Customer Support is a Profit Center
By: Martin H. Normark
Tags: Customer Service, Product Design, Software Development

It’s easy for some people to discard the value of customer support and tell themselves that it is a cost center which is something you should outsource.

We already spent a substantial amount of time and money on development, why not save any cost possible attached to the delivery of the product?

The fact that customers are having issues can easily be problems on their end and we don’t want to be their local IT support staff.

Do you remember the last time you had a problem with your internet connection and you had to get on the phone with your service provider? Was that experience any good? (if it was, then you’re probably a loyal customer of their’s somewhat because of their support, no?)

If you’re a customer, you should be able to talk to the company you’re doing business with. Paul English, founder of Kayak.com

Customer Support directly influence your brand

Branding and marketing has become so much more about the entire experience with your product and your company, and not just an afterthought of advertising on top.

With any contact your customer has with your product or brand, the brand either increase or decrease in value from the perspective of the customer.

Why not make any experience with your brand as great as possible, so that you add value to your brand every time?

The circles of marketing

Most amateurs and citizens believe that marketing is the outer circle. Marketing = advertising, it seems. The job of marketing in this circle is to take what the factory/system/boss gives you and hype it, promote it and yell about it. This is what so many charities, politicians, insurance companies, financial advisors, computer makers and well, just about everyone does. Seth Godin — The circles of marketing

The above quote from the blog post by Seth Godin is accompanied with the photo on the left and also a downloadable PDF.

As customer support adds value to your brand, it also helps to think about customers as people you can influence and turn into evangelists. People go crazy when they get more than they expected. Every day we see evidence on the internet of companies winning big by going the extra mile.

That was basically the building block of Zappos, who was sold to Amazon for a substantial price tag.

My favorite example by far is LEGO who scoured their warehouses for the discontinued Emerald Night Train an 11-year-old boy had spent two years saving up his money to buy, only to discover it is now an expensive collectible that is not being manufactured anymore.

It arrived at their door step two days before his birthday. Priceless marketing.

Seth Godin ends the blog post with the following sentence:

When in doubt, when your marketing isn’t working, the answer is easy: go one circle in.

Insights for product and growth

I believe that we can never know too much about our customers, and very few actually know enough to clearly articulate their product decisions. Talking directly to customers should be a top priority, even after you feel successful and have become profitable (from day one?).

Treating customer support as part of both your product and your product design team can help you continually learn about their day-to-day jobs and learn about their struggles and enable you to align your product according to this validated learning.

Paul English, founder of Kayak.com, was frustrated with engineers not sharing empathy with customer issues when he explained it to them.

So he thought that exposing engineers directly to the customer would increase their empathy, and get the issue solved more effectively.

Career path to engineering

Hiring engineers will always be a challenge. So why not establish a clear path to engineering within your company?

Support staff who could potentially become engineers would early on show interest in how the engineers solved bugs reported by customers.

That slowly grows, and they’ll suddenly start doing initial research into the bugs. Is it a client side issue? Open up DevTools in Chrome and have a go at troubleshooting.

Someone doing customer support, is now doing a little bit of testing. The more they do that, they more interest they show in the subject the more they might want to change their job into that of a member of the QA team.

From there, it shouldn’t be discouraged to grow further into engineering.

How much does it cost to hire an engineer in a competitive market?

With direct cost of advertising the position, teaming up with a recruiting agency, getting paper work done, doing interviews, travel expenses but also indirect cost of on-boarding a new person, peers spending time to help that person get up to speed — the cost could go well over $50k and even approach $100k.

Conclusion

It might be totally obvious to you that customer support is a central part of a product team. It might also be totally obvious that the user experience of your product goes beyond the actual app on their phone or in their browser.

What is often forgotten is the hidden cost in lack of the above that invisibly ramps up the cost of going with what seamed like a cheap option.