Tech Data Answers Call For Higher-End Tech Support
“We felt our customers wanted more support in the areas that make them the most money: networking, servers, storage, software,” said Barb Miller, director of government and technical services at Tech Data.
Support calls from solution providers once answered by general technical support staff now can be routed first to more vendor-specific or solution-specific engineers through a touchtone menu system for quicker, more accurate responses, she said.
“The majority of customers have requested that we quit focusing on part-number lookup and low-end product support, and devote resources with them in areas that they cannot do easily do for themselves,” Miller said.
Kim Mercer, account executive at Micro System Enterprises, a solution provider in Houston, said the new technical support system is an improvement. “It’s not so general anymore. The people on the other end of the phone have more knowledge about specific products. I can go to a specific manufacturer and drill down to get answers that are really valuable,” Mercer said.
But one solution provider said getting support for products of vendors not listed in the call center menu has become more difficult. The call will be routed to a vendor product representative who may not have the technical knowledge as an engineer, said the solution provider, who asked not to be named.
“For someone like Cisco, [the new system] is excellent. They have the top Cisco support team. But on a lot of the ’unsupported’ lines, you end up calling back where you originally started. It’s hit or miss,” the VAR said.
Tech Data has not changed the criteria to qualify for technical support, Miller said. It is free to any solution provider that brings in sales of $50,000 in Tech Data products per quarter, and Miller said she has not received any complaints.
“Our live answer rate is now 95 percent, higher than it ever was,” Miller said. “This is a way of improving our support, not [hurting] it. We’re not preventing more people from getting in. As Tech Data grows and evolves, tech support has to grow and evolve around that.”