How to Reinvent Your Technical Support Team, Part 3

September 10, 2008

The final step in reinventing your technical support team has to do with spreading the word to both colleagues and customers about the improvements you have made. This article will offer suggestions on how to do successful internal and external marketing.

The goal of marketing is to sell something, and your goal will be to ‘sell’ your new technical support team. After all, your colleagues have to recommend it and your customers have to take advantage of it for all of the work you have done to be worthwhile. In order to sell your team, you are going to have to explain the benefits to others and then build their confidence through effective performance.

Have you ever been served food that looked exactly like it did on the commercial? Did you ever get those stubborn stains out like they promised you on the bottle of cleaner? That’s marketing. You have to talk about the ideal case, though I know that is not in your nature if you are a technical person. Just talk about the good stuff.

“This is going to save you time.”
“This is going to reduce the number of angry customers that you talk to.”
“This is going to increase the number of customers who will serve as a reference for you.”

Internal Marketing Techniques

You are going to need to market yourself to the rest of your company before you start talking to external customers. This is especially useful because it allows you to bring other departments into your external customer marketing effort. Keep in mind, however, that each department has its own concerns, and that you will need to be specific in how you approach them.

Sales: The salespeople probably curse you behind your back when they get together for their three-hour martini lunches. This is a lot to overcome, but since they clearly understand what the problems are, you will have an opening to start a discussion about how to solve them.

Salespeople, generally speaking, are focused on money. You need to explain to them how the new support system will help them close more sales. For example:

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

You also need to give the salespeople a support transition script and encourage them to use it. Make some posters, print up some signs, or even give them money when you hear them say it (for the first few months, anyway). It can go something like this:

“Sir, I’m going to get the experts right on it. We’ve spent a lot of time and money revamping our technical support system. The team is now much faster at figuring out solutions to problems than I am. They will take care of this.”

Finally, set a process in place for salespeople to hand off cases to you. Keep it simple, such as an email to your helpdesk with the customer’s name or a quick phone call. If you give them a checklist of information to gather, they won’t bother.

Marketing: It might seem like marketing lives on new products, but that’s not the case. Marketing lives on happy reference-giving customers. Once they understand what you are doing, they will want to work out a way to follow behind you to dig for quotes and references. Do your best to enable them to do that. If you can work out a way to automate the customer satisfaction surveys, for example, it is worth quite a bit of effort.

Those quotes and reference customers help increase sales, and can help you reinforce the new behavior of the salespeople. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together like that?

<!–[if !supportLists]–>Accounting: Accountants love counting costs. They don’t know it yet, but your new support system is going to help them do just that.

Through tracking time per support case, you will be able to provide cost accounting data on each customer. For example, if two customers pay the same amount of money but one utilizes twice as much support time as the other, you can tell right away which one is more profitable. This means more accuracy and more insight into customer profitability, which is important for the entire company. Management, for example, can use the data to target products to more profitable segments of customers.

If the helpdesk tool doesn’t let you track your time spent per case (and by aggregate: by customer), then get a timesheet program. Either way, you will need your accounting staff to coordinate with you on the customer list. There must be a computerized mapping between the customer list in your helpdesk or time system and the customer list in the accounting software. Talk with your accounting staff to figure out who will manage the mapping.

<!–[if !supportLists]–>Development: You are going to need help from the development manager if you are planning to hire your own developer for bug fixes. The manager will have to interview the candidate you want, train your new support developer on the code base and source code control tools and do code reviews of this person’s work.

The development manager is likely to react skeptically to your idea. You need him/her to buy-off on this investment that you are asking them to make, so take him/her to lunch and be prepared. Speak with the developers ahead of time and take notes on how much time they waste fixing bugs. You need to sell this to the head of development in terms of fewer interruptions and fewer headaches. If you are getting a performance bonus for improving customer satisfaction, then offer to share it if you have to. It’s worth it, trust me.

External Marketing Techniques

Sales and Marketing will do most of the work for you on letting customers know about the new improvements in Technical Support. They have a ton of automated messages and informal scripts that they can insert little announcements into. This includes:

newsletter
cover letters with invoices
automated emails to website visitors
automated emails to new customers

“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 7am to 6pm (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, and we try to reply to all problems that get to us before 4:00pm 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).”

Customers seem to like it, and I take great personal pride from that. The next time I rewrite it, I’m going to go with free verse.

Best of luck to you in reinventing your technical support team and keeping your customers and colleagues happy in the process. Feel free to drop me a line to share success stories.

About the Randy Miller: 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.

Photo courtesy of penubag and used under the GNU Free Documentation License.

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