Hello,
We are a 2nd level of escalation in a service provider, trying to put a $
value on the support we give to our NOC and other implementation teams,
when they email us about problems they face. But we are merely bits and
bytes engineers that cant quantify and justify the value of what we do to
the management team. I guess these smart suits want to see an excel sheet
with a table of how much they save or gain by the support we do. We respond
to technical questions and simulate problems in a lab.
Can anyone help me with an idea or any material i can reuse? Templates? Has
any one been in a similar situation.
Thanks
Kim
Kasper/Karim/Kim
Your job is customer retention. Your value is maintaining all company
income. Write the yearly revenue on a piece of paper and hand it to
them.
Hey,
So usually this is done by the business unit leaders. At AT&T people used to call it "pushing the wastebasket". The idea is that each department runs as a separate business and in order to evaluate the business you debit and credit departments as if they were counterparties in a trade. Someone usually ends up on the outside looking in.
Typically, for call centers, this evaluation is done on a cases handled versus calls placed manner with time/$ values associated with every ticket.
Tier 2 support costs more per person than tier 1. If tier 2 doesn't actually speed or reduce call traffic, there's no point in having a tier 2. Now, as one might imagine, there is a great deal of subjectivity in these numbers. Many teams try to tackle this by dividing salaries by hours on the phone. This can hide a lot of the value of tier 2 as the whole point is to eliminate extra time someone would've spent in tier 1 looking for the answer.
Your challenge is to quantify how much time you're saving and multiply it by your salary per hour number.
That's a good place to start.
Cheers,
Joshua
I used to think that these kind of situations take place when a manager was
never an engineer so he does not understand how things work but i was
surprised when i faced these from managers with an intense engineering
career so i gave up on trying to give conceptual excuses and want to just
give them the dump tables and numbers that they are looking for.
Kim
I would think your $ value would be calculated by a few factors.
1. How much would it cost to train and hire NOC guys that do what you
do today vs. using outsourced support for those issues or going to a
higher level team.
2. How much longer would SLA affecting problems take to solve without
you?
3. This one is tough, how many customer implementations would fail and
how many customers would you lose due to the loss of technical
expertise?
A super simple calculation would be something like "we provided 10,000
hours of support and a consultant with similar skills would have cost X
dollars" or if they would have escalated to an even higher level in your
organization you have to calculate the cost of your hours vs the hours
of more expensive engineers.
A calculation you will probably not be able to make is if a higher
engineering level than you had the time and resources to handle the same
cases or if they would need more body count to do so. I can't tell what
your $ value is without knowing the cost of not having you.
I would think the best thing to respond with would be to take some of
the cases you handled and find out what it would have taken to solve the
problem if you had not been there. For example, I you provided three
hours of help that no one else in your organization could have, you
could calculate how much an outside consultant would have cost and how
long it would have taken to retain that consultant. You will then be
able to say that X project would have cost this much and taken this much
longer.
Bottom line is what is the cost of NOT having you.
Steven Naslund
Hello,
We are a 2nd level of escalation in a service provider, trying to put a $
value on the support we give to our NOC and other implementation teams,
when they email us about problems they face. But we are merely bits and
bytes engineers that cant quantify and justify the value of what we do to
the management team. I guess these smart suits want to see an excel sheet
with a table of how much they save or gain by the support we do. We respond
to technical questions and simulate problems in a lab.
Can anyone help me with an idea or any material i can reuse? Templates? Has
any one been in a similar situation.
Sounds like a job for the Bob's.
There is no such thing as a generic business case that can be applied across all companies in an industry. Every business is unique in its product definition and organization structure, but each question is also unique and therefore the analysis must be done every time.
The way to begin is to ask this manager what he believes the possible outcomes are (downsize your group, eliminate your group, re-define your group, etc.) and then work with each of the key stakeholders that you have to estimate the impact of those outcomes. For example, if 1st line operations indicates that eliminating your group would result in decreased customer satisfaction and missed SLA's, ask them to quantify it as much as possible and go to take the numbers back to your business people to have them estimate the impact on revenue.
The analysis should be constructed and presented in standard finance terms (like NPV) so I would suggest that you make friends with someone in finance to assist you with the preparation. You can also take a short two-day course like this http://executive.mit.edu/openenrollment/program/fundamentals_of_finance_for_the_technical_executive/16 that will teach you how to build up these analysis yourself (I have taken the one referenced and I recommend it to all managers with budget responsibility).
The outcome from these discussions often has surprising but positive outcomes for everyone...maintaining the status quo is not always the best possible outcome despite the biases we usually have when we begin the analysis. 
If you work closely with all of your stakeholders, everyone will learn and benefit from the experience.
Dave
Thanks everyone for the feedback.
Can someone give an example on how i can calculate $ value from improving a
product/service usability and servicability? I am trying to categorize what
we offer :
1) Improve customer experience
2) Reduce service deployment time
3) Improve service availability
Regards
Kim
You need to talk to your marketing/sales department and have them figure out how many existing clients you would retain by maintaining the current level of service, how many clients you would lose with lower quality of service, and how many clients you would attract with better service. From that, you can figure out a rough ROI for your department.
This isn't a fundamentally technical question, it's a marketing & sales one. You can have the best service ever, but if your company is unable to attract or retain clients (whether due to your company's PR reputation, market saturation, or whatever), it doesn't matter.
- Pete
We are a 2nd level of escalation in a service provider,
trying to put a $ value on the support we give to
our NOC and other implementation teams,
when they email us about problems they face.
Hi Kasper,
Support is about customer retention. You solved a customer's problem. As a
result, the company continues to recognize revenue from that customer for
another year. When you fail, the company loses that revenue stream.
Tier 2 support is about solving the difficult customer problems. Often
these are Power User problems -- they would have solved a tier 1 problem
for themselves. Power Users are interesting because each "recommends"
services to something like another dozen customers. They're the "computer
guy" the luddites know. When a power user departs upset, other customers
will leave over the course of the next 12 months because he recommended
something else to them. They won't complain. They won't offer the company
an opportunity to retain them. They just leave.
So, success on a tier 2 call means retaining not one, but as many as a
dozen customers.
And that is the value of tier 2 support. You're tier 1 with a multiplier
effect on customer retention which is much higher than the difference in
your salary.
Can anyone help me with an idea or any material i can reuse? Templates?
Has
any one been in a similar situation.
Sorry, can't help you there. You'll have to do your own research to put
supportable numbers to the claims.
Regards,
Bill Herrin