- Nov 7, 2024
9 years later...
What have I learned since I first started managing support teams?
When I first became a manager of support teams, every support-related talk, meet-up, and conference was about how to get a seat at the table. There are certainly still companies where support teams are still struggling, but by and large I've noticed more and more support leaders have achieved this.
But now, what do we do in these seats?
It's not enough to want to share the voice of the customer internally, or triage and get bugs fixed quickly, or strive for high CSAT (we'll save my thoughts on CX metrics for another post*).
Support teams also need to tie their work to revenue.
While it's true that dissatisfied customers will take their business elsewhere, your team and your customers don't exist if the business doesn't exist in the first place.
You may think, how can support contribute to revenue if they're not selling directly to customers? However, this mindset provides helpful constraints when designing your support services. Some examples:
Prioritizing and triaging bugs: consider the cost of a developer spending the time fixing the bug compared to spending that time on feature development. Won't-fixing low priority bugs may cause pain to a few customers, but ensures developers are always doing the most impactful work for customers. If the low priority bug surfaces again and becomes higher priority, we can always reassess.
Designing support channels and SLAs: balance the cost of providing those channels/response times (hiring, tools, etc.) against the revenue the customer would generate for the business. While I'm sure every customer would like instant, white-glove responses to all their problems, what is actually realistic and sustainable to provide given your business/team size?
Support process and policy: The processes and policies you put into place for your team in their day to day protect against churn and retention, and save costs by increasing efficiency. Think your refund policy, chatbot implementation, admin tooling, etc.
If as a support leader you are not the one making these decisions, or training your team to care about business outcomes in their day to day work, then you will end up ceding these decisions to other teams. That's how you lose your seat at the table.
*I lied, here are some posts about measuring support value that resonate with me: