KUALA LUMPUR, 28 AUGUST 2008 - The Malaysian office of global network solutions provider 3Com Corporation maintains that the satisfaction of its customers has significantly improved after a restructure of its Asia Pacific division.
According to the company, after the bulk of the Global Services Organisation was brought in-house in November 2007, an independent customer satisfaction survey gave 3Com a six out of a maximum seven rating in 12 out of 14 different service aspects. In terms of percentage, 3Com AP’s customer satisfaction rating rose to 85 per cent, from 70 per cent a year ago.
In addition, in the last two quarters, says 3Com, 90 per cent of both warranty and contract support calls were answered within two minutes. For AP customers with warranty support issues, their calls go direct to non-technical staff at a call centre in the Philippines while more complex support contract calls – 95 per cent of which are technical in nature – go direct to 3Com engineers in the Sydney call centre.
The company’s Asia Pacific field service delivery manager, John Wardell, said that by using dedicated in-house engineers on the line for priority contract customers, it is able to cut resolution times, because a majority of the technical questions can be answered immediately. “Our contract support customers are delighted to hear a 3Com person on the line, who is quick to understand the issue and offer a solution.”
In November 2007, 3Com announced that it was going to run a major part of its AP services and support organisation in-house to improve service delivery and give more personal attention to its AP customers. The restructuring was part of a US$12m global service improvement effort that included two new multi-lingual call centre functions based in Australia and the Philippines.
Improving soft skills
“It’s about putting the right level of technical support for the right audience,” said Wardell. “Moving ahead, we are focusing on improving our support staff’s soft skills and online support tools.”
He added that the company has a best practice improvement cycle methodology to ensure the enhancements to service quality and resolution times continue to improve. “3Com is already strengthening its professional services engineering teams across Australia, India, Malaysia, Korea and Thailand to assist implementation partners for larger, more complex deployments that involve 3Com’s latest technologies.”
Wardell added that localisation support has also been boosted with more Korean and Thai service agents on the regional services team. “Our priorities in the next 12 months are to continue to improve customer satisfaction, revenues and profitability from the services business.”
