My thoughts on support:

1. Organization of support requests:

a. Centralization of requests
b. Prioritization
c. Feedback to the customer Support ticket ID
d. Assignment of request
e. Contact the customer with a 2 hours window
f. Leaving a track of all the interactions with the customer, from request to resolution
g. Organize support requests by customer, topic, and ability to sort by keywords.

2. Organization of a support team for which its primary focus is attend requests of live accounts.

3. Economics of support. Its currently a struggle in some accounts for determining whether is a
sage bug, an configuration error or a user error, including in those numerous accounting or
process issue. This last category usually is fought with the discovery document on hand and
some are won, some are lost.

In the few instances where the customer and the consultant were covered with either a pre-
paid support block or better yet with a yearly contract for limited or unlimited support, it
relieved the pressure of determining what Ive stated above, and in most of the cases we work
better.

4. We as consultants do not usually share internally:

a. What was set up in a customer, the process in place. And if the support team comes in,
we had to find on our own processes, even applications that we did not even know that
were in place.
b. The support team usually does not share the support request plus the resolution. Im
guilty of this as well. We lack not only a centralized place to review the supports history
of a given client, but similar cases on different implementation. Lots of efforts are
wasted this way.

5. We let customers dictate the communication, by:

a. Contacting directly the consultant, even after years of being live.
b. We do not have a firm process were the implementation team hands over the
implementation to support, and there should also be an overlapping of both teams,
where the support team will familiarize with the customers environment, and has
contact with the customers implementation team.

6. This support is a service that can be a revenue stream to SCS as much as new sales,
implementation, development and maintenance fees. If well organized and oiled, the service
can even be outsourced to other SAGE Partners, even market directly to customers if we brand
it as a separate line from our main SCS line.
Im sure that 90% of the business partners are having the same issues that we do: after the
implementation the customers request support, dont want to pay for it, dispute hours, etc.
Even SAGE support is not usually satisfactory, usually not timely responses or are too generic for
the end users.
We have a knowledge reservoir very strong that we can use outside the SCS customer base
boundaries.