Transforming Service and Support into a Revenue Engine:
The Initiative That’s Too Important to Wait

Why Do We Do Support?
Service and support makes customers successful. This, in turn,

• Makes the company’s offerings more valuable to customers.
• Increases product use and adoption.
• Drives loyalty, referenceability, retention, and repurchase.

In short, customer service and support sustains and grows the business.

Service and Support Becomes Marketing and Sales
Enterprises often take a more tactical view of support, either thinking of it as a cost center or a direct profit center. Cost center managers do everything they can to reduce the cost of delivering support, almost regardless of the impact to the customer. Direct profit center managers will optimize support contact revenue, whether or not the terms of those contracts make customers feel like unwilling hostages. Either way, the customer comes out with the wrong end of the deal—and trapped, dissatisfied customers are no way to build a business.

Enlightened service and support leaders understand the true value of support is the sustainable value it creates—value reflected in customer loyalty and profitability. Customers who are simply satisfied may well defect; delighted ones rarely do. The highest value of service and support is creating customer delight—not out of a sense of altruism, but because it’s the most sustainable competitive advantage. As loyalty guru Fred Reichheld said, “who would have thought the Golden Rule was such a profitable business strategy?”

Making It Happen
Service and support organizations should take five actions to turn service and support into the company’s revenue engine:

1. Send the right message. Leaders need to take the time to remind everyone that they are in the customer success business, and that means more than moving on to the next case. It means capturing or improving knowledge to solve the same issue more effectively next time. It means actively listening to the voice of the customer to address the causes of their problems, not just the symptoms. It means always seeking to create loyalty-building customer experiences.
2. Measure the right things. Measurement dashboards should go beyond the standard KPIs to capture the customer experience and its effect on revenue and profit. These measures might include net promoter score, web site effectiveness measures, transactional satisfaction, renewal rates, and repurchase rates.
3. Help customers help themselves. For every person who used to be helped by an employee, effective service and support organizations are helping ten others through the web. Fulfilling this invisible demand for support can only increase customer loyalty and lifetime customer profitability.
4. Empower customers to help each other. Support communities have emerged as a primary way to deliver customer service. Customers have tremendous expertise on how things work in the real world, and their enthusiasm, coupled with a desire for recognition, makes them willing to help their fellow enthusiasts without financial reward.
5. Gain and use knowledge with each customer interaction. The biggest opportunity to drive profitability from the contact center is to learn something with every customer interaction. Support organizations that are continually learning will deliver better service. They’ll also strengthen customer bonds by turning a series of disconnected transactions into a relationship.

Consona’s Knowledge Management and Knowledge Driven Support solutions provide the technology underpinnings for implementing these actions. Together, strategic-thinking support organizations and Consona CRM can make service and support the secret weapon every sales and marketing organization dreams of having.