Customer Support: Your Secret Revenue Generation Engine
There is a lingering view in the industry that your customer support team is a cost center. A drain on business resources that could be better spent, in selling further to newer prospects. As Investopedia1 puts it: “a department within an organization that does not directly add to profit but still costs the organization money to operate.”
It’s possible that your organization recognizes the relative merits in keeping and nurturing existing customers, rather than solely focussing on selling to new ones. It can cost up to five times as much to sell to a new customer than to retain an existing one. Furthermore, 89% of companies see customer experience as the key to retention. You’re 60-70% more likely to sell to an existing customer2, and they spend about 31% more than your new customers3.
The question is—beyond mitigating the high costs of selling to new customers, how can you leverage your customer support team to actively sell to existing customers? How do you turn that cost center into a profit center?
Here are three strategies that can help you do just that.
#1 Keep Engagement Levels High
Keep your customers engaged even after the end of the natural post-implementation or post-purchase cycle. This maximizes conversation and provides direct revenue generation opportunities.
How can you keep your customers engaged?
Make Sure the Pre-to-Post Sales Transition is Smooth
Ensure that the handover from pre-to-post sales is smooth, and customers have a bump-free transition. Building a personal approach in your transition plan encourages your customers to be an active part of the ongoing relationship with your support team.
Build Engagement Using Data on Account Behaviors
Identify key account behaviors that you can use to build engagement. Perhaps the customer took out a trial and didn’t make use of it, attended a webinar and didn’t follow up with another, didn’t fill out any surveys, or perhaps they only contact you when there’s a problem. All of these behaviors should alert your customer support team towards an opportunity to increase engagement. When a customer calls in for help, you can have the support team provide personalized follow-up to help increase engagement. For example, support can help the customer understand the value of the trial, link to other upcoming webinars, or follow up on specific survey feedback.
Help Customers Research Their Needs
A powerful engagement strategy is to help customers research their needs. According to Forrester4, 68% of customers prefer to conduct their own research, rather than reach out to one of your salespeople. Impartially assisting with their research builds trust in your company and your support team, even if counterintuitively, the advice is not to use your paid product. Building trust in your client relationships is key to opening up further channels of communication and increasing engagement.
#2 Give Your Support Team the Freedom and the Tools to Sell
Most customer support agents will insist they are not salespeople, and most of them don’t want to be either. Committed customer service folk are usually helpful, people-focused, and solution-oriented individuals who find the concept of selling anathema to them, so don’t ask them to do it directly.
There are three ways by which you can give your team the freedom they need, to sell.
Give Your Support Team the Information They Need
Access to appropriate information is crucial. If your support team is in the dark over how your customers use your product or engage with the wider organization, you’re limiting their opportunity to fix bigger issues, build trust, and help the client. Use tools that give your team a full customer view. Maximize the flow of information across teams by using a single platform view of the customer. Maximize collaboration by choosing tools that support cross-functional communications in real-time.
Incentivize Engagement, Not Sales
Don’t incentivize your team to sell directly. You’ll alienate all but the few who have a natural capacity and flair for selling. Instead, incentivize your team on engagement levels. Be creative about how you guide and measure those levels. Monitor changes in account-based triggers such as trials completed, webinars attended, surveys filed, community involvement, and knowledge base article up-votes. Also consider incentivizing at a team-level, rather than for each individual. Increased client engagement is not traced back to one individual contributor but through the consistent actions and approach of the team.
Measure Trends in Customer Value
Of course, if you are not incentivizing the team directly on revenue or selling targets, you’ll need to find ways to correlate your customer engagement levels to revenue downstream. Beyond the usual measures of churn and retention, the single most important metric that is influenced by increased engagement is Customer Lifetime Value5. Take baselines on this and watch the upward swing as engagement increases.
#3 Maximize Your Team’s Potential to Generate Revenue Directly
For those team members who are particularly demonstrative of expertise, you can provide them with fantastic opportunities for personal development that also directly generate revenue. Away from their day-to-day responsibilities, encouraging them to participate in other initiatives and projects can significantly improve employee engagement, knowledge, experience, and profile. Adapt your hiring strategies to give greater weight to people who want a more expansive role such as this.
Here are three ways to generate revenue directly in your support team.
Provide Live Training
Team members with specific technical skills could deliver live training in the product, to customers. This can take the form of single-customer events, or more openly available sessions.
Host Webinars
Webinars are a lower pressure way to develop and deliver knowledge. Your support folks can use the opportunity to present webinars to build their own skills, as well as teach customers. Have your support agents develop and deliver the webinars themselves, and use the process as a research and personal learning opportunity in its own right.
Provide Opportunities for External Projects
Give your support folks opportunities to step away from the front line once in a while. If you have sufficient bandwidth, allow them to work in other roles or projects. The expertise they gain will be immeasurable, and you could even use this to enhance your team’s relationships with the client. For example, consider establishing a formal consultancy practice staffed entirely by support agents. If the service is well defined, such as limiting the scope or the length of the project, you can weave this into your existing support staffing model. The pricing model can match your existing consultancy practice, or diverge significantly.
Invest in Support to Generate Revenue
Making the move from a cost center-led customer support practice to a revenue generation engine does take investment. You will need to align processes, and probably tools, around the new model. You will be investing time in training, and pulling the rest of the organization around to this new way of working. You’ll need to work through the relevant merits of each strategy and measure the outcomes.
You will also certainly need to invest in your support people—both through training and an updated hiring process—and be prepared to compensate accordingly. With careful planning, the seeds planted in your customer support team will ensure significant future growth, retention, and satisfaction.
A business model that supports the generation of revenue from support, is key to future growth across your organization.
Source:
1 – https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-center.asp
2 – https://econsultancy.com/15-ways-for-companies-to-increase-customer-lifetime-value/
3 – https://www.slideshare.net/actonsoftware/act-on-marketing-automation-beyond-customer-acquisition
4 – https://www.forrester.com/Forrester+Updates+Death+Of+A+B2B+Salesman+Report+Two+Years+Later/-/E-PRE9704#
5 – https://www.business.com/articles/7-reasons-to-measure-customer-lifetime-value/
