Support Engagement Process

When you've got a problem in your contact center, let's face it- there are only two things on your mind: Get that problem fixed and get it done right now.  You don't want to worry about what goes on behind the scenes when you call for support.   That's our job.

At PSS we work hard to make sure we consistently provide great service to all of our customers, all of the time.  Of course we're not perfect, but we have a proven system in place that works very well.  We measure everything we can and watch it like a hawk to make sure we keep getting better.  Here's what you can expect from us:

Before you decide

We can provide you with an estimated cost to support your IVR, CTI, or PBX system soon after we gather some information about your systems.  PSS Sales  can walk you through the details, but in general it's not unlike getting a quote for car insurance.  We need to know the type of systems you have, their size, location, an overview of the applications running on them, and an overview of the external systems they're connected to.   In most cases we can turn around a quote within 48 hours based on the information you provide.

If you like what you see, we'll schedule a time to verify the information and make adjustments to the quote if necessary.  It's not that we don't trust you, it's just easy to mis-identify some equipment and we want to make sure everyone's on the same page before we go any further.  This way you can be confident that our quote is accurate and you won't get any last minute surprises. 

Once we get started

Once we have a signed contract, we roll up our sleeves and get to work.  Right away we'll get all the stakeholders together and make sure everyone knows how to report a case to us and what will happen when they do:

• Call our support number and a live person will answer the call 24x7x365
• It will be a technical person who can start working your case immediately
• We'll immediately open a service call and give you the call ID so you can track it online or whenever you contact us

We'll review the kind of information that's helpful to have available when you place a call. This will accelerate the process and help us start diagnosing the problem more quickly.

Escalation Process

Next, we'll review our escalation process.  By default we treat every customer case with Level 1 outage priority until we assess the problem and the customer agrees that we can downgrade its severity.   We automatically escalate Level 1 issues as follows:

• Escalate to the Chief Operations Officer if unresolved after 4 hours
• Escalate to the Chief Technical Officer if unresolved after 8 hours
• Escalate to the President if unresolved after 12 hours

This aggressive escalation process is triggered by internal procedures-we don't wait for you to complain before we bring customer issues to the attention of senior executive in our company.  Since we don't hesitate to escalate 24x7x365, this keeps us all really focused on resolving our high priority cases as quickly as humanly possible.  One less thing for you to worry about. 

We'll also introduce everyone to the lead support engineer assigned to your system.  This person will become the resident expert on your system, applications, and architecture within PSS.  Your lead support engineer will be responsible for reviewing and verifying the details of everything we support in your environment.  We'll take a full inventory and look at all of the software, hardware, and anything else you consider part of the system.  We'll verify and record into our database the system type, version numbers, operating systems, processor types, and a long list of other details that will come in handy down the road.    We'll also discuss how to get both remote and physical access to your systems so everything's in place for the first service call. 

High Quality of Service

Once we've got everything kicked off properly and you're set up and integrated to our ongoing support processes, there are several things we do to ensure that we assure a high level of service.

• We staff our 24x7x365 support appropriately and manage our incoming queue of cases with a multi-tier rollover process to ensure that we always have a live professional available to answer new calls even if we just got bombarded with several urgent cases.
• Whoever takes a call will continue to work a call from start to finish, so we maintain a clear sense of ownership and responsibility for solving your problem.
• If the engineer working a call needs assistance- from inside or outside PSS- they get on the phone immediately and continue working the issue until it's resolved. We don't have a culture of handing off problems from group to group or vendor to vendor.
• We treat every issue as a Level 1 outage priority until you tell us it's not. We always treat our customers with that level of respect, and in return we almost never have someone claim the sky is falling when it really isn't. This way we never close a case prematurely, and that helps maintain service quality for everyone. One less thing for us to worry about.
• We automatically escalate unresolved issues very quickly, as we discussed above. We also remind our customers that the escalation process isn't just for open cases. Any time a customer isn't delighted with the level of service we provide, our executives want to hear about it.