These days, service and support are half the battle (and sometimes more than half) in using manufacturing software, or choosing a software vendor. The Software Support Professionals Association, based in San Diego, CA, was formed in 1989 and made its first annual awards for excellence in software support in 1990. The SSPA recently announced its 1997 STAR (Software Technical Assistance Recognition) awards to software companies that have most improved the quality of their support; that provide the best support for complex, mission-critical applications; and that provide sustained support excellence.
Winners of most improved in software support are Filenet Corp., FTP Software and QAD Inc. This award recognizes that a significant improvement in customer satisfaction was shown over a 12-month period, explains Bill Rose, founder and executive director of SSPA. QAD attributes the performance improvement to a call tracking system it put in place as it was readying its new version of MFG/PRO. "We have grown substantially in the past year and a half, and our new version of MFG/PRO has produced a need for technical support that we had not had before," says David Burns, director of global marketing at QAD, in Carpinteria, CA. "We have added people to the technical department and introduced new training procedures."
In the complex-support category, Aspen Technology and SAS Institute were singled out for 1997. These companies handle a smaller number of support calls but those calls are often long in duration and highly complex in nature. In Aspen's case, for instance, its software manages most of the complex processes in oil refineries and chemical plants that operate 24 hours a day. "We have to support a complex product with highly skilled people," explains Ed Orlinski, vice president of customer support at Aspen. Many of those people come from industry, he says, not just computer or software backgrounds.
Companies noted for sustained excellent support, with consistently high levels of customer satisfaction for at least three consecutive years were Great Plains Software, Stream International and Sykes Enterprises Inc. Stream, of Norwood, MA, was formed from the merger of two and provides software publishing, migration and systems integration on a worldwide basis. Its 2,000 technical support specialists handle 500,000 calls a month. "We continually retrain them so they are constantly up to date," says president Terry Moore. Stream has forged strong partnerships with all the major software publishers and has access to their databases and technical specialists, he says. "We resolve almost 90% of the issues on the first call," Moore says.