In the second of our Department Spotlight series of articles, we provide a few quick facts about our Customer Support department, the guiding principles behind how they operate, and the exciting service enhancements our customers can look forward to.

Quick facts

• Customer Support uses a multi-channel service delivery model which consists of our Customer Portal as a preferred contact method, emails, and direct telephone calls. Customers may also “self-serve” from hundreds of knowledgebase articles on our portal. Additionally, we pull back information from our customers through system diagnostics that allow us to solve problems customers may not even know they had.

• Globally, the team comprises just over 300 staff members located across South Africa, the UK, Unites States, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden and Australia.

• They use ITIL-adapted processes as a framework to categorise, prioritise, assign, resolve and provide continued maintenance on customer cases.

  
  
  

The guiding principles behind how the department operates

What exactly does Support cover?

In short, the daily activities of the department include:

• Supported issues and error investigation,
• Upgrades to software versions and iterations,
• Provision of advice, guidance and workarounds to customer queries,
• Out-of-hours support for P1 incidents which is charged at an additional rate,
• Root cause analysis on newer versions of our software,
• Triage of service requests.

We measure the success of these activities through:

• How well we achieve hitting our service level objectives
• A decrease in the number of support cases,
• Improvement of our CSAT, CES, and NPS ratings, and
• A reduction in case backlogs.
  
  

Recognising the importance of skills development

As part of the KCS Group’s continued investment in job development and skills development, the offices in South Africa launched an Internship Programme in October 2020 – the first pilot programme of its kind for KCS. The aim of the programme is to recruit and develop young professionals at the start of their careers.

A second round of interns were recruited in September 2021 and we are proud to share that of 6 interns who took part in the programme, 5 received permanent employment at KCS. The programme is currently running throughout 2023 and we are very excited about what the future holds for this initiative and for each intern that participates.

In addition to early career development, KCS is continuously working to build and expand on our existing learning pathway with faster onboarding, in-house training programmes, targeted learning, and accredited specialist training.

What can our customers expect from Support in future?

As KCS continues to build our Support capability, we remain committed to:

• Providing customers with increased access to knowledge about our products,
• Ensuring customers have full visibility of the status of their inquiries,
• More pro-active work using panic analysis form system diagnostics,
• Collaborating with customers and different internal departments, to make upgrades as easy as possible,
• Increasing the achievement of our service delivery standards and supporting our customers efficiently and effectively.

Curious to find out more about the different departments in the Kerridge Group?

Learn more about our Professional Services Group in last month’s article.