This is a special episode as John is a Distinguished Researcher at TSIA -- an organization that works with Support Leaders in B2B Technology world. Listen to it to understand what Support Leaders are thinking, what are they doing well, where are they struggling (where they are going to spend money) etc. Must-listen episode!
Key Insights
- Fun fact: TSIA used to be called SSPA — Services and Support Professional Association
- TSIA maintains a list of Business Challenges — Organizational structure: Swarming vs Tiered Structure, Metrics: What metrics should I be tracking / What’s the average, Self-service / Knowledge-Management, Channel Mix: Introducing digital channels and moving away from phone/email & Customer Experience: How should we track it… how to set compensation structure.
- For SaaS vendors, most of the support questions are around how-do-I-something (vs legacy hardware vendors where most questions were around break/fix)
- Chatbots: 17% of members say they have a chatbot in place but most of those are pilots and not launched. 30% of these customers have built themselves (John doesn't recommend doing it)
- Workforce scheduling/assigning cases automatically is still being done manually/spreadsheets in B2B.
- Only 5% of members have a mobile-app for Support. Making support website HTML-5 is not good enough … most of support websites have rendering challenges on mobile phones/iPads.
- 92% customers start with google search and if support portal content is not indexed, customers won't come to the support site. More than 50% of vendors are google-indexed though. Legacy hardware vendors tend not to do google indexing though
- Support issues are going up 20% YoY… its hard for support organizations to grow in terms of people to match that demand so automation is a must
- Knowledge Management: 41% vendors responded that they could get 30% or more productivity gains if knowledge was being shared better.
- John is bullish about using RPA in Support.
- Customer success is not a department but a culture! Also, using Professional Services team to do Customer Success.
- Next-gen Support: Persistent, Personalized, Intelligent
- Recommendation for CEOs: Don't treat Support as just a cost-center. They have the most visibility and influence with Customers & they can share great information and insight with engineering and product to make products better and control churn. Support also feeds into QA and engg teams.
- Recommended books: Bad Blood/Theranos and Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders
