Turning Support into a Revenue Generator

Software support is critical to maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty. But many vendors pay short shrift to support until a customer backlash upends their reputation and bottom line.

Enlightened vendors—especially those that rely heavily on software maintenance streams—are using support as a competitive differentiator. These vendors continually seek new ways to provide world-class customer support without breaking the bank. Some now use support data and technology to improve product adoption and usage. By thinking beyond traditional support activities, these companies increase product usage and satisfaction, turning the support function from a cost center to a revenue generator.

Moving Support Online. Many vendors now invest heavily in moderated Web forums and online knowledgebases to foster self-service support. For products with a technical audience, this seems to be a win-win proposition. Online support enables developers, systems analysts, and technical architects to leverage a community of peers to get timely answers to their questions, while vendors control support costs and free up staff to focus on value-added activities.

One vendor that has successfully employed this strategy is data integration powerhouse Informatica. The company has more than 40+ moderated support forums and an online knowledgebase of 60,000 articles, guides, and videos. Given this investment, 74% of Informatica’s customers now indicate that they prefer to use the company’s Web/social media channel for support rather than the phone.

Moreover, the switch to online self-service support doesn’t seem to have affected customer satisfaction and loyalty. In fact, the reverse is true: Informatica’s maintenance renewal rate is 96% and the company has been voted number one in customer loyalty among data integration vendors for the past eight years, according independent research firm TNS.

Next-Generation Online Support

New Support Strategy. Building on its past success with online support, Informatica is now taking the next step and delivering next-generation online support services. Dubbed “Support, Your Way,” Informatica’s new offerings move support from a reactive activity—responding to customer problems or complaints—to a proactive, data-driven one that focuses on accelerating time to value and increasing user adoption.

Informatica DiscoveryIQ. At the heart of Informatica’s new strategy is Informatica DiscoveryIQ, an intelligent cloud application that provides customers with a comprehensive view of their product usage and contextual recommendations about how to maximize adoption of Informatica products. Informatica DiscoveryIQ is a personalized, proactive support portal that uses a customer’s product usage data combined with Informatica’s support interaction data generated from thousands of customers to provide best practice recommendations and alerts to maximize customers’ return on investment in Informatica products.

Informatica DiscoveryIQ will be part of all Informatica support levels: standard, enterprise and mission critical. The product will become generally available for Informatica Cloud customers in March or April, 2015, and will be available for MDM customers in Q3 2015 and PowerCenter customers in Q4, 2015. In short order, Informatica plans to equip all its software with agent technology, giving customers a DiscoveryIQ portal(in cloud) to monitor product usage and maximize value and adoption.

Architecture. Informatica DiscoveryIQ collects product usage data from customer subscriptions, product configuration files, and log files. It also collects customer interaction data from case files, customer Web searches, and customer escalations. It moves all this data via secure internet connections to Amazon S3 where it parses and moves the data into a cloud-based Hadoop cluster. Informatica customers access the DiscoveryIQ portal via a browser using single sign on services from Informatica’s cloud product (Informatica Cloud Service) in the upcoming release in April.

Proactive Management

With rich and customer-specific knowledgebase at its disposal, DiscoveryIQ enables customers to:

• Monitor adoption and operations by tracking and analyzing the number and type of data processing tasks run over time and associated data volumes.
• Benchmark data processing activity with peer companies in the same industry with similar revenues and numbers of employees.
• Forecast usage based on past activity to better plan capacity and systems requirements.
• Receive recommendations to improve adoption and performance using your product activity via logs, errors, and your searches of Informatica’s Web site and support portal.
• Better manage upgrades since DiscoveryIQ defines tasks, manages workflow, tracks completion and suggests release notes to read.

Essentially, Discovery IQ’s built-in intelligence analyzes product usage, anomalies, and customer interaction history to generate contextual recommendations and offer best practices based on broad customer experience. With Informatica DiscoveryIQ, customers can get answers for questions like:

• What are the product features am I consuming?
• How much data am I processing now versus six months prior?
• What are my top issues and how can I address them proactively?
• What are best practices for addressing these issues?
• Am I the only customer with this use case?
• How can I manage my upgrade process to complete seamlessly?
• What new release features might interest me?

Examples

Software Upgrades. One of Informatica DiscoveryIQ’s most popular features is its ability to help administrators plan a software upgrade. It presents a set of tasks that need to occur along with dates for accomplishing them. It can identify black out times, whether files are locked, and disk availability. Most importantly, it can provide recommendations of things to do and check to ensure a smooth migration. (See figure 1.)

Figure 1. Managing the Upgrade Process

Recommendations. Using a customer’s log file and Web searches and tapping into DiscoveryIQ’s vast support database, the tool generates a series of customer-specific recommendations for maximizing product usage and usefulness using a customer’s Web searches. (See figure 2.)

Figure 2. Auto Recommendations

Operational Analytics. Informatica DiscoveryIQ also allows administrators to track usage for individual Informatica products using filters. This gives them one place to go to view all the activity and usage patterns of all Informatica products used by their company. (See figure 3.)

Summary

As software vendors mature, it’s increasingly important that they provide exemplary support and service to cement customer loyalty in an age of faster, better, cheaper products. Providing personalized, proactive support portals is an excellent way to deliver value to customers each day and demonstrate your ability to use information to help them proactively manage their software environments.