Company: Blackboard Incorporated, Washington, DC
Company Description: Founded in 1997, Blackboard Inc. is a global leader in enterprise technology and innovative solutions that improves the experience of millions of students and learners around the world every day. With offices and datacenters in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, Blackboard supports learning opportunities around the world and across all industry verticals.
Nomination Category: Support Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Support Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Blackboard's Managed Hosting Support Team

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since January 1 2011 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Blackboard Inc. is a global leader in enterprise technology and innovative solutions that improves the experience of millions of students and learners around the world every day. The Managed Hosting Support Team provides mission-critical support to almost 1000 Blackboard clients, creating a world-class support experience through investments in four areas: People, Process, Technology, and Key Performance Indicators.

People

In 2011, Blackboard invested heavily in staff development and employee recognition programs. Every technician on the team attended external training classes to stay current with emerging technologies and Blackboard Project Managers earned PMP certifications. The Support Management team also became Level 1 ITIL certified to ensure adoption and implementation of industry best practices. Monthly morale and team building activities are standard practice on our team to encourage a sense of community between technicians. Additionally, support management awards exceptional employee performance with framed certificates and financial bonuses.

Process

Our theme for 2011 was proactive planning for a reactive environment. We started designing our own sets of software patches to apply to client environments during scheduled upgrades as a call avoidance measure. By placing some of our most efficient technicians in a triage role and empowering them with
newer tools to find solutions, we increased our 1-day closure rate by over 82%. We founded a new team of professionals within Support called Client Care whose mission is to focus solely on value-add activities for our clients. Services such as product/process web seminars, community user groups, and new client orientation courses have contributed to strong client rapport and customer satisfaction. We take customer satisfaction very seriously and in 2011 have achieved our highest ratings to date in part by tasking a proactive approach to tracking trends or patterns in survey responses that have led to lower scores.

Technology

Managed Hosting Support also adopted many new technologies to improve our team communication and to collaborate more effectively with our operations, storage and infrastructure teams. We migrated all internal product information from an older Wiki knowledgebase into Microsoft Sharepoint™. We also migrated CRM tools, upgrading our case management features and external knowledgebase. We now communicate news and information to hundreds of our clients through Twitter, adopting best practices for Social Media. Using our own system monitoring tools, we developed an automated process to determine which clients need server configuration tuning the most so we can proactively complete needed changes before end users experience issues.

Key Performance Indicators

The Managed Hosting Support team set company records in support case closure rates (1-day = 45%, 7-day=70%, 30-day=95%) while maintaining a 95% Client Satisfaction score (over 1800 surveys submitted.) The overall backlog of support cases was reduced by over 54%. Our team averaged less than 3% of our total backlog aging to 90-days. Our case activity is monitored to ensure a client never waits more than 1-day without receiving an update. Perhaps the metric we are most proud of, however, is we escalated only one percent of all cases to our Engineering team, solving all others within Support.

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:

Jason Minkoff is the Senior Director of Client Support for Blackboard's Managed Hosting organization. He is responsible for overseeing the strategy and resources for a team comprised of more than 50 support professionals, serving almost 1000 clients worldwide. With offices and datacenters in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, Jason built Blackboard's Managed Hosting Support team with the focus of offering 24X7X365 coverage to all of Blackboard's clients and partners. Managed Hosting Support is proud of their 2012 1-day case closure rate of almost 60%, as the team remains focused on providing excellence in client service and continuous improvement.