Improving customer support processes: A case study

Abstract

IT organizations need systematic methods to manage the increasing number of service requests and software problems reported by customers. A large number of open problems can rapidly increase the costs of software maintenance and development. Therefore, an IT organization needs a well-defined customer support model. However, existing customer support models have one major shortcoming: a lack of process description that shows the interaction between different support processes (incident management, problem management and change management) and their activities. In this paper, we use a constructive research method to build an improved process model for customer support. Additionally, we present findings of a case study that focused on improving support processes in a medium-sized Finnish IT company. The research question in this paper is: What is the role of the problem management process in customer support? © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.