Software Vendor and Customer Support

[maxdomen]

I have been trying to find information about the way customer support works for the software company.
The questions I would like to ask are:
1) What is the prime cost of customer support(including product maintenance, customer support)?
2) What is the expenses structure?.

For example: How often support engineer have to visit client, how much time such a trip could take.
What is the percent of software caused client problems?

The motivation of manager for customer support team is interesting area also.
What is the key parameters for support team effectiveness estimation?
What is the common reward system for support?
There are a lot of information from ITIL , but it is very heavily-loaded for us, finding methods that are more agile would be very nice.
We have the box product with the several dozens of integrations per year. The product quality is rather high.
The most of the problems are caused by other software environment: bad DB version, security policy problems in LDAP and etc.

I know that these parameters are different for most companies, which have different projects, customers.
But we are interested in any experience you can share considering the subjects specified above.

Sample SLA would look like this:
We provide informational support by phone, email and using web site for the following areas:
- Product installation
- Product usage
The guaranteed answer time is:
- 2 days for email
- 4 hours for phone.
We also provide:
- The diagnostics which may be required if product problem persists.
- Bug fixing.
- Product update caused by federal law changes.
The customer have to provide us with the access to his systems where product is functioning, and we oblige not to break customer's security policy.

We would be happy to receive any information from you.

Definite ways of support department job quality estimation would be very nice to get.
For example:
- The percentage for answers in the period of time defined in SLA
- The percentage of answers that solved customer problem, without asking any more questions.

The separation of support problems and ones caused by developer faults would be nice

[james02]

Well to my opinion the working of the customer support of a software company may vary. It can depend on the type of software it deals with primarily. Like I have been to two different software companies and have seen that there mode of operations when it comes of customer support are drastically different from each other. So I guess you have to make your plans accordingly.
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