“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. 🙂