BENCHMARK SURVEY: TECHNICAL SUPPORT COST RATIOS.

Over the past few years, software companies have struggled to keep the cost of telephone-based tech support under control. Thousands of hours of consulting time, conferences, and operations research have been spent on finding ways to deliver support more efficiently, without cutting service quality to a level that might send customers to the competition.

So what has all this effort accomplished?

Sadly, not much. Although individual companies have fine tuned their phone-based support operations, overall industry benchmarks for tech support performance have shown almost no improvement since the last Soft-letter/ASP benchmark survey in 1997 (and the results of the 1997 survey in turn showed minimal change from our first survey in 1993). For most software companies, telephone support remains a painfully expensive service that, even worse, rarely seems to buy customer loyalty or good will.

Clearly, there's no magic bullet for the support cost problem. Better product design may reduce the total demand for support, call center automation can probably improve efficiency and delivery, and more attractive Web support options are bound to lure many users away from the telephone. In the meantime, though, the biggest payback in support process improvement is likely to come from hard work on classic issues of productivity and cost management. And for that purpose, we offer the benchmarks and data in this report as a reference point.