If you’re the guy everyone turns to for help, who supports you? One place
support professionals can turn is the Association of Support Professionals
(ASP). The international organization offers content regarding industry trends
and the latest research on call center operations, Web support, customer
satisfaction, compensation trends, and fee-based services.We spoke with ASP officials and some members to find out what the group’s Web site offers and the price of membership. Here’s what they had to say.
History of the organization
In the late '80s and early '90s, executive director Jeffery Tartan and membership director Jane Farber ran semiannual conferences on the East and West coasts.
“Our attendees began asking us to start up an association,” Farber said. They wanted a way to keep the benefits of the conference going all year long. So we started ASP in 1995 at the request of our customers."
With the advent of Web technologies, the need for conferences was far less, and in 1998, the organization phased out its twice-yearly gatherings.
The cost
Individual memberships to ASP are $60 annually; corporate memberships are $500 annually and cover as many support professionals as your organization employs globally with full benefits for each one.
Farber said ASP membership is affordable because the association doesn’t squander money on expensive, glitzy conferences.
“Everything is on the Web,” she said. “We have no printing costs to pass on. We don’t have to cover travel expenses. All we need to cover is the time we invest in researching information for our members.”
While ASP's membership costs thousands of dollars less than that of other associations, it’s just as valuable, according to member Jacky Hood, president of Crescent Project Management. Hood recalls a project from several months ago, when she had to assess call centers at a health care company with two hospitals and approximately 15 clinics.
"The telephone menu trees had been redone dozens of times and the client wanted to know if there were any standards,” Hood said. “I called a number of consultants, looked through old magazines, and nobody had anything useful."
She called Farber, who quickly located and sent a 1996 article with precisely the right information that had appeared in an ASP publication.
ASP publications
Farber said ASP publishes a series of statistical and advice-based articles drawn from the experience of its members and other support professionals, typically on subjects where there is little or no comparable material anywhere else.
"We focus on a fairly narrow niche, so there simply aren't many other people collecting the kind of data we do—statistics on IT organizations and help desk groups are usually not applicable to external support groups," Farber said. She said ASP attempts to listen closely to members' information needs and conducts studies specifically in overlooked areas.
"In fact, I'd say almost all of our research efforts have been inspired by questions from our members,” Farber said. “Our research isn't academic. Literally every question we investigate has some practical application for people who are running support organizations.”
As an example, Farber said ASP is one of the few organizations that collects data on Web support, support outsourcing, and fee-based support. She said that while these are critical issues to ASP’s audience, they're not particularly interesting to people outside of our market niche.
Feedback about support Web sites
Hood said she gets "tremendous benefit” from ASP’s Year’s 10 Best Web Support Sites contest, which is open to the public. The contest honors outstanding Web-based customer support sites for software and other technology products. Entries are judged on 25 separate performance areas, including overall usability, design, navigation, knowledgebase and search implementation, interactive features, personalization, and the major site development challenge.
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