But what do customers want?

A critical ingredient in creating and rolling out support offerings is customer input: what are the features that make a difference? what do customers value and will pay for? what’s missing? Extensive customer surveys take time and significant resources, neither of which may be abundant. But you can start with what you have: your customer satisfaction survey.

You have to go beyond the number and actually read the comments. It’s easier than you think: I just went through several months‘ worth of comments for a customer project and although the file was dauntingly thick it did not take more than a couple of hours to read them all. What did we find? That customers really want attention: they want a phone call rather than a volley of emails; they want regular status checks; they want clear and frank conversations when bugs won’t get fixed. (This was a high-complexity support organization where cases routinely require days or weeks to resolve.)

So what we learned in this instance is that the best investment was soft skills training — and that’s just what we’ll do. It turns out to be a lot cheaper than the extensive technical skills re-training the customer suspected would be required and a lot easier than having to roll out brand-new support offerings.

An unexpected bonus of reading the comments is that many are positive! We all need a pat on the back from time to time…