Success Story
Lawson achieves a 700% return on investment with WebEx Support Center
Founded in 1975, Lawson Software has grown from a small contract programming organization into a global software company focused on service-oriented businesses in selected vertical markets. Today, Lawson has more than 2000 customers worldwide and $428 million (FY 2002) in annual revenues.
The Challenge
In early 2000, Lawson realized that providing technical support to its growing customer base had become an inefficient, time-consuming process. The Global Support Center (GSC) staff was reinventing problem scenarios with customers over and over again via the phone. The average time for handling a complex support call with a customer was two hours, bringing the run rate of complex support calls close to 1000 calls per month (approximately 10% of the total support calls received by the GSC per month), requiring an astonishing 2000 hours per month of support agent time. The company tried using dial-in access to the customer’s computer to reduce the time for resolving complex problems, but this proved to be very inefficient. Lawson began looking for a better solution to provide technical support—one that would enable the support staff to gain access to the customer’s desktop when troubleshooting problems.
The Solution
After reviewing numerous solutions, Lawson selected WebEx Support Center for a number of key reasons. Support Center could be integrated with Lawson’s existing support process and tool set and was easy to use by both the GSC staff and the customer. Support Center enabled bringing in additional GSC staff members if needed when interacting with customers. The service also supported “assisted sessions” whereby the customer could let the GSC staff member “drive” (have cursor control) on their desktop during a troubleshooting session, while still giving the customer the option to take back cursor control at any time. Finally, Support Center provided a hosted service that kept startup costs low and offered fast response times during application sharing sessions with customers.
Because minimal training was required, Lawson pursued a “fast” rollout approach, whereby Support Center was made available to the entire GSC organization in 2001. Within a couple of months, the GSC staff had incorporated Support Center as a standard part of their support process and standardized the communication of its benefits to customers. Monthly usage increased from 300 sessions per month at the start of 2002, to 1200 sessions per month by year-end. Today, the GSC organization consists of 165 staff members, with 134 staff members being first line consultants who interact directly with customers. The entire GSC organization uses Support Center. To make it easy for customers to join online support sessions via Support Center, Lawson has included a link on their website to allow customers to log on to a WebEx support session initiated by the GSC staff member.
The Benefits
The decision to implement WebEX Support Center has proved to be well founded. The results speak for themselves. In 2002, Lawson’s GSC staff created 141,466 support cases. WebEx Support Center was used on 11, 721 of these calls. It helped to reduce the Average Handle Time for complex calls by 25%. Lawson estimated that this translates to an annual savings of nearly $600,000 and an ROI in excess of 700%. Furthermore, customer satisfaction and the resolution rate of all customer reported problems have both increased since Lawson implemented WebEx Support Center. This has produced additional benefits for Lawson not reflected in the ROI.
Support Center has provided Lawson additional benefits beyond time and cost savings. Support Center has also been adopted for use in coaching customers by showing them visible outcomes when correcting their problems online. It’s also being used to train customers on the Lawson support process and on how to troubleshoot their own problems by leaning how to diagnose issues. Making customers more self-sufficient in resolving their problems in this way has resulted in additional savings.
The Future
The Lawson GSC organization has embedded WebEx Support Center into their daily support routine and into their corporate culture. Adoption and use of WebEx has migrated to other parts of the company’s organization, such as Training, which has also begun to utilize WebEx in their operations. As word spreads throughout the organization, and as Support Center interacts with its customers, WebEx is becoming an integral part of the way Lawson does business.
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