SX Live from a Non-support Perspective

Ryan Radcliff

Director of Product Marketing, SupportLogic

Today we look back on Day 1 of the first ever SX Live, an industry conference dedicated to support experience! Being new to the world of support, for me it was crazy to see how intricate and strategic support organizations have to be.  Coming from a sales background, I always got calls from angry customers when they were not getting what they wanted from support. I had no idea how much goes into working support tickets and efficiently managing a support team.  How has this been under the radar for SO LONG? This meeting of the minds was LONG overdue. 

With that in mind, see my top takeaways from Day 1 of the event below.

1. Support Experience Matters!

There is a clear change happening in the industry, where customer support is becoming the most important thing to buyers. 51% of B2B companies avoid vendors after a poor customer service experience. (Zendesk). Not only is this shift happening in the minds of buyers, but organizations as well. Thriving organizations are realizing that more emphasis and resources need to be given to support organizations. 

2. Support is not a cost center. It is a revenue center

In the new subscription world, the majority of conversations over the lifetime of a customer is done with support engineers.  Support engineers are not only responsible for good support, but they also are the keepers of a lot of customer insight.  Customers share feature requests, sentiments about the product and potential upsell opportunities. Programs need to be created around collaborating and sharing these insights to other functions within the organization. If not shared, these key insights become wasted, instead of leveraged to increase revenue.

3. Not Every Support team is built the same

Every organization depending on product and scale is different. Francoise Tourniaire (Founder of FT Works)  presented a support maturity model in which companies can rank themselves among  five stages: Bootstrap, Structured, Managed, Holistic and Visionary. The stages range from fully reactive to completely proactive support. Each stage has a different case resolution process and corresponding tools (for example, Salesforce CRM). The benefit of knowing where your organization is on the maturity model is being able to evaluate if you are in the right stage and suggest areas for improvement to bring your team to the next level.

4. Proactive Support is expected by customers

A resounding theme amongst the support leaders was needing to anticipate when a customer is going to have an issue and proactively solve the issue. It was surprising to hear that  customers now expect proactive support. This is not hard to give one to one support when you have 2-5 customers, but as a company scales  and backlog exponentially increases it becomes very complex.   Larger support teams need to leverage AI/ML tools such as SupportLogic to predict where and when escalations are going to happen. Allowing the team to become predictive and proactive rather than reactive.