73: Support Contributing to Revenue with Craig Stoss

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 73 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is support contributing to revenue. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back Craig Stoss. Craig, thanks so much for joining me again. Pleasure to have you back. This week we're talking about support contributing to revenue. It's something that a lot of support leaders are particularly keen to begin to get to grips with in their organizations, right? So where do we begin?

Craig Stoss: 0:52

I think with most support departments, you need to begin at the point where a customer comes in to support. You know, the number one way I would say a support department contributes to revenue is through maintaining existing customers and supporting them through their troubled times so that they choose to renew. That is where you every company needs to begin. What do you want to be known for? What tone do your reps need to use? And how do they use those tools that you give them in order to help the customer be successful and therefore renew?

Charlotte Ward: 1:24

So how do you correlate those behaviors and that style of service with, for ex for instance, that reduced churn?

Craig Stoss: 1:33

That's the problem, right? It's it's it's an interesting uh issue that I think companies solve in different ways. In fact, I I've been at a company where if there was a conversation and support that led to a business discussion around a potential upsell or around feature sets that the customer says are very important and they're struggling with, those things can be marked down using tags or check boxes to indicate, hey, I had a conversation with this customer that potentially could have gone south. And I think this feeds into customer success as well. If you have the right set of tools within your customer success team to be able to monitor the types of cases that are coming in, the types of conversations support is having with the customer, the customer success team is then able to kind of note, oh, well, these customer contacted support a lot, but still decided to renew or upsell or increase spend. Uh, this customer did not talk to the at all, and they chose to churn. And you can start to do some correlations between uh support activity and the actions of the customer afterwards.

Charlotte Ward: 2:40

Should all of those onward conversations you you think live outside of support? Or are we really there just almost as a kind of lead generation, for want of a better way of putting it?

Craig Stoss: 2:50

I mean, I certainly hope not. 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: 4:00

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: 4:08

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. Uh, support is can also drive revenue by identifying worrying trends. They they're the ones talking to the customer every day, and they can start to see negative trends in the product. The sentiment is going down about this feature, uh, no one understands this use case and can start to fix those problems before they get mass visualizations like online or through social media. I think this is also true with larger organizations. The COVID-19 thing has really spiked up support loads. And and it, you know, you can see online every day people complaining about wait times and things like that. That doesn't uh help the customers be successful. And so you can help drive revenue through uh being able to, as a support department, step up your game, you know, take take actions uh to make sure your customers are getting through these difficult times. Uh all of these things are trends that support is probably some of the first people in your organization to see.

Charlotte Ward: 5:22

And all of all of these uh perspectives need data, don't they? I know you're a big fan of data. And and actually to understand how support can contribute to revenue, you have to be able to measure all of those things in different ways and find correlations where pro previous previously none have necessarily been taken, right?

Craig Stoss: 5:42

Yeah, I think that's true, right? I mean, uh take a simple example of a UX problem that support maybe identifies up to the product team. Um does usage of that feature go up after the fix? You know, you can you can have tools installed inside your application that measure that. Was usage were customers successful before or were customers successful after? Um, you know, a lot of companies do A-B testing. Amazon is famous for their A-B testing. Um, you know, there's no reason why support can't contribute to that type of testing by saying, hey, we think customers don't like this thing. Let's test a solution to it, and you can prove whether uh customers are more engaged there. Um and yes, tying this stuff to revenue is is certainly not easy, but it's also very easy to tie it closer to uh the other side. You know, if we don't do these things, um what happens to churn?

Charlotte Ward: 6:38

That's it for today. Go to customer supportleaders.com forward slash seventy-three for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.