Founded in 1987 to serve the publishing industry, Hudson Software also offers helpdesk services to ISPs and wireless hotspots, with skilled technicians and extensive reporting capabilities.

by Jeff Goldman [March 17, 2004]

Glenn Polin has been working in the computer industry for about 35 years: He started with mainframes, worked at Apple in the early 1980s, and has been serving the education industry since then. "In the '80s, as microcomputers became more and more prevalent in schools, there was a cry for materials," Polin says. "The schools had these computers, and now they needed educational materials for them."

Today, Polin says, you literally can't sell a textbook without having both support materials for teachers and ancillary activities for students available either on a web site, a CD-ROM, or a portable device. "Today, this is an enormous undertaking for the publishers—and these publishers, for the most part, are not overly technical companies," he says.

Hudson Software	Voice: (914) 773-0400 x550
E-mail: emailus@hudsonsoft.com

To help publishers deal with the challenge of providing educational software along with the necessary support for it, Polin founded Hudson Software. "When I started the company, I went around to the various publishers and asked them what they needed to help them do what they were doing," Polin says. "The business has been built on that ever since."

Initially, he says, most publishers asked for help with programming and development. Hudson served that niche for a while, but soon began to expand into quality assurance and management, helping publishers and developers to work together more efficiently. "We began to work with both parties to help get a piece of software done to a satisfactory degree so they could publish it," Polin says.

Adding support
At the same time, Hudson began receiving requests to provide technical support for the software they had helped to develop. "We took on first one client and then another, until now we serve many large names in the professional publishing, educational publishing, and nonprofit arenas," Polin says. "Technical support was something that they sorely, sorely needed."

In order to provide support for publishers, Polin says, Hudson had to transform itself into a call center. "We had to become a technical support company," he says. "Once you've done that, once you've made the commitment to the techniques, the databases, the call center equipment, and the type of switch you need, it's a fairly simple jump to ask, 'Okay, now where's the rest of the call center market?'"

As a result, Hudson recently began offering helpdesk services for ISPs and wireless hotspot providers in addition to its longstanding clients in the publishing industry. "Hotspots looked like a young, growing market that someone could come into entrepreneurially and help to shape—and from there, ISPs were a natural outgrowth," Polin says.

Hotspots, in particular, were a logical step for Hudson. "We already support at least one product line from a major publisher with wireless connectivity," Polin says. "There are other things that people call about, but the primary call is, 'My students can't connect.' So we have practical knowledge of the kinds of problems that people face."

Employee evaluation
In offering helpdesk services, Polin says Hudson's employees are its greatest strength. The screening process for new hires is extensive. "First, the application comes in, and if the application looks like they're illiterate, if their communication skills are poor, we reject it out of hand," he says. "Our clients demand well-written records, so I can't put somebody on the phone who can't write a clear English sentence."

Applicants with good writing skills are then screened through a brief telephone interview, and those who pass that test are given a written test. "We give them an evaluation that covers a broad range of computer knowledge," Polin says. "Keep in mind that we're mostly still supporting proprietary applications for publishers, so these people need to be conversant with the computer industry."

Those applicants who pass the written evaluation are brought in for a second interview. "We put them in front of a computer, preferably at an operating system that they're somewhat uncomfortable with," Polin says. "Then we'll ask them a series of questions, progressing from easy to hard—and they're forced to improvise. That's really what we're looking for: we're looking for problem solvers."

This process, Polin says, helps Hudson to hire technicians who don't require the help of a call script when they answer a help call. "My clients want the phone to be answered by people who can solve problems without sending them off somewhere else," he says. "Anybody who gets through this screening process is pretty good."

Reports and pricing
For much of the ISP market, these qualifications may actually be excessive. "Generally, when someone calls, it's a connectivity issue," Polin says. "They're either having trouble connecting to the Internet, or they're having trouble getting email—whereas a certain percentage of calls in the proprietary market require you to know about a particular product, which we have to train our reps on."

Similarly, publishers who deal with proprietary software require extensive record-keeping in order to improve their software. As a result, Hudson's reporting is extremely extensive. "There are some examples of reports on our web site, and there are other custom reports that we do for clients," Polin says.

In addition, all clients have access to an online interface that tracks calls in real time. "As calls come in, we create what we call issues," Polin says. "If it's a call where we recognize that there's an issue out there, we put those issues in a database, and we categorize each call so our clients can literally come in and, say, look at February's data and see exactly, by product and by issue, where their dollars are being spent."

For ISPs, helpdesk services are priced per user, while hotspot support is generally priced per minute. Hudson's pricing isn't the lowest in the market, but Polin is confident of the offering's quality. "We have excellent technicians, and we have the right equipment in place," he says. "We have everything we need to satisfy the most demanding customers."

— End

Related articles:
	[April 24, 2002]	Covad Puts Teeth in its SLAs
	[April 4, 2001]	According to Whom?
	[Sept. 29, 2000]	e-CRM at $6 Per Hour

Online resources:
	Outsourced Customer Support Directory
	Quick Reference Chart