, did not reserve them and so did not have the snow-chains available ...  But he promised to have them reserved in the store later the next week.

Yesterday I visited the store again and ... no reservation no chains .... but luckily (and after asking the ignorant servant) she had one on the shelve.. hooray.    When paying I discovered that the box was broken so I asked for a new box - if looks could kill....

It took me some time and lots of energy but in the end we found a solution by putting the chains in a new box (was that so difficult?) satisfied customer ....  

Driving home I realized that these kind of servants are killing for your image.  You can spend tons of Euro's in advertisement but if you carefully try to ignore service to your customer, its a waist of money..  

Lesson learned - "Servant, you can make or break the image of the company your work for. The least you can do is be polite an do what you promised to your customer. Give it a try - sure it works".  

To end with a quote "Customers come by Foot but leave by Car" in my case I left with my snow-chains

Hans