Skills-based Routing: A New Approach to Support

In a corporate setting, it's invigorating to see company values jump from the drawing board to real-life situations that directly affect people. Walking the walk is what matters most to our customers and ourselves. The customer support team for IBM Netezza data warehouse appliances recently rolled out a better way of helping our customers, something we call “Skills-based Routing”.  This approach exemplifies how closely held values can turn into actions that result in positive change for employees and customers alike.

Our roadmap is guided by three principals:

1.    Dedication to every client's success.
2.    Innovation that matters - for our company and for the world.
3.    Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships.

The IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance motto has always been that “simple is better”. The values outlined by IBM are powerful in their simplicity. Our strengths as individuals and as a team are built on client success, innovation, trust and responsibility. This combination of values serves as the foundation for our success now and in the future.

Integrating with IBM has offered us the chance to expand to new markets, around the world, where our technology is making a difference every day. We're grateful for this opportunity, and at the same time we are dedicated to making sure our existing customers know that they are truly valued and will continue to receive the quality level of support that they've come to expect from us. We know that some of our biggest evangelists don't work for us: we work for them. They are our customers. They've seen what our technology can do to transform their businesses, and they've come to realize that we're always there to help and guide them toward future accomplishments.

“Skills-based Routing” is an innovative new approach to customer support that we've designed to ensure that our customers receive first-call resolution when they have a question or face a new challenge. We've always been proud of the unique combination of people skills and technical expertise that members of our support team share. As our customer base has grown larger with IBM, we've realized that we can leverage our individual strengths in specific niches and create a more efficient foundation of support for both new and existing clients.

With “Skills-based Routing”, we offer highly knowledgeable and targeted experts to customers facing challenges in niche areas, right from the start. When a customer files a ticket with us, it's immediately dispatched to one of six teams that are intimately familiar with the issue at hand. If it's a performance issue, the ticket is routed to a performance team, if it's a hardware issue it goes to the hardware team, and so on. With this new system, customers have the support of niche experts from their very first call to us.

The result is that we're closing tickets more quickly than ever before and our backlog of open tickets has declined rapidly over a short period of time. Customer support is and will continue to be a team effort here, and we're always looking for new ways to do it even better.