"Stephen Smoozer is here to see you." Good old Steve. My buddy. Always looking for ways to help me out - for a small fee, of course. Actually he's not a bad guy, even though I could swear it was him standing behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. He called last week to let me know he was going to be "in my neighborhood" and thought he'd just drop by, if that worked for me. I know why he's coming - our support contract is up in three months.

I outsourced our internal Help Desk operations to his company a couple of years ago, and, with some minor blips, it's been to our advantage. Of course, the Help Desk operation is linked into Entire, so I can continually monitor their responsiveness and derive historical data for trend analysis. Since I knew Steve was coming today, I ran some reports out of Entire yesterday highlighting specific items I wanted to address. I've pre-staged Entire to some of these, so I can immediately point to them during our discussion.

After hearing how much Steve "loves" to meet with me and giving him an update on my golf game (which I have no doubt, he's really interested in), Steve casually mentions the support contract. His company is proud to be serving us, hopes to keep our fine relationship intact, and has some ideas on how they can provide even more help (Did I just hear a Ka-ching in the background?).

As I tell Steve I've been thinking along the same lines, his hand instinctively reaches for his pen. However, there are some items I'd like to discuss before we talk about the future. I give Steve copies of my Entire trend analysis, showing a slight, but perceptible, drop in problem resolution time. Steve quickly replies they have brought in a couple of new people recently, so the trend will be reversed as they come up to speed. Now I turn my monitor around and show Steve Entire's information on some specific instances where their response did not meet our contract terms.

Over the next couple of weeks we arrive at a deal to extend and expand the contract, at better terms, due to the accurate and detailed performance tracking provide by Entire.