The Ultimate Customer Support

In Pursuit of the Ultimate in Customer Support

by Phil Verghis
President, The Verghis Group
Author, The Ultimate Customer Support Executive (Silicon Press)

What would it take to...

• Elevate your company’s customer service and support to a higher standard?

• Deliver the ultimate in customer service and support?

• Turbocharge your career in the process?

To become an Ultimate Customer Support Executive, you must wear two hats. First, you must represent your company to the customer.  Second, you must represent the customer to the rest of your company. The latter means becoming a fierce and fearless champion of your customers, and representing their interests to all departments.

Take Charge of the Entire Relationship

To do that, you must not only feel your customers' pain, but communicate their dissatisfaction to the rest of your company.  Then work for changes that will make things better. This means eliminating any obstacles that stand in the way of your customers getting the best experience possible.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to become a fearless advocate for your customer.

Here’s one important way to do this. Dig down and uncover the root cause of every incident, before you consider it resolved. In our interrupt-driven world, few customer support people bother with this step. Instead, we manage and report on the symptoms, i.e., the incidents, while ignoring the underlying issues that prompted calls in the first place. That keeps us busy—usually too busy. But call volume can be reduced in the long run by taking ownership of problems now. Fix them sooner rather than later.

Most of us take good care of customers after they report problems. But to boost service up to the next level, we must start taking care of customers even before they contact us. In short, we must take charge of the entire relationship. Once again, this is not normally within customer support's scope, or. anyone’s scope for that matter — which is why it is so often overlooked. But failing to do so can be costly both to both customer experience and loyalty.

It's About Respect

To become an Ultimate Customer Support Executive, you must first earn respect from the rest of the company. After that, you must demand it.

Earning respect means delivering results. Demanding respect means contributing more. It means understanding how your business operates and being able to view it the way top management does. For your own organization, see if you can answer these questions:

• What does each department do and what value does it bring to the customer?
• Which departments bring in revenue? How?
• Where do your company’s revenues come from?
• What drives revenue and what is overhead?
• How much do your top customers contribute to the bottom line?
• What exactly is the bottom line for your organization?  What is the top line?

To demand respect, you need to be able to answer these questions.

You will want, for example, to become familiar with your organization's balance sheets, cash flow statements, and profit & loss statements. All are briefly explained in my book, or you can find them elsewhere.

Understanding the “business of business” allows you to view the financial workings of your company the way upper management does. It’s a tremendous asset to know what the boss means when she talks about the “bottom line.”

A traditional way to fatten up the bottom line is to reduce spending. But to command respect, aim higher—at the top line of the income statement. Ask  how can my department and I generate additional revenue?  Or help gain market share?  Don't think that it's outside your domain. On the contrary. According to the Association of Support Professionals, support-related services now contribute more than half of total revenues for most B2B software companies, and generate an even larger share of their total profits.

Every boss values and respects employees who bring in additional income. To earn respect, think of ways you and your team can kick it up a notch.  Here's one important way.

Customer Surveys, Invaluable Feedback

Know how your customers feel about your company. That's where customer satisfaction surveys come in.  They are like getting a physical.  Customer surveys take the temperature of your customers, and answer questions vital to your company’s health, such as:

• Are your customers really satisfied?  Why or why not?
• Are you providing the right services to the right customers at the right price? Or do your customers want something else?
• Are they puzzled by new features you’ve introduced, but not admitting it?
• Are any of your customers ready to bolt to a competitor? Why?

Luckily, you don't have to become an expert in surveying.  It's usually more efficient to partner with a company like CustomerSat that specializes in measuring satisfaction and uncovering answers, even to questions you may never have thought to ask.

Are you asking?  More importantly, are you listening?

Most companies aren’t.  Few companies really listen when customers say if they're happy, what they like and dislike, or how things could be improved. Is your company listening to both customer support interactions and, for overall customer relationships?  Both are important.  Most companies never contact former customers, those who have defected, to find out what happened, why they left, and if there’s anything they can do to change their minds. This intelligence has tremendous value both in winning back lost customers and winning new ones.

It’s easy to rationalize this omission, given the interrupt-driven nature of customer support. After all, support queues are jammed, and your downsized support staff is stretched to the max. Who has time to reach out to customers on a proactively?

We must find the time.  It's worth it.  Here's why.

Boosting Customer Loyalty

It costs six to eight times more to win a new customer than retain an existing one. With that in mind, the value of measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty and acting on them becomes obvious.

According to a 2002 Harvard Business Review article, surveying contented customers can increase profitability over the course of a year. Compared to customers who had not been surveyed, these customers were:

• Three times more likely to open a new account
• 50% less likely to defect to a competitor
• More profitable

As CustomerSat’s slogan so aptly points out, you can indeed profit from customer feedback.

Improve Your Internal Processes

Listening to customers has another valuable benefit. Their feedback can show you how to improve internal business processes and focus on what’s really important. For example, you might discover that one particularly laborious process yields little value to the vast majority of your customers, so the process can be edited or eliminated.

This streamlining can lead to higher satisfaction rates, greater loyalty, less turnover and higher revenues. A win-win for all parties.

Customer Surveys: Reflect Your Handle with Care

Like any customer interaction, customer surveys are fraught with potential risks. That's another argument for entrusting them to a a pro.  For one thing, even when customers are asked their opinion, they often don’t feel like we’re listening. Worse, customers may feel that things are stacked against them.

For example, consider the last time you bought a car. Let’s suppose the salesperson treated you well, and you were relatively satisfied. After signing the paperwork, she takes you aside and puts a “How did I do?” questionnaire under your nose. She leans close and pleads that anything less than a 5 (on a scale of 1 to 5) will cause her dealership to get in trouble with the car manufacturer.

This approach demeans the process. When their opinion is asked, customers should feel that they’re not being pressured to give bogus responses, and that they are being listened to—and that you are acting on their concerns and suggestions.

Action Management

The better you know your customers' feelings, the better you can respond to them. Knowing why the customer bought and, how you impact them or their businesses is critical. Taking timely action is crucial. Respond promptly to dissatisfied customers, make things right, and you’ll discover that your customers will also inform you about issues and opportunities in areas outside your traditional scope.

One powerful strategy is to respond in near-real time when customers say they were less than satisfied. When I was Vice President of Infrastructure & Support at Akamai, we implemented a callback system that replied to customers who gave us a less-than ‘satisfied’ rating to a question within 15 minutes. In effect, any such rating was treated as a high priority issue.

To make our response even more effective, each callback was handled by a manager or other senior person. This person was not only specially trained in dealing with customer issues, with high sensitivity to customer satisfaction, but they had both the knowledge and the clout to resolve issues immediately.

You can imagine our customers' responses. Our immediate callbacks, plus our VIP treatment, shocked and delighted our customers. We made it clear they were important to us, and did whatever it took to resolve the issues in their favor. Very often customers cited this lightning-quick response as a reason for staying loyal—and for upgrading their service levels.

This is one example of delivering ultimate customer support. Can your company afford to do any less?

Phil Verghis is president of The Verghis Group and author of The Ultimate Customer Support Executive: Unleash the Power of Your Customer. A preeminent expert on global service delivery, he is a highly sought-after speaker around the world. Prior to founding the Verghis Group, Phil was the Vice President of Infrastructure Support at Akamai Technologies. He was chairperson of the Strategic Advisory Board of the HDI, the largest membership based technical support organization in the world. Among his many industry accolades, Phil is the only two-time winner of the Service 25 award, given to individuals who have made a significant impact in the field of service and support. He can be reached at phil@verghisgroup.com.

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