Behind the Scenes: Milestone Systems’ Tech Support Prowess
Milestone Systems Senior Support Manager Gary St. Arnauld discusses what it takes to provide superior technical support to security dealer and integrator channel partners, plus insights into the company’s tech support structure.
Milestone Systems Senior Support Manager Gary St. Arnauld stands among different camera models at the company's technical support facilities.
How do you incorporate feedback from end users and partners?
We get feedback from partners and customers as well as our salespeople, training personnel and developers. One way we accomplish this is to offer everyone the option to provide feedback on each case after it’s closed. We then measure the feedback against an industry benchmark called Net Satisfaction. The team follows up directly on all dissatisfied feedback and look for areas where we can improve, and we work hard to make those improvements. Milestone also does an annual survey of resellers – not just for technical support but all parts of the business. We look at that year after year and develop strategies to continuously improve our organization.
How do you measure the quality and quantity of the tech support service?
In order to be successful on this front, an organization needs to measure many aspects of how it performs. In terms of tech support, two measures we strive to improve are average handle time [AHT] and average speed of answer [ASA].
AHT is highly dependent on being able to quickly identify the root problem. To help with that, we have been very selective over time about the staff we hire and invest a lot in their training so they can identify issues quickly and accurately. Another goal is reducing call wait time. As volume increased we needed to keep pace with the rate of business growth. And one of the places we had fallen behind was in our speed to answer; we could see it in our metrics and survey results. So Milestone invested in additional resources and newer technologies to help route phone calls, and we were able to reduce our speed-to-answer by 30% from 2014, and that number continues to drop.
Milestone also recently invested in a global communications system for auto-callback. It allows callers to select an option to receive a call back when a tech support representative is ready as opposed to waiting on hold. They don’t lose their place in line and they don’t have to be on the phone the whole time.
Milestone software supports thousands of cameras and has hundreds of integrations with solution partner systems. What kind of challenge does this present to support teams?
From a support standpoint, we need to stay as current as we can with our knowledge of third-party integrations, analytics and custom features. From a customer’s point of view, it’s not always clear in what domain a problem lies, so we have to sort out whether the issue is with the integration or the installation. This complicates things, and we’re working hard to develop expertise around the Milestone Integration Platform Software Development Kit [MIP SDK], which is a comprehensive tool that makes it easy to create applications for Milestone XProtect VMS. We have training going on to enhance those skills – we’re expanding our lab to include a number of these integrations so our support engineers can get hands-on experience with them and readily familiarize themselves with all the nuances. Since it’s not always clear where an issue may lie, it’s crucial that we have an open collaboration with our integration partners, which we continue to strengthen.
Are there any other plans to continue evolving the support organization?
In the very near term, the organization is developing some enhanced tools for even faster determination of root causes of problems. We’re also making sure that we have proper resource planning and training. We continue to develop and improve our online self-help resources and support communities, as well.
There has been a need in the marketplace to provide
a range of enhanced support services that reflect different business needs: customers in the mid-range market have after-hours requirements that are very different from a mission-critical environment like an airport. We have put together a group of support agreements that fall into different ‘care’ categories with premium and elite services that better address the needs of those requiring service level agreements and technical account management. This is quite significant. Incorporating these distinct parameters gives us the ability to deliver the right service, at the right time, from the right resource – that’s what we’re striving for.
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