Quantifying the value of customer support

Naslund, Steve SNaslund at medline.com
Thu Feb 14 22:17:48 UTC 2013


I would think your $ value would be calculated by a few factors.  

1.  How much would it cost to train and hire NOC guys that do what you
do today vs. using outsourced support for those issues or going to a
higher level team.
2.  How much longer would SLA affecting problems take to solve without
you?
3.  This one is tough, how many customer implementations would fail and
how many customers would you lose due to the loss of technical
expertise?

A super simple calculation would be something like "we provided 10,000
hours of support and a consultant with similar skills would have cost X
dollars" or if they would have escalated to an even higher level in your
organization you have to calculate the cost of your hours vs the hours
of more expensive engineers.

A calculation you will probably not be able to make is if a higher
engineering level than you had the time and resources to handle the same
cases or if they would need more body count to do so.  I can't tell what
your $ value is without knowing the cost of not having you.

I would think the best thing to respond with would be to take some of
the cases you handled and find out what it would have taken to solve the
problem if you had not been there.  For example, I you provided three
hours of help that no one else in your organization could have, you
could calculate how much an outside consultant would have cost and how
long it would have taken to retain that consultant.  You will then be
able to say that X project would have cost this much and taken this much
longer.

Bottom line is what is the cost of NOT having you.

Steven Naslund	

-----Original Message-----
From: Kasper Adel [mailto:karim.adel at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 2:52 PM
To: NANOG list
Subject: Quantifying the value of customer support

Hello,

We are a 2nd level of escalation in a service provider, trying to put a
$ value on the support we give to our NOC and other implementation
teams, when they email us about problems they face. But we are merely
bits and bytes engineers that cant quantify and justify the value of
what we do to the management team. I guess these smart suits want to see
an excel sheet with a table of how much they save or gain by the support
we do. We respond to technical questions and simulate problems in a lab.

Can anyone help me with an idea or any material i can reuse? Templates?
Has any one been in a similar situation.

Thanks
Kim




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