IT Support Industry Striving To Maintain Commitment To Service: Survey

HDI, the world’s largest membership association for helpdesk and IT service and support professionals and the premier certification body for the industry, has announced the 2009 Annual Practices & Salary Report, a comprehensive study that presents an overall look at the state of the IT support industry. The report shows that the technical support industry is working hard to maintain its commitment to the service and support of end-users and customers, despite the difficult economic backdrop.

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

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The study was conducted with 1,053 participants from 11 industries between May and July 2009 from the United States, Australia, Canada, India and Philippines. The results illustrate behaviours and opinions of support centres in a wide array of industries, sizes, and organisations that range from local to international. The report is broken down into six categories, including Incident Management; Support Tools; Process, Procedures, and Strategies; Performance Metrics; Training, Certification, and Satisfaction; and Salaries.

Report highlights include:

• Even though support centres in general do not appear to be supporting more customers, the large majority of support centres continue to see an increase in their number of incidents. The leading contributor to increased incidents, once again, is attributed to changes in infrastructure and/ or products.

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

• The telephone continues to be the leading communication channel for incident management, followed by e-mail. One-third of support centres respond to e-mail incidents between 15 minutes and one hour and over one-third respond between one and four hours. Additionally, 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.

• The number of support centres whose employees are receiving bonuses is down five percent. Still, there are 19 percent of support centres whose management receives bonuses and 45 percent whose management and staff receive bonuses.

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

• Support managers foresee both hiring freezes and salary freezes in their support organisations. This is up 21.4 percent and 23.6 percent, respectively from 2008.

• 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. The Computer industry is currently providing the most training for its IT support staffs while Manufacturing and Retail provide very little.

• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) seems to be particularly popular in Australia as well as large support centres and with those who provide internal support. Forty-three percent of support organisations are currently using or implementing ITIL and 21 percent are planning to implement some part of it.

• Sixty-five percent of support centres said that there is no direct charge to their customer for support services. This is up 5 percent from 2008.

• Sixty-three percent of support centres currently use Knowledge Management Software, while 20 percent are planning to add it. In addition, over 13 percent of support centres are calling it their primary initiative for tool implementation.

• While many support centres 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, Linked In, Twitter, Facebook, or My Space to provide support.