Services

Support Center Practices Certification

The Vertex Product Support Group has earned the prestigious Support Center Practices (SCP) certification for our seventh consecutive year.  SCP certification is the global standard for service quality and is rapidly being adopted by leading technology companies.  Currently, Vertex is one of just over 50 SCP certified companies in the world. These  companies include Lawson Software, Lockheed Martin Incorporated, PeopleSoft Incorporated, McKesson Corporation, Mentor Graphics Corporation, Network Appliance Incorporated, and Xerox Corporation. 

To receive this certification, the product support organization in a company must participate in an on-site audit and meet the requirements of over 100 business elements defined in the SCP program, demonstrating commitment to satisfying customers and delivering the highest quality support available.   

So, what does this mean for Vertex customers?  They have the benefit of utilizing a support resource that is committed to excellence and high performance standards, not only by our own internal benchmarks, but also by the SCP annual re-certification audits.

For example, Vertex has:

• Improved our support representative availability by increasing staff levels by 30%
• Implemented a new inquiry management system which makes it easier for our representatives to obtain, maintain and share customer information.
• Deployed an automated call distribution system to more effectively route customer calls.
• Implemented extensive performance measurement programs including survey programs that measure customer satisfaction.
• Increased the percentage of calls that are answered live by 90%

And we will continue to look for ways to improve our support services by working with our customers, just as we couldn't have achieved this award without the invaluable customer feedback that helped refine our support practices. 

As a matter of fact, Vertex has earned the SCP re-certification process for the past four years.  Key steps we take to ensure re-certification include:

• Periodic customer satisfaction surveys
• Established service level commitments with published performance against them
• Online support knowledge base for frequently asked questions
• Customer focus groups
• Ongoing training of Product Support Analysts to foster greater understanding of environments and platforms in which Vertex software runs (i.e. ERP systems, Java, etc.)
• Development staff rotation into support team to gain perspective on product needs

Below is a picture of the Product Support organization, celebrating the certification. Sometimes it's nice to be able to put a face with the person on the phone or at the other end of an e-mail!  They all look forward to continuing to provide our customers with the highest quality support.