Who’s Calling Customer Support?
At most software companies, incoming calls to Tech Support don’t match up against customer databases. We’ve worked on this with several clients to identify causes and jointly design solutions. It provides a great case study for how product managers should think: segmenting issues and balancing competing interests as the “CEOs of their products.”
Setting up this scenario, imagine that your software company sells to thousands of large and small corporate customers. Customer Support is taking lots of calls from people that are not in the customer database. Some callers want technical help, others are asking for product upgrades or rebates. Your support manager is complaining about unhappy users and struggling to determine how to handle each caller.
As a product manager, your first reaction should be to tear this into a few different pieces – each of which may need its own solution. You might group these, for instance, into:
- Legitimate paying customers that we don’t have contact information for
- Customers with expired support contracts
- Non-paying users, including pirates and users of expired trial software
The best product managers work in an agile manner: looking for quick partial solutions that deliver immediate business value while also driving long-term strategic items. Putting on our agile hats, let’s consider each segment for possible improvement.
Identifying and Tracking Real Customers
It’s hard to get customer information from sales channels, and even harder to get end users to register for support. In the corporate space, product managers have a grab bag of partial solutions to legitimately capture customer support information.
- Improved internal data handling and housekeeping. Your shipping and fulfillment groups may know where products are going: look for feedback from your ops processes.
- Sales incentives. If you have a direct sales force, someone knows each customer. Consider a “no contact info, no commission” policy enforced through your sales automation system. Then reduce the griping by paying commissions to your reps for service renewals. (For channel sales, think about optional co-marketing funds to align incentives.)
- Nagware. End users who fill in pop-up requests for registration could get extended support or faster responses. (Stop pestering them when they refuse three times.)
- Require users to register online with a company email before they can get support. At a minimum, you can verify that email address when delivering login information. And most amateur software pirates are reluctant to involve their companies in petty software theft.
- Offer useful information to registered users. Done right, how-to newsletters can build brand loyalty while simultaneously reducing support calls. Avoid hard-sell marketing in these vehicles.
“But I’m sure that my support contract was renewed”
Our second group of callers insists that their support contracts are still current. “The renewal check is in the mail” or “Your paperwork processes must be running slow”. Customer Support needs help with clear policies, signed off by your CFO, so that they know what to do. Product Managers win applause with common-sense answers like:
- Offer a per-incident charge. Choose an appropriate price (say $75 per incident or $90 per hour via credit card), with the first charge credited against support renewal. This generates revenue, encourages renewals, and undercuts the myth that support should be free.
- Have a “hot accounts” list. Your Sales VP should provide a monthly list of the top 10 prospects and problem accounts. If someone calls Support from these companies, route it to your top analyst and ignore any formalities. I’ve seen great support engineers pull accounts out of the fire and back into the revenue column.
- 15 days’ grace. If the contract expired on October 20th and a call comes in October 28th, just help the customer.
Tech Support is generally understaffed and under-appreciated. They will join your fan club if you can create good, clear policies.
Thar Be Pirates
And finally, some folks have the nerve to call you for support after stealing your software. They are willing to spend a lot of their time to get free service and software from you. Don’t waste your energy trying to get revenue from pirates, especially if it inconveniences your legitimate customers.
Think like a CEO, then, about the net effect on your business of implementing license keys or digital rights management (DRM). There are great vendors with proven solutions in this space (we’ve worked with Aladdin and Macrovision, or check out SIIA) with solutions based on installation codes, hardware tokens, system fingerprinting, and other ways of tracking legal software deployments. Done correctly, you’ll minimize customer inconvenience, and may get substantial benefits, such as a superdistribution and segment-specific bundles of features. Done poorly, you’ll create confusion and put your job at risk. (Remember Sony BMG’s DRM fiasco?)
Sound Bytes
Support and licensing issues are complex. Product Managers need to think broadly, balance the support of non-customers against complexity for paying customers, and keep a bias towards customer satisfaction. Even, at times, among the pirates.
