Every so often, the customer support community resonates with a specific conversation. For a while, everyone was talking about whether or not Support is a "cost center" and what that means and whether that's good or bad. Recently, the conversation shifted to the value of Support (our friend Neal made a light-hearted quip about it a few days ago).
I've been asked this question a couple of times over the past few weeks, usually phrased the same way:
How do we show the value of Support?
You may be shocked to hear that I have some thoughts. They boil down to: (1) define your terms and (2) know your audience.
What is "value" anyway?
There are lots of ways to talk about value. Is it the importance of a team to the operation of the business? How much the customer relies on Support for successful and continued use of the product? Those are important and valuable, but we all toil in the yoke of capitalism, where “value” means dollars (or whatever your local currency is).
Okay, so we're trying to calculate the financial impact of the Customer Support on the business. We have options there too, but the general feeling among support professionals is that Support both reduces churn and encourages upgrades and/or repeat purchases, making the team at least partially responsible for some amount of revenue. We'll just do some math!
Or will we? Calculating a specific revenue impact is difficult for two reasons.
First, there's no straight line between a customer support interaction and a decision to churn or not churn, or to upgrade or not upgrade. Positive post-sales interactions (whether with Support or another team) can foster positive feelings that can lead to renewals and upgrades. But not always, and not all at once. Is Support responsible for 100% of renewals from customers who have interacted with them? I doubt it, and I don't think anyone else believes that, either.
Second, customers can and do churn despite positive post-sales interactions. Maybe the product didn't meet their needs. Maybe the software wasn't being maintained to the customer's satisfaction, even though the support and success teams have done everything they can to make the customer happy. Should the Support team be penalized for churn they can't control? I don't think so, and I think most people would agree that putting the blame entirely on the post-sales teams does little more than shift blame around the company.
Given that, putting a hard number on revenue impact is guesswork at best. Some companies are trying to make it more concrete by using their Support teams as upsell channels. That makes the support > revenue line clearer, but at the expense of turning Support into a Sales team. It's hard to see this as anything but a reframing of the "Is Support a cost center?" conversation. We haven't made progress there if we only look at Support's "value" as a number on a balance sheet.
What's the point?
Let's take a step back and ask: why are we doing this anyway? Why do we want to quantify the value of Support? Who do we hope will see that value?
To be "data-driven" I asked a few people why they wanted to quantify Support's value. The answers were a little muddled; there are multiple reasons, and everyone I talked to listed more than one, but most clustered around:
- Justifying their budget, for hiring or tooling or both
- Expanding their access in the company, often to increase their impact and influence with Product and Engineering
- Justifying their continued employment
Each of those uses a different definition of "value." In the first case, we're talking about the financial impact of the team - difficult to quantify but logical as a goal. If you're providing more financial value to the company, you should be given more financial support for your work.
In the second, value is measured in product and customer knowledge. The Support team has more direct context on how the customers use the product than Product and Engineering, and that information is useful for product decisions like what to build, when to deliver it, and how to present it to customers. That ultimately shows up as revenue, but not directly and not immediately (as usual).
The third goes a step further and feels the most urgent. Some companies have shown that they are willing to replace Support teams with software, either in whole or in part. The Support community has rightfully predicted that it would be a disaster, but it hasn't stopped executives from ditching their Support teams for bots. This leaves Support leaders scrambling to prove that keeping a human support team is in the company's best interest, which we usually do with a mix of revenue data, product usage data, customer interaction data, and support-derived product insights to prove that just having a Support team is good for the business.
What do we do about any of this?
Quit? Take over the company? Start your own company?
Yes! But short of that, understand what kind of value you need to demonstrate to accomplish your goals, and then get that information in front of the right people.
First, decide what value you're talking about. Are you meeting with the CFO to discuss next year's budget allocations? Bring churn and renewal calculations. Showing that putting more money into the Support team drives revenue for the business will help you justify hiring more staff, expanding into new regions, and buying more software licenses.
Are you trying to get Support more involved in product conversations and decisions? Revenue numbers aren't useful here; it's time for customer data and qualitative insights. Show that you have information other teams lack and that your team's data compliments the Product and Engineering teams' data, and you're more likely to be asked to pull up a seat.
Are you trying to convince the CEO that the human Support pros are worth having at all? That's a tougher challenge, but we now have data on what happens to companies that let their Support teams go, and the data is not in the companies' favor. It's almost impossible to A/B test the Support vs. No Support scenarios, but we can use these recent stories to show that having a Support team is important to customers.
That sounds hopeful, but there's still bad news: it might not work. Executives who don't understand or respect (value) the contributions of the Support team aren't interested in the team's input (value) in other parts of the business. And if they already don't want our input, they aren't interested in our estimates of what we contribute to the bottom line. Your audience might not exist at your current company.
I'm not suggesting that these are lost causes or that we should quit and walk into the woods. (Yet. I will probably suggest that in a future blog post, and fully support anyone who's already walking.) I am suggesting that we stop looking for metrics and hard numbers to "prove our value" when the people we're talking to didn't use metrics or hard numbers to decide that our contributions aren't important. The best outcome might be getting the resources you need, but it might just be that you stop banging your head against a C-suite wall and spend that time zeroing out the queue. At least then you get rid of the headache.
Where am I going with this?
Justifying support budgets, support involvement, and support existence are each important, but they're different. When you start to get that itch to prove your value to your company, pause and ask: why? What kind of value do you want to show? To whom? What do you want them to do about it?
Without understanding your motivation and your needs, you'll waste a lot of time. You'll gather data that doesn't make your case, you'll talk to people about things they don't care about, and you'll end up right where you started but more frustrated and with a bigger backlog in the queue because you haven't been looking at that.
We're busy. Support is a valuable part of every business, whether you quantify that in dollars, ideas, or customer happiness. Don't waste your time trying to convince people who aren't listening with data they don't care about.
Brian Levine