Way Cool, Inc. has hired you to determine how it can minimize costs in terms of
ID: 3873350 • Letter: W
Question
Way Cool, Inc. has hired you to determine how it can minimize costs in terms of customer service and support. Its focus is on its product, a state-of-the-art virtual reality game that is extremely popular and attracting new users each day. The company wants to invest as much as possible in developing its game and as little as possible in terms of providing support. In fact, the company believes the game is so easy to use that support is unneeded and is thinking of eliminating customer support services all together. Prepare a brief report that outlines the pros and cons of minimizing the company’s investment in support. Suggest ways the company can minimize its costs without eliminating support services altogether. Also suggest ways the company can ensure its minimized services are meeting customers’ needs.
Explanation / Answer
Providing support to a software solution delievered to a client is an inevitable part of any project. It can be seen as an oppurtunity to gain more business or as a burden in terms of resource management. The product that we provide, a virtual reality game, also requires a support team's bandwidth.We are looking to eliminate customer support services all together. Let's look at some pros and cons of the same:
Pros:
Efficient resource management can be achieved if we eliminate the support services. In fact a huge bandwidth can be freed if we are able to achieve a zero support for our product. It will help in cost management, time management and most importantly it will enhance the overall productivity of an individual resource. The company can focus on a new range of products with the increased bandwidth. Not only in terms of financial gains, it can lead to enhance job satisfaction for the employees who want to be a part of new development of the company.
Cons:
Eliminating 100 percent support is a risky task. Though our product is much stable now as it has reached a good user base in market, but sometimes support need not be there just to report bugs. It is for user feedback and most importantly user satisfaction with our product. A user wants his/her voice to be heard for any new service or recreation he is being part of. The business line in which we deal require us to maintain the user base that we have already gained and removing the support abruptly may lead to some situations in the future in which we dont want to see our company.
So, examining pros and cons i can put forward a few suggestions for the management, We need not eliminate the entire support services for the product. We have to still retain some bandwidth for support services. To achieve our goals of utilizing resources to the best, we can definitely reduce the size of team that looks into support services. We can limit the hours in which support services will be provided. I would rather suggest a single support team to handle support services for different range of products instead of having one team for each product. We can hire less experienced people than our current support team's experience to save on cost. We can recruit support specific engineers who are more professional in support services than development. Also we can make developers provide regular KT's to support team so that they can work efficiently and this can be done on a rotational basis so that no resource remain unsatisfied. To ensure that minimized services are meeting customers need, the support team has to be made more pro active and time bound. I would suggest a seperate manager to look into work of support team so that feedbacks and suggestion are timely taken and an efficient response is given to customer's satisfaction. Some bonus can be announced for support team to ensure they always have something to fight for.
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