I knew that I didn’t want Hudson to be like a typical call center. I wanted to be customer centric, making our reputation and profits based on how much we helped customers and exceeded their expectations. When I started Hudson and took the first tech support account, I didn’t intend to be in the “call…
How Hudson Software became the preferred choice for Technical Support and QA services In 1987 I found myself unemployed in the New York area, with a house, a wife, a baby, a dog, and a mortgage. With a master’s degree in Computer Science, I had been happily and fully employed for years working at various…
“How will I know what is going on?” When you are first thinking about outsourcing support, a question naturally arises that goes something like this: “How will I know what is going on?” To manage your outsourcing vendor effectively, you will need information and reporting about the outsourced activity. Managing a vendor to outsource technical…
A few posts back we had talked about one of the most commonly used tech support statistics, First Call Resolution and how it can be subject to abuse. Another important statistic in the tech support world is Time to Resolution, or more simply Resolution Time, but abbreviated TTR. Resolution time is just what it sounds…
What does outsourcing really mean for your business? Outsourcing is a relatively simple idea, but one that can often seem divisive. This is frequently due to confusion and disagreement surrounding the very definition of outsourcing. Entrepreneur defines outsourcing simply as, “The practice of having certain job functions done outside a company instead of having an…
We saw a good article the other day from InsightSquared entitled, “Why is everyone so obsessed with First Contact Resolution?” First Contact Resolution (FCR), is a simple statistic. It measures the percentage of cases that are resolved on first contact with the customer. So if you receive 100 calls, and 40 of them are resolved…
Tech Support: Delight or Fright? Does it pay to delight your customers with great technical support or customer service? An article recently published on the Zendesk blog is titled, Why delighting customers doesn’t pay caught our attention. Since we like delighting customers, we read the article carefully. The conventional wisdom is that the way to…
A recent article from the Association of Software Publishers echoes something that we at Hudson have been telling our clients for years: that tiered software support, the way most call centers do it, works very poorly. Here is what they said: “For a while now, forward – thinking customer support and call center managers have…
If you view technical support vendors mostly based on price, do you think that technical support is a commodity? Wikipedia: “The exact definition of the term commodity is specifically used to describe a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. …The market treats [commodity]…