1 - Determine What Fields Impact Average Case Costs

This step will require you to evaluate case properties in some detail before you are ready to decide on how you want to bucket the average costs per ticket. SupportLogic allows you two levels of categorization or grouping for estimated case costs. As we are looking to track cases that have escalated versus cases that have not, one of your groups is decided for you: "Is Escalated".

Next, determine if another case field value significantly changes the average costs your organization incurs when resolving issues. For example,

• Does the operating system have an impact on the general amount of time your support agents / engineers spend on resolving tickets?
• Do certain products or product lines require significantly more technical knowledge in order to troubleshoot customer issues?
• Does the region where your support agents / engineers are located impact the costs for case resolution?

If you are having trouble recalling which case fields you have available, use the Dynamic Filters option on any of the Operations pages to review available Case Fields and preview the values for each.

2 - Establish Standard Case Costs and Escalated Case Costs

Once you have decided on which fields impact the average cost per case, you are ready to set up the column in Favorite Customers. To do so:

1. Arrange columns layout to your liking. In the example below, we move the Estimated Support Cost column over to the far left.

2. Set your time period you want to use for your average costs per case calculations. 

Keep in mind that if you want to determine whether using SupportLogic has had an impact on your overall cost per case by reducing escalations, you should set the time period to the same as you will set in Step 3 - Deploy Escalation Manager Workflow instructions. The shortest time period for this assessment to take place is six months.

3. Add the average costs per case based on escalation status and one other case field. In the example below, we are using "Is Escalated" and "Product" as our two case fields that have the most impact on average cost per case:

Only once you have filled in all of the boxes with an average dollar amount are you able to hit "Save". Changes are applied immediately for the Estimated Case Cost column.

4. You can add customers, Virtual Accounts / Groups and individual reporters as "favorite" customers and they will automatically appear on your list and have their estimated costs per ticket calculated. Customers that are grouped together in Virtual Accounts, for instance, appear on the list with a small drop-down menu.

3 - Deploy Escalation Manager Workflow daily use best practices guide.

To evaluate whether or not SupportLogic is helping to reduce your average cost per case by helping to avoid escalations, target a group of your Support / Escalation Managers and have them follow the Escalation Manager Workflow as a daily activity over a period of six months, for example.

Follow up with your target group of Escalation Managers using the daily best practices to ensure that they are following them consistently. 

You can also run reports using Control Settings > User Engagement > Escalation Feedback over the specific time period you are assessing to determine if your target group of Escalation / Support Managers are providing feedback on a regular basis.

4 - Track and Report to Compare Results

An easy way to track and compare impacts of using the Escalation Workflow best practices is to create two Virtual Accounts and add them to the Customer Favorites view. This will maintain a running total comparison between two sets of customers.

Creating an Ongoing Comparison

To create an ongoing comparison:

1. Create two Virtual Accounts: one comprised of the customers managed by the Support Managers who are implementing the Escalation Management Workflow and one comprised of Support Managers who are not.

• See the Virtual Account and Groups article for instructions on how to do so.

2. Add the Virtual Accounts you created in the previous step to your Customer Favorites view.

3. You can then expand the Virtual Accounts to compare things on a per account basis or Export as CSV to review a detailed report, add additional calculations and chart the data as needed.