IT support organizations are doing more with what they have and the increasingly popular tools of choice are self-service, knowledge management and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) according to HDI’s just released 2009 Annual Practices & Salary Report.

The study, conducted with 1,053 participants from 11 industries in the U.S, Canada, Australia, India and The Philippines revealed:

--Even though support centers in general do not appear to be supporting more customers, the large majority of them continue to see an increase in their number of incidents.  The leading contributors are changes in infrastructure and/or products.

--The number of support centers whose employees are receiving bonuses is down five percent. Support managers foresee both hiring freezes and salary freezes in their organizations. This is up 21.4 percent and 23.6 percent, respectively from 2008. Still, there are 19 percent of centers whose management receives bonuses and 45 percent whose management and staff receive bonuses.

--Self-help tools are the primary implementation initiative for 13 percent of support centers. This is up from 10 percent in 2008.

--Calls to live support reps continue to be the leading communication channel for incident management, followed by e-mail.  E-mail productivity is increasing, though, resulting in fewer interactions, and calls. 70 percent of incidents are resolved with two or less e-mail exchanges and fewer e-mail incidents are being converted to phone support than in 2008.

--63 percent of support centers currently use knowledge management (KM) software, while 20 percent are planning to add it.  Over 13 percent of support centers are calling it their primary initiative for tool implementation.

--While many support centers are embracing collaborative tools such as SharePoint (30 percent) and Wikis (17.4 percent), they do not widely use social networking tools such as blogs, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook (News - Alert) or MySpace to provide support.

--ITIL, which, reports Wikipedia is a set of concepts and practices for managing IT services, development and operations with comprehensive customizable checklists, tasks and procedures, seems to be particularly popular in Australia as well as with internal and large support centers.  43 percent of support organizations are currently using or implementing ITIL while 21 percent are planning to implement some part of it.

--Fewer support centers are outsourcing services in all areas except for one, hardware support and repair.  The top reasons support centers are not outsourcing more are due to concerns about control of service, service quality, customer acceptance and then cost.

--Although the primary training focus for new hires is product knowledge, customer service remains the number one area that support staffs are being trained in overall.  Also the computer industry is currently providing the most training for its IT support staff while manufacturing and retail provide very little.

“The Annual Practices & Salary Report takes a deep dive into the state of the service and support industry,” says Rich Hand (News - Alert), HDI executive director of membership. “It offers an inside look at support centers’ practices used throughout the industry which assists managers and directors to validate existing practices, showcases new ideas for improving methods and procedures in support centers and also provides a set of data to which support centers can benchmark against,”.  “Given the world’s current economic climate, support centers are working hard to maintain their commitment to the industry and meet the needs of their customers.”

 

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