IBM APAC & Japan - Customer Service Department of the Year

Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Department Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Hardware

Nomination Title: IBM APAC & Japan

IBM Partner Ecosystem Support Desk (IPE PSD) is a new mission to move the third-party company support back to IBM. With this alignment of the PSD roles with the existing IBM Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) support scope, we can better support our Business Partners (BPs) from end-to-end process perspective. In many cases, the role is the initial "face of IBM" for our future Business Partners and therefore with this role we step into crucial position of creating first experience for IBM BPs. The key mission of the role is to guide the BPs through prerequisites to be fulfilled in order to become an accredited IBM Partner and support them throughout this process.

Becoming customer centric. To get more familiar with our internal E2E process, we had initiated our own learning sessions where we invited 16 speakers from IPE, marketing and Q2C to share a variety of information related to the BP support. We put ourselves in BP’s shoes, utilizing newly deployed Cognitive Support Platform that allows us to provide BPs with faster feedback. In addiion, driving process simplification we achieved 3,920 saving hours. Furthermore, starting from last month, we began providing BPs with new, value add services, such as Call Campaign. PSD facilitates these events dedicated to understanding what we can work on collaboratively that will provide a mutualbenefit for both BPs and IBM.

Adopting agile way of working. Client feedback is very important for the advocacy of our company. The new workflow enabled the AI supported analytics, reporting and dashboard, helping with data analysis of the key focus areas which BPs always care about. From management perspective, it’s visible for team to track the open cases in our daily operations, which help team improve the turn around time of our response. That’s one of key drivers for team to keep 100% client satisfaction from hundreds of BPs’ thank you letters after we went live. The key Japan partner sent appreciation to us that ”with the IBM Partner Support Desk transition to Q2C Dalian, the speed and the quality of the response have improved more than ever.”

The PSD team helps with Partner World Programs related inquiries. The PSD team provides unique opportunity to develop wide portfolio of skills, get familiar with IBM Business, strategic Platform for BP channel business (Partner World), our clients and their challenges, becoming a significant part of BP channel chain.

The transition of the PSD mission to Q2C started in 3Q of 2020. While facing the global crisis of COVID-19, we could not have the trainers provide the face-to-face training. We dared to start the virtual learning and team moved to a meeting room together for group learning, crossing several time zones. To communicate well and build the knowledge of Partner World programs quickly we stayed in one project meeting room for 3 months, using Webex and Slack for sharing and learning. During the learning period, our team got a perfect 100 score for knowledge testing, receiving high praise from the internal stakeholders.

Starting on Jan 1st of 2021, we officially went live for the APAC&Japan PSD support from Dalian Q2C team.

Now PSD Dalian supports APAC&Japan BPs in 5 languages, helping them win benefits via PW program. With the PSD now being back to Q2C, we are also playing an important role in bridging between Business Partner and internal teams. Now we could leverage Q2C E2E resources and positively interlock with the IBM Partner Ecosystem (IPE) team, aiming to give BP one-stopService.

IBM Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) Operations comprises various shared services functions within IBM’s Finance and Operations. Q2C provides support for IBM sellers for pre-sales and post-sales support, including BP contract management, BP disbursement, account receivables, and SOX compliance testing related operations. The team has strong business background with multiple languages capabilities, such as English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Cantonese.

APAC&Japan Partner Support Desk (PSD) Team supports the following countries and administrative regions: Australia, New Zealand, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and Japan.

This work movement brought big benefit and value generation in efficiency improvements:

Q2C Dalian team provides one-stop service support for end-to-end partner execution process to improve client experience.

We enabled cognitive support platform and 7 process simplifications with 3920 hours saving, also improving the turnaround time of the service.

150+ Call campaign to drive BPs’ engagement of IBM competency and package, 3 external client events to solve the partners’ problem quickly. Totally 300+ inbound and outbound calls were supported and 7000+ emails requests were completed successfully.