“Business is simple. Management’s job is to take care of employees. The employees’ job is to take care of the customers. Happy customers take care of the shareholders. It’s a virtuous cycle.”
John Mackey, Founder and CEO, Whole Foods Market
Love this quote, which I spotted in Chip Conley’s book Peak. Somehow companies keep forgetting that their customers pay the bills. Why would you accept (even build, in some cases) anything that makes them unhappy?
“When your [customer support] representatives start seeing themselves as marketing staff instead of troubleshooters, they can turn questions and problems into opportunities. They can listen to what the customer wants or needs and:
1) Educate customers about your company
2) Upsell your products
3) Build buzz for upcoming product releases”
From Turning Support into Marketing
I promise you if my support team focused on this, our customers would hate us.
I agree with the premise that support should not just be damage control. I agree that the people on the front lines talking to customers are extremely valuable to the company. I even agree that the occasional upsell can make sense (Warby Parker’s support team just upsold me thinner lenses the other day – after doing an amazing job solving my issues.)
But putting the support team under sales or marketing is dumb. Those departments are focused on acquiring customers. While some support work can contribute to acquisition & sales, the goal of support should always be on retaining customers. (And if you don’t think that’s valuable, read Jamie Quint’s post on how it can be MORE valuable than acquisition.)
I’m not trash-talking Sales or Marketing – I’m just saying support goals don’t generally fit into their paradigm. It’d be like moving Sales under Engineering. Does the Sales team have value to the Engineering team? Sure: they can provide customer feedback and find beta testers. Does that mean they should work under Engineering and focus on those tasks? Of course not!
It’s distressing to me how acquisition-minded the tech industry continues to be, despite the waning effectiveness of acquisition channels (see Richard White’s UserConf keynote for a great overview of all of this). Retention is hugely important, and the sooner companies realize this and build departments and executive roles around it – encompassing support and community – the sooner they’ll be poised to survive beyond their early success and buzz.
Full Disclosure: I previously worked for UserVoice, a Desk competitor. I’ve got nothing against Desk though…they were always nice to us. 🙂
The problem with the balance between marketing and caring for customers is that marketing is often immediate. You can put an ad out and immediately see people visiting and signing up and spending money. You put effort into customer service, community building, or just basic user experience and you don’t see an immediate result. But us community professionals swear that you will see a long-term benefit.
That’s why I’m so pleased to note that Ryanair is seeing its worst annual revenues in five years. I’ve been saying for years that Ryanair’s tactics were going to explode in their face, but people kept saying “they’re selling tickets, so apparently is not an issue”. To me, this is fantastic validation that caring for your customers does make a difference and treating them badly does affect the bottom line.
A few very pleasant folks have interviewed me in the last couple of months, so I figured I’d share those here.
Support-Driven Podcast – Scott Tran interviews me about kicking off a community effort, finding your community niche, and combining customer service & community. Also available on iTunes.
Big Door – I discuss why customer loyalty isn’t marketing, the community management trends I see, and metrics one should look at.
Startup Product Summit – A little bit older, but arguably one of my best and most widely-accessible talks. I cover customer feedback, customer-focused product design, and how to understand when data or customers are misleading you. Slides available here.
Hope you find these helpful, useful, or at least entertaining! 🙂
I’ve had issues with my Sonic.net internet since I moved into my new place. I’m not sure what it is yet, but we’ll get a week of great connection and then suddenly have it drop every 15 minutes. This is understandably frustrating. But what’s not frustrating is Sonic.net’s customer service.
Here’s how my latest call went:
Compare this to AT&T, which I had prior to Sonic.net. I had tons of issues with them and they were horrible to interact with. In fact, I wrote a whole blog post about it for UserVoice. They:
I almost enjoy getting support from Sonic.net. They have clearly optimized their experience around customer service, and their staff is obviously empowered to actually do shit. They can tell that I am a reasonably tech-savvy person and don’t treat me like an idiot. And their staff sounds engaged and interested instead of sounding like sweatshop workers. I went through maybe 15 AT&T phone calls and nearly cursed them out. I’ll gladly go through another 15 Sonic.net calls if necessary, because their service is superlative.
Companies like AT&T will continue to see customer service as a cost center, providing the minimal required service while pumping money into user acquisition marketing which, ironically, often shows up in my mailbox. Meanwhile, Sonic.net invests just a bit in empowered, smart support agents, great policies, and simple-but-effective support tools and they’ve got my money for life.
THIS is why service is important.