The Art of Support: A Blueprint for Customer Success and Support Organizations
Are you a customer success or support executive curious about adapting industry best practices to your organization? Are you a newly-promoted customer success or support manager with plenty of ideas, but not much management experience? Or are you an executive with no hands-on experience with customer success, but wanting to learn more about how to decrease churn and improve revenue expansion from existing customers?
The Art of Support is a practical guide for managers and executives that answers your questions. In it, you will find:
•Best practices for customer success and support, from designing customer lifecycle journeys, to managing day-to-day activities, to measuring results.
•Nuanced recommendations to build or improve your organization: segmenting customers, choosing delivery models that match customers’ requirements and resource constraints, managing knowledge, setting appropriate goals and objectives.
•Dozens of practical tools you can use right away such as customer scorecards, sample support portfolios, hiring checklists, decision trees for selecting support models, job ladders, and budget templates.
•How to use customer data to influence strategic decisions for the product or service, prospecting, and selling
Praise for The Art of Support
Customer experience has become a big trend and a marketing buzzword. However, focusing on clients is a very difficult art and science. Francoise's book explains in detail how you can turn around your operation and innovate towards a whole new level of customer engagement. She has an amazing way to look at new trends in the industry and tie them into an overall customer engagement strategy. -- Marco Bill-Peters, VP, Customer Experience and Engagement, Red Hat
Francoise has rearchitected the classic handbook for support organizations, The Art of Support, to help managers achieve the four big jobs of support: customer success, self-service, issue resolution, and customer advocacy. Perfect on all four! -- John Ragsdale, VP Technology Research, Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA)
Customer success finally gets an authoritative textbook—along with the classic support blueprint found in the first edition of The Art of Support. -- Francois Lopitaux, Sr. Director, Product Management, Salesforce
There are a few consultants out there who really know what they are doing in the support space. Francoise is one of the absolute best. She adds the human element that others often miss. This is the reference book for organizations of all sizes who want to succeed at keeping and developing customers. -- Al Hahn, Executive Director at The Association of Support Professionals
The Art of Support has been my solid reference guide for managing a customer-centric enterprise. I’m delighted to see it refreshed for the new generation of support and customer success managers. -- Ansa Sekharan, EVP, Global Customer Support and Informatica University, Informatica
Table of Contents
•Defining Support Portfolios
•Customer Success
•Self-Service Support
•Issue Management
•Managing the Business of Support
•The Support Organization
•Managing Support People
•Tools for Support
•Support Metrics
•Appendix with multiple checklists and tools including budget templates.
About Francoise Tourniaire
In 1998, Francoise founded FT Works, a boutique consulting firm focused on helping technology companies create and improve their customer-success and support operations.