The Path to Revolutionizing Your Technical Support - Part 3: Marketing the New System

Written by PayPerShop.com - Filed under: Articles on July 7th, 2008

By Randy Miller, Director of Services, Journyx

The first part of this series discussed how to introduce positive changes and new methods into your technical support department. The second part focused on staffing and management. This final part will offer advice on how to market your new support system to both your company and your customers.

Marketing?

Yes, marketing.

How well does it normally work when you tell someone to do something? It depends on your relationship to that person, right? A friend will explain why they aren’t going to do what you told them. A sibling will hit you. Your spouse will laugh. Your kids will do it while whining incessantly.

Have you ever had any luck telling someone at work who doesn’t report to you what to do? Me neither. This means that you have to sell it to them, which is where marketing comes in.

The first thing you must understand is that marketing involves focusing on the ideal case. I know that if you are a technical person, that is probably not in your nature. You want to set absolutely correct expectations. Don’t do that. Just talk about the good stuff. You can say, “We have made some major changes in technical support. We are now better trained and more organized. You can trust us.”

You should also tailor your speech to your audience. When you are talking to Sales, talk about salespeople, and when you are talking to Accounting, talk about accountants. Be sure to focus on the benefits: “This is going to save you time.”

Internal Strategies
You are going to need to market yourself to the rest of your company before you start talking to customers, and thankfully, doing so will allow you to involve them in your external marketing efforts.

1. Sales
Salespeople, generally speaking, are focused on money, so your best bet is to explain how the new technical support team will help them close more sales.

“When you call in to existing customers asking for more business, they won’t have big thorny problems to overcome, which will help you close more sales.”

“You will have happy customers at your fingertips to serve as references which will help you close more sales.”

In addition, there is one script that you need to give to the salespeople—a new support transition script. Make some posters. Print up some signs. Give them money every time you hear them say it (for the first few months, anyway).

“Yes sir, I understand that this issue is important to you. I’m going to get the experts right on it. Our technical support team is much faster at figuring out solutions to problems than I am. I trust them to take care of this.”

The salespeople will also need some new processes for how to give you a support case. Keep it simple and set your expectations low. They might email the helpdesk with the customer’s name and problem, or they can simply call you so you can take down the information and create the case yourself. All of your support people must know that if anyone, especially a salesperson, ever mentions a customer problem, then that support person must immediately take full personal ownership of that problem.

Finally, you will need to work with the salespeople on technical support for prospects. Don’t bother asking for it, because you won’t get it until they really trust you. Your policy towards prospects needs to be that you will support anyone the salespeople tell you to. Again, it is a trust-building issue.

2. Marketing
Your marketing team loves happy reference-giving customers. They won’t need much convincing to follow-up after some or all of your support cases with customer satisfaction surveys and requests for satisfaction quotes. It is important for the company that you enable them to do that. Those quotes and reference customers are your long-term marketing program with the salespeople, helping you reinforce their new behavior.

3. Accounting
Your new technical support system will help accounting allocate support costs to each customer more accurately. By providing data on how much technical support time each customer actually utilizes, you are enabling them to determine which customers are more expensive to service than others. Upper management and product planning will then be able to use this data to target products to more profitable segments of customers. You will also find it useful as you can argue for raising the support billings on the least profitable segments of customers.

(More profit is good. I felt silly typing that sentence. I hope I didn’t insult your intelligence there. It just needs to be said.)

You should also point out that the information on how much time you spend on each customer also helps the accountants get the invoices paid. Customers who are using a lot of support time are clearly using the service, so they will pay the full invoice price. If not, they should easily succumb to collection calls that threaten to cut off their technical support.

4. Development
You don’t need to engage the development team directly until you start planning to hire your own developer for technical support. The head of development will almost certainly react skeptically to the idea, so you should consider buying him/her lunch in order to talk it over. Gather some data from the developers beforehand—how much time they spend working on bug fixes and how big of a pain it is. Take your notes to take to lunch with you.

You will need the development manager to interview the candidate you want as if he/she were hiring a junior developer. He/she will also have to train your new support developer and do code reviews of this person’s work.

Sell this to the head of development by making it clear that this will mean fewer interruptions and headaches for everyone. If you are getting some sort of performance bonus for improving customer satisfaction, offer to share it if you have to. It’s worth it.

The head of development might have just the right candidate for you. This person will almost certainly be the wrong candidate. Smile, thank him/her and accept the candidate anyway. When the person gets mad and quits, you will get to hire your own candidate with the head of development’s help. Giving them an out from firing that non-performer just might be your cost of admission, and even though the person might not fit the profile I gave you in Part 2, his/her experience in the code base and acceptance among the core development team are tremendous bonuses. The work patterns established (like attending development team meetings) will greatly benefit your replacement candidate later on.

External Strategies
While it is not a good idea to run a full marketing campaign stating, “Hey, our support is no longer dreadful,” you will be able to announce your improvements to customers. In addition to the sales script previously mentioned, you can insert announcements into your customer communications such as the newsletter, automated emails, and cover letters that are sent with invoices. Ask the marketing and sales teams to find the right locations and messaging.

You can also make use of your customer communications such as helpdesk email confirmations. For example, here is what I wrote for ours:

“We have received your cry for help and have logged it in our helpdesk under this case number: #########

Our support ninjas monitor the helpdesk from 7 AM to 6 PM (CST), Monday through Friday. They sneak in some other times, but we can’t make any promises about that.

A real person will read this case within two hours (during the times listed above). We triage and deal with critical issues first, so if your site is down you should expect to hear from us soon. We try to reply to all problems that get to us before 4:00 PM on the same business day.

You can reply to this email to update your case, or you can call us at 800-755-9878 ext 2 (US) or 512-834-8888 ext 2 (everywhere else).”

We have had tons of positive reactions from customers about that, saying things like, “I love it. I’m glad I’m getting help from a real person instead of some software system.” I take great personal pride from that, even though I am planning on writing a new version in free verse.

Feedback
Compliments are not just good for your team’s self-esteem (although that is extremely important). They can also help cultivate your relationship with your customers and possibly create new opportunities. The act of saying something nice about you will reinforce a customer’s good feelings about you and will make them significantly more likely to repeat it to someone else. That word-of-mouth recommendation marketing is priceless as you are, in effect, turning the negative situation—the customer had a problem—into a positive situation—the customer recommends your company. Not only that, but as I said before, such good feelings can lead a customer to provide a quote for your marketing.

When you get this really institutionalized, you can build up quite a resume of customer recommendation quotes. If you are not careful, though, your whole website will be covered with quotes like, “The people at this company do a great job of fixing problems.” That is really nice, but could also leave prospects with the impression that your software has tons of problems. For this reason, make sure that your marketing people know how to ask for generic quotes like, “The people at this company really know what they are doing.”

A few changes in processes, staffing and internal relationships is all that is needed to revamp your technical support team with great success. Good luck! Drop me a note and let me know how it’s going.

About the Author:
Randy Miller has 11 years of customer-focused experience in sales and services delivery. Prior to joining Journyx in 1999 as the first Timesheet-specific sales rep, Randy spent five years in the Corporate Sales and Retail Management divisions of leading electronics retailer CompUSA. Since then Randy has held many different positions at Journyx, including: Sales Engineer, Trainer, Consultant, Product Manager, Support Team Manager, and Implementation Manager for Enterprise Accounts. Randy has personally managed development and implementation efforts for many of the company’s largest customers and is a co-holder of several Journyx patents. Randy was named Director of Services in 2005. Randy can be reached at randy@journyx.com.

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Filed under: Articles on July 7th, 2008