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Laurel Poertner’s Consona CRM Support and Education Blog will discuss the activities happening in the Support and Education departments to keep customers and interested parties updated on our internal projects, process changes, technology updates and new initiatives. Everything in this blog will be focused on the customer experience and how we are constantly improving our communication and interaction with our customers.
Laurel Poertner is the Vice President of Support and Education for Consona CRM. In this role, Laurel leads the entire support and education team across all of Consona’s service and support solutions.
Welcome to the Consona CRM Support and Education Blog
My name is Laurel Poertner and I will be your host of the new Consona CRM Support and Education Blog. In this column, I plan to post updates on many of the activities we are working on within the Support and Education department. I’ll be letting you know about new initiatives we have planned for the coming year, new projects, and also some of the process improvements that help us communicate and interact better with our customers.
Since this is the first blog, I would like to introduce myself and give you a little background about me. I work out of our Kirkland, WA office about 10 miles north east of Seattle. I live about 8 miles north of Kirkland with my husband and 19 month old daughter. Before she came into our lives, I used to snow ski, go hiking in the beautiful Cascade Mountains and lot of other outdoor activities. Now, I get my exercise chasing her around the house as she explores and pushes the limits I try and set for her!
I have been with Consona for 10 years as of January 24th. I actually started on the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) side of our business. ERP targets the manufacturing sector and I worked for a company called Intuitive Manufacturing Systems before we were acquired by Consona in 2006. When I started at Intuitive in 2000, I was hired as an implementation consultant. I implemented our software at various manufacturing facilities for over 2 years and then the Manager of Support position became available. I was eager to reduce the amount of traveling I was doing so I jumped at the chance.
I made quite a few changes and improvements to the Intuitive ERP Support operations and one of them was to start (from scratch) a virtual education program. I single handedly taught about 25 different virtual classes on a rotating basis every couple weeks all the while managing the Support team. After Intuitive was acquired by Consona, I took over Support and Education for the two biggest ERP product lines (Intuitive ERP and Made2Manage), a staff of about 45 people. Then, in January 2008, I moved over to the CRM business unit and took over Support and Education for that team where it was two main products (Onyx and KNOVA). After the acquisition of SupportSoft in July 2009, our team has grown to about 40 people in five different countries around the world (US, Canada, Belguim, India, and Japan). We have since rebranded and now support the following products: Consona Customer Management (formerly Onyx), Consona Knowledge Management (formerly KNOVA), Consona Dynamic Agent, Consona Live Assistance, and Consona Service Gateway (all formerly SupportSoft).
Now that you have some background on me and hopefully can see that I have had some experience in Supporting software as well as implementing it and finally managing teams, I would like to tell you about some of the things we are working on for 2010.
The most exciting project we have kicked off is our KCS (Knowledge Centered Support) project. KCS was developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation and is a best practices methodology that Consona CRM adopted in December 2009. If you would like more detailed information from the consortium, please visit www.serviceinnovation.org. To summarize, KCS is a process for working support cases and creating knowledge at the same time. It is the effective capture, structure, and reuse of support knowledge to solve problems. We believe that this proven methodology will improve our effectiveness in supporting our customers. This is not just coming from me and the Support and Education employees, it is something that the entire Consona CRM business unit has embraced and we are designing our software products around it. So, who better to be the guinea pigs than our own support and education team! In fact, it is rapidly becoming a household name in the ways of support processes at major high tech companies. Companies like: Symantec, Dell and Blackberry are members of the consortium and are actively using KCS. I will have more updates to come on this since we just kicked it off last month and it is a new process for us.
To go with our KCS initiative, we also have a project where we will be upgrading to our own new CRM flagship product “Knowledge Driven Support” (which by the way is KCS Verified) in the middle of 2010. We are very excited about this project and it will make everyone’s daily activities run much smoother. We plan to upgrade the rest of the team that is using ExpertExchange to KDS towards the end of the year depending on how the first part goes. The biggest advantage for us in using KDS is that everything is on one screen for the support agent. Right now, with our older version of Consona Customer Management, we need to keep the Consona Knowledge Management window open, AND we have to set up a user defined field to capture the new knowledge article numbers that are created for each case that the agents are working on. With the new product, everything can be done through the Knowledge Management screen and it will be automatically linked to the case. Another great feature is that it will keep track of the search history so our support agents will be able to see what customers tried to search on before contacting support. This will give us some great information to help customers find solutions easier once we know how they are searching for them.
A third and final project I will talk about in this initial blog post is the launch of our new education program. Tim Leavitt, our Manager of Education has been working hard on implementing a new Learning Management System (LMS). This new system will allow us to display all of our various education offerings to our customers as well as being the primary method for registering for classes, downloading recordings and providing feedback to Consona. We are starting out with three types of training: computer based training (or recorded classes), online virtual courses, and classroom courses. To view these new offerings you will need to log into Customer Central which is currently only available to Consona CM customers. We are actively trying integrate this with our other two support portals. All of our support reps (including me) have access to the LMS and would be happy to show you a demo of what is to come if you’d like. Just let us know!
There are a lot of things to talk about with these three projects, so I will be posting updates on each of them so you can see how we are progressing. I will also be talking about some other topics like: metrics, the different phases of KCS, and some upcoming education offerings.
Thanks for reading my blog and feel free to send me any feedback or questions to laurel.poertner@consona.com.
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