3Com Asia Pacific Improves Customer Support Significantly after Restructuring its Professional Services Division

It achieves higher customer satisfaction after the bulk of the Global Services Organization was brought in-house in November 2007

MALAYSIA – August 26, 2008 – 3Com Corporation, a leading provider of secure, converged voice and data networking solutions for enterprises of all sizes, today announced that its Asia Pacific (AP) service and support operations have achieved significantly higher customer satisfaction since moving the bulk of its Global Service Organization in-house in November 2007.

The new model has achieved great improvement in service levels in the AP region. In 3Com’s annual customer satisfaction survey conducted by an independent company, customers gave 3Com AP a six out of a maximum seven rating in 12 out of 14 different service aspects. In terms of percentage, 3Com AP’s customer satisfaction rating rose to 85 percent from 70 percent a year ago. In the last two quarters, 90 percent of both warranty and contract support calls were answered within two minutes. For AP customers with warranty support issues, their calls go direct to non-technical staff at a call centre in the Philippines while more complex support contract calls – 95 percent of which are technical in nature – go direct to 3Com engineers in the Sydney call centre.

By using dedicated in-house 3Com engineers on the line for priority contract customers, 3Com is able to cut resolution times because a majority of the technical questions can be answered immediately. According to John Wardell, Field Service Delivery manager for 3Com Asia Pacific, 3Com’s contract support customers are delighted to hear a 3Com person on the line who is quick to understand the issue and offer a solution.

“It’s about putting the right level of technical support for the right audience,” said Wardell. “Moving ahead, we are focusing on improving our support staff’s soft skills and online support tools.”

In addition, 3Com has a best practice improvement cycle methodology to ensure the enhancements to service quality and resolution times continue to improve. 3Com is already strengthening its professional services engineering teams across Australia, India, Malaysia, Korea and Thailand to assist implementation partners for larger, more complex deployments that involve 3Com’s latest technologies.

Wardell added that localisation support has also been boosted with more Korean and Thai service agents on the regional services team. Said Wardell, “Our priorities in the next 12 months are to continue to improve customer satisfaction, revenues and profitability from the services business.”

In November 2007, 3Com announced that it was going to run a major part of its AP services and support organisation in-house to improve service delivery and give more personal attention to its AP customers. The restructuring was part of a US$12m global service improvement effort that included two new multi-lingual call centre functions based in Australia and the Philippines.