Firstly, welcome to the blogging world. I sincerely hope you keep up this sort of output. Its superb.

One thing I wanted to share with you was the story of a helpdesk implementation we rolled-out for UK hosting company who were outsourcing the bulk of their operation to a Contact Center Serbia.

We conducted a Customer Experience audit and found that a significant number of people contacting the helpdesk were web developers and freelance technologists who were both reselling and acting as mavens for a critical new service (at the time one of the first hosted Exchange Services in the UK).

We profiled them and found that they were both very technically knowledgeable and typically contacted the helpdesk only after expending considerable effort trying to solve their problems themselves.

These vital customers hated getting script reading support agents on the phone. They were being forced to describe a complex problem to people who did not understand the issues and whose main job was to register the issue and add it to the list of issues to be escalated “up” to the sort people who were the developer’s technical peers.

Our solution to this proved to extremely successfully. We simply inverted the classic support pyramid. Instead of having our least knowledgeable people in the first line, we put our system administrators on the phones. They triaged incoming issues, passing down low level support tasks (like mailbox configuration) to juniors whilst giving immediate attention to serious issues.

Where necessary, the issues was passed to the NOC engineering team, but it had been captured and described by an administrator and most importantly the customer knew they were dealing with highly skilled and knowledgeable “agents” who immediately understood their issues as peers. We also delighted customers by caring about the same thing they did and proving it by providing them with technical equals to support them.

Of course part of the reason were able to do this was because this was an outsourced implementation. We were able to hire truly brilliant Exchange administrators in Serbia for the price of trainee secretary in the UK. I believe that this is one of the the main customer experience benefits from correctly implemented outsourcing: Operational and Excellence delivered live. Customers love it.