Product Support Services Saved the Day - A Case Study

The Customer

A leading network security and information management company in the USA required a rigid support setup to aid its product sales team. It was much needed because the company's operations had expanded to other countries and it was becoming very difficult to manage the support function.

The Challenge

The company approached Flatworld Solutions with the following challenges -

Due to the company's increasing client base at a fast pace, a lot of pressure was building up due to the absence of product support services.

The company was unable to provide product support services after the normal working hours. Thus, outsourcing product support services to Flatworld Solutions facilitated product support round-the-clock.
The turnaround time to resolve queries of the company's non-USA clients was huge. It had to be reduced, especially for its clients in Asian and European countries.
The company was incurring heavy costs to provide the product support services.

Flatworld Solutions formed a committed team of product support engineers who were highly qualified and well versed with operations in domains such as Oracle, Networking, Operating systems and Network Security. Then, a dedicated support center was put in place, which was equipped with voice, email and internet facilities. The secure support center was ideal to host a test simulation environment.

Flatworld Solutions executed the support operations in a series of stages -

Initially, product support was provided at night - after the normal working hours. Later, support was provided round the clock.
At the beginning, only email support was being provided to the company's clients. Over a period of time, voice support and chat support services were also included.
Severity levels in the customer query resolution process were introduced.
An escalation process, to pass on the critical defects pointed out by customers to the engineering team in the USA, was also setup. This ensured that only the most critical defects in the product were reported to the company's engineers, while less critical queries were resolved by Flatworld's support team.
A call tracking system was put in place in order to record all call-related data.
A formal training program was also devised to enhance support operations. The operations were also improved by the introduction of a dashboard and MIS.

The Results

Flatworld Solutions met the requirements of its customer within 6 months of implementing the project. During the 6 months, the special support team from Flatworld was able to enhance the quality of its customer's support operations, including the overall business process. Some of the areas that were considerably improved were -

Workload of the company's support team in the USA dropped drastically as Flatworld's support team managed the bulk of the queries with ease.
The availability of 24X7 support operations helped the company manage its clients in a better manner, especially those located in Asian and European countries. This resulted in improved customer satisfaction.
Considerable decline in the overall costs was recorded by the company by outsourcing its product support services to Flatworld Solutions.