CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

13 May 2008

Company News

Mentor Graphics Offers Personalized Web Support Portals; First to Earn Certification under the SCP eService Standard

Mentor Graphics Corporation announced it has re-architected SupportNet, http://supportnet.mentor.com/, its web customer support site, offering users an individually customizable portal for easy access to technical product information of interest to them. The company is also the first company to earn certification for its web support services through the internationally recognized Service Capability & Performance (SCP) Standards. Mentor earned certification under the SCP eService Standard after an extensive audit of its global online customer support operations.

“Mentor has hundreds of products and thousands of application notes, how-to videos, product updates and the like on SupportNet. By offering customers a way to customize SupportNet to the products they care about, we’ve reached a rather remarkable 76% success rate for on-line support,” said Tom Floodeen, vice president of customer support for Mentor Graphics. “Not only does this offer customers a powerful and swift way to get the answers they need, but when customers can find what they want quickly on-line, it allows us to focus on more complex problems, speeding responses there, too.”

With hundreds of products, electronic design automation (EDA) customers can struggle to find the information relevant to their needs. The new SupportNet allows customers to select the products that they care about and filter out extraneous information. The company studied customer usage patterns and developed statistical information to better prioritize content display for the most critical and common tasks customers wanted to do. The portals are further segmented based on customer role, either designer or system administrator. SupportNet is architected to enable continuous customer usage analysis to further refine information display, so evolving usage needs can be met.

SupportNet provides full on-line searchable documentation, as well as natural language query supported by InQuira. Searching across thousands of pages of content including PDFs can be troublesome for any search technology. Customer feedback helped Mentor determine that the biggest factors for successful searches were a) the ability to enter an entire phrase or question and b) pinpointing the exact match whether in HTML or PDF content.

The SCP Standards are designed to improve the quality and effectiveness of support. A consortium of leading technology companies, along with Service Strategies Corporation, created the internationally recognized standards, which define best practices, quantify performance levels, and establish a foundation to continuously improve service operations. Achieving certification against SCP Standards requires annual comprehensive audits to confirm that companies meet the requirements defined by the program. Launched in 2007, the SCP eService Standard measures approximately 50 eservice factors including usability and design, security and privacy, and self help services.

The new SupportNet customized portals are available today to all users of Mentor Graphics Support at no additional charge at http://supportnet.mentor.com/.

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