Special offerings for certain product lines?

I just talked to a vendor who routinely provides 24×7 support (since its products tend to be used in mission-critical applications that mandate support around the clock) but is getting push-back from the customers of a particular product, who don’t perceive it as mission critical and hence balk at paying large amounts to support it. If the portfolio of support offerings included an 8×5 choice, at a more palatable price, that would be the end of the story: present both the 8×5 and the 24×7 offerings and let the customer decide what is best. But what if the portfolio does not include a cheaper, shorter-hours program?

1. Evaluate whether the request is simply a financial negotiation tactic. Is the customer asking for business-hours support because s/he does not need 24×7, or is s/he asking because 24×7 support is too expensive? If the concern is purely financial take a look at pricing rather than discovering down the line that the customer needs and expects you to have staff on hand around the clock.

2. Consider the magnitude of the requirement. Are we talking about one isolated customer or about many similar customers who don’t want 24×7 support? If the former, negotiate with the customer (and you may decide on how flexible you’d like to be); if the latter, it’s time to review your support portfolio.

3. Study the pros and cons of adding a cheaper support offering. A customer who terminates support is a customer who pays nothing into your coffers. That may be fine if the customer is too small or too cheap to matter, but if you have an entire group of customers in that situation it’s probably wise to define an offering they need and can afford, in this case a business-day support program. If you decide to do that remember to enforce the restrictions. It would be silly to deliver gold-plated service at a discount.

4. Decide whether to make the new service available with other product lines.  Presumably customers who use mission-critical products will want mission-critical support, which requires 24×7. But you may also find that some customers decide to scale down on their support commitments, which will impact your revenue line. One possibility is to routinely recommend 24×7 support but have the 8×5 offering as a back-pocket offer to be used if needed. Don’t be afraid to have different offerings for different product lines as long as they match customer requirements. (And streamline them as much as possible so you don’t drive the sales reps and the customers crazy.)

Self-service Ideas for Premium Support

As we discussed last week creating a special collection of knowledge base documents for premium customers may not be a great approach — but there are other ways to provide premium levels of service online. Here are some ideas, in no particular order:

- premium forums (communities): for instance, the forums may be monitored more attentively by your staff, guaranteeing fast responses.

- private webinars for new releases or other technical discussions. An interesting idea here is to record the webinars and make them accessible to all customers later, giving the premium customers early and interactive access to the speakers and materials but leveraging the information for everyone.

- customized portals that include personalized information such as the contact information for the account. Such portals are fairly easy to create and maintain, especially for the larger accounts (and if you need more proof ask the account team: chances are that it maintains such information already, so why not roll it into one coherent whole?)

- account-wide case tracking: instead of allowing each contact to see only his or her cases, it’s very helpful to allow contacts to view everyone’s cases (with permission.) Fortunately this feature is becoming routine in many case-tracking systems so should not be too hard to implement. It happens to be particularly attractive to the larger accounts that are more likely to take advantage of premium support.

- account metrics. Many times premium customers receive regular metrics on their support activities through an account manager. POsting the metircs online (or even better, allowing the customer to generate custom metrics at will) is an easy step up.

More knowledge base for premium customers

When building premium levels of support the focus is typically on assisted support features: longer support hours, faster response times, assigned support engineers, etc. But does it make sense to also include additional self-service features such as access to premium knowledge base articles? Let’s see the pros and cons.

Yes! There’s no reason why self-service features should not be included in a premium offering. For instance high-end, consulting-like white papers or access to the same knowledge base support engineers can access (before articles are sanitized and reviewed) would be appealing to premium customers. The other, obvious benefit is that the cost of delivering those extra features is very small, unlike that of typical assisted support add-ons.

No! There’s a technical issue with providing levels of access to the knowledge base, in that many tools only provide a public/private access dichotomy so providing customers with different access levels will require customizing the tool, which may be cost-prohibitive. But the larger issue is that providing self-service materials helps to cut down on requests for assisted support, so the temptation will always be to make the self-service information available to all customers. Many of my clients who initially embraced the idea of a graduated knowledge base (and made the necessary tool investment) later decided to publish all materials for all customers’ consumption.

So in most cases I would choose something else than graduated knowledge base access for premium support. We’ll see other self-service ideas in future posts.

Who are your prospects?

Selling support is different from selling products in many ways but one difference is inescapable: it’s hard to sell support for product X to customers who don’t already own product X. In other words, your pool of prospects is limited and defined ahead of time.

So why do we often restrict the pool further, to those customers of product X who already have a support contract? That’s right: most support organizations focus their selling efforts on renewing existing contracts and completely neglect customers who dropped support in the past. That could be a good thing: many customers who drop support do so because they are no longer using the product, so they won’t need support either. But what of customers who dropped support because of budget considerations or a temporary shelving of the product? What about instituting a “get in touch” program to contact customers who were once on a support contract but dropped out? If they are no longer using the product, make a note to leave them alone and move on. If they are using the product, see if you can put together a reasonable “come back to the fold” offer.

Should resellers provide support?

Yes, resellers can provide support – and some do it well while others do not. So how do you choose?

Go with resellers if they can provide a unique benefit that you cannot provide. That could be Korean-language support, deep knowledge of the shipbuilding field, or the ability to support a customized version of your product.

Provide support yourself if your resellers are mostly sales outfits, with little to no technical expertise. If you let them provide support they will suck you dry of resources while pocketing the support revenue. And customers won’t be happy. Not a good combination.

If you choose reseller support

1. Select resellers with the proper infrastructure for support. For instance they should have a few trained technical staff members and a tracking system.

2. Offer training to the support staff and test their competence through certification tests, formal or informal.

3. Include minimum performance standards into the contracts so that you have enforcement tools. Require a minimum number of certified support staff, set maximum escalation rates and perhaps minimum customer satisfaction ratings. 

4. Define the revenue split between the reseller and you (for the amount of second-line support and maintenance you provide.) You can either split each support contract or set a yearly fee for your services.

5. Define the policy for handling customers who prefer to get support directly from you. Setting up a competitive situation between you and your resellers is always tricky. If the reseller is providing support you probably want to stay away from its customers. 

If you choose to provide support yourself

1. Create a good support sales kit for the resellers. You can repackage materials you already use for your own sales force but remember that resellers sell many products so don’t have the time or capacity to remember lots of details. This could be a great impetus to streamline your tools, and perhaps the support offerings themselves, including pricing, for everyone. Your own sales force will thank you.

2. Pay a commission on support sales. It’s not easy to sell support so expecting the reseller to do it out of the goodness of its heart is folly.

Finally, be open to a mixed model (some resellers providing support, some not), as long as you follow the recommendations above for each category of reseller.