162: Year in Review: Growing the Business through Support

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 162 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week I continue to look back at 2020. Even in 2020, there is still a lingering view in the industry that your customer support team is a cost center. It's a drain on business resources that could be better spent in selling more to newer prospects. It's seen as that very definition of a cost center. A department within an organization that does not directly add to profit but still costs the organization money to operate. It's possible that your organization recognises the relative merits in keeping and nurturing existing customers rather than solely focusing on selling to new ones. It can after all cost up to five times as much to sell to a new customer than to retain an existing one. Eighty-nine per cent of companies see customer experience as the key to retention. You're sixty to seventy percent more likely to sell to an existing customer, and they spend about thirty-one percent more than your new customers. The question is, beyond mitigating the high costs of selling to new customers, how can you leverage your customer support team to actively sell or actively generate revenue from existing customers? How do you turn that cost center into a profit center? My first strategy is to keep engagement levels high. Keep your customers engaged even after the end of the natural post-implementation or post-purchase cycle. This maximizes conversation and provides direct revenue generation opportunities. To keep those customers engaged, first make sure that the pre-to-post-sales transition is smooth and that customers have a bump-free transition. Building a personal approach in your transition plan encourages your customers to be an active part of the ongoing relationship with your support team. Then build engagement using data based on account behaviours. Identify those key account behaviours that you can use to build engagement. Perhaps the customer took out a trial and didn't make use of it, attended a webinar and didn't follow up with another, didn't fill out any surveys, or perhaps they only contact you when there's a problem. All of these behaviours and others should alert your customer support team towards an opportunity to increase engagement. When a customer calls in for help, you can have the support team provide personalized follow-up to increase engagement. For example, your support team can help the customer understand the value of the trial, link to other upcoming webinars or follow up on specific survey feedback. Then thirdly, help customers research their needs. Powerful engagement strategies to help customers solve their own problems and research their own needs. According to Forrester, 68% of customers prefer to conduct their own research rather than reach out to one of your salespeople. Impartially assisting with their research builds trust in your company and your support team. Even if, counterintuitively, the advice is not to use your paid product. Building trust in your client relationships is key to opening up further channels of communication and increasing engagement. Another strategy you need to consider is giving your support team the freedom and the tools they need to sell. Most customer support agents will insist they're not salespeople, and most of them don't want to be either. Committed customer service folk are usually helpful, people-focused and solution-oriented individuals who find the concept of selling anathema to them. So don't ask them to do it directly. First, give your support team the information they need. Access to appropriate information is crucial. If your support team is in the dark over how your customers use the product or engage with the wider organisation, you're limiting their opportunities to fix bigger issues, build trust and help the client. Use tools that give your team a full customer view. Maximize the flow of information across teams by using a single platform view of the customer. Maximise collaboration by choosing tools that support cross-functional communications in real time. Secondly, incentivize engagement and not sales. Don't incentivise your team to sell directly. You'll alienate all but the few who have a natural capacity and flair for selling. Instead, incentivize your team on engagement levels. Be creative about how you guide and measure those levels. Monitor changes in account-based triggers, such as trials completed, webinars attended, surveys filed, community involvement and knowledge-based article upvotes. Also consider incentivising at a team level rather than for the individual. Increased client engagement is not traced back to one individual contributor, but through the consistent actions and approach of the team. And finally, measure trends in customer value. Of course, if you're not incentivizing the team directly on revenue or selling targets, you'll need to find ways to correlate your customer engagement levels to revenue downstream. Beyond the usual measures of churn of retention, the single most important metric that is influenced by increased engagement is customer lifetime value. Take baselines on this and watch the upward swing as engagement increases. You need to invest in support to generate revenue. Making the move from a cost centre-led customer support practice to a revenue generation engine does take investment. You'll need to align processes and probably tools around the new model. You'll need to invest time in training and pulling the rest of the organization around to this new way of working. You'll need to work through the relevant merits of each strategy and measure the outcomes. And you will almost certainly need to invest in your support team in your support people, both through training and an updated hiring process. And be prepared to compensate accordingly. With careful planning, the seeds planted in your customer support team will ensure significant future growth, retention, and satisfaction. A business model that supports the generation of revenue from support is the key to future growth across your organization. Let's hear how some other leaders do it.

Mike Redbord: 7:06

Yes, support is primarily engaged in the process of helping customers, you know, get the value they wanted and helping them fix problems. But it's totally wrong to say that support cannot have an impact on growth. And so there's a few ways that you can do that, I think. One is just like a mindset of growth in support. I think if your leadership and support, whether it's yourself as a support leader, whether it's your CFO or your CEO, if you all look at support as a cost center, that attitude is going to come out of your mouth. It's going to enter into your quarterly meetings, it's going to seep into the team, and the team is going to believe that they are a drag on growth. And that is super toxic. So the first place to start with this, I think, is starting to think amongst your leadership team and especially among your finance team, how can support contribute to growth? And you need to kind of ask the question and I think participate in a brainstorming conversation with those folks in order to start to change the dialogue if you feel like you're in a place where you don't have that.

Mo McKibbin: 8:02

I do think that customers have a lot of really high demands. So I really break it down into seven different tenants. So I think of it as helpfulness. Do you actually solve their problem? Expertise, do you know what you're talking about? Efficiency, do you help people as quickly as they want to be helped? Accessibility, can you help people the way they want to be helped? Positivity, can you make the interaction as positive as possible? And proactivity, can you anticipate needs before they arise? Most people, when they think of what makes excellent customer support, they focus on positivity and efficiency. And that eliminates a lot of the other qualities that make a customer feel truly taken care of. And so I think that that's probably where the delivery gap lies. The problem is that all of these things take incredible investments in resources that companies do not allocate to customer support because the perception of customer support is that it is a cost center. But what is ironic about that is that when you treat customer support like a cost center, it becomes one.

Craig Stoss: 9:18

I think support's main role is just to help support the customers through their difficult times. That doesn't mean you can't act as a business advisor. You can get more context about the customer, you can get more understanding about what they're trying to achieve. You can start to make recommendations that help their business succeed and might therefore help your business succeed. And that's not a problem. I think that still comes from a place of support. And you can train your support reps to have those higher level conversations. I like to use the phrase, don't answer questions, solve problems. And I think that that's where that second piece comes into is you're solving business challenges that are preventing the customer from succeeding with your software. Whereas, you know, a customer could call in and say, I would like this button to be blue, and you might say, Well, here's how to change that button to be blue, I'm answering your question. When really it's a larger conversation about accessibility options. You know, they have a colorblind person on their team and they need to be able to adhere to certain uh accessibility standards. That's a bigger business problem, but it's a very different situation than answering the question, how do you change this button to the color blue?

Charlotte Ward: 10:27

Yeah, it's really understanding the use case and actually the value that your product or service is bringing to that customer, isn't it?

Craig Stoss: 10:35

Yeah, absolutely. And and I think that, you know, tomorrow a phrase from a good friend of ours, every employee should either be doing something every day to retain existing customers or get new customers. And I really believe that. I think that is absolutely true. And support's role in that is probably a combination of both in some ways.

Erica Mancuso: 10:56

Support needs to be that trusted person for the client. And you don't want the customer calling support, wondering what they're going to try to be sold. I mean, don't you hate that when you call, say, your cable company to have a simple issue resolved and they're trying to upsell you to a better package. You have to walk that line carefully. But you know, organically, in a lot of the discussions that support's having, they can really uncover needs that are real needs and not just, hey, I'm trying to upsell you.

Mike Redbord: 11:22

I think a lot of folks, when they consider support and its relationship to revenue, they they look for with its support sort of has a direct line to day-to-day actions driving revenue. And in SaaS models, for example, that means retention and reverse and churn and a lot of that, you know, that's applicable, but that doesn't always apply if you've got an e-commerce product or any number of different product lines. So I think there's a couple of avenues that are worth exploring. One is thinking about your support team's relationship to the product and the product feedback. A true voice of the customer program can come out of support. And I've seen that happen in a lot of great cases. I one of our programs, a partner here, I can talk about briefly. The manager just noticed that they were getting a lot of different types of feedback in their CSAT messages. And so she took it on herself to categorize that, create a coding system over a couple of weeks. Clearly, saw some groupings, you know, push that forward back to our partner contact. And their development team came back very quickly and said that it helped them fast track a number of massive initiatives that they were just kind of struggling to determine where customers are feeling pain. And they turned around and they said, Wow, the support team actually had this data, saw it coming in. It's also a good way to empower the support teams. A lot of frontline agents will tell you, hey, I know what the customers need. They're complaining about you know, X, Y, and Z all day long. But you have to give some form to that. You have to put it into a system so you can codify it, understand the maybe pain point Y is actually more valuable than pain point X, and that's what we need to drive at first. A real voice of the customer program, it's a phrase that a lot of people tend to toss around, like, oh we we you know, we like to listen to the voice of the customer. But if you don't have a program for it, it's not really going anywhere. It's just, you know, a few data points, maybe a couple of passionate snippets that surface in a meeting for conversation here and there. And a product manager or project manager isn't going to have a lot they can do with just a handful of anecdotes, right? You have to turn it into quantifiable data.

Charlotte Ward: 13:19

Voice of the uh voice of the customer often just means a few customer interviews, doesn't it? It doesn't it doesn't mean actually really collating a lot of these insights from across the organization. And of course, as you say, support is is part of the organization that talks a lot to your customers. If you're able to capture that, that's really powerful. That's it for today. Go to customer supportleaders.com forward slash one six two for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.