Justify your existence!
No pressure, now
A few years ago, the financial landscape for startups was different. Money was being pumped into the ecosystem by venture capital (VC) firms with little regard for things like profitability or even a plausible path to a return on investment. If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to tell you things have changed. Money is a lot tighter, investments aren’t as easy to come by, and tech companies of all sizes are tightening their belts. In this environment, where companies are looking to make the most of the funds available to them, support can be a tempting target. If your team is anything like what I’ve been advocating over the course of this year, you have a team of highly skilled professionals providing fast and effective support to a highly technical audience. This doesn’t come cheap, and sooner or later you’ll have to start answering questions about whether you really need that many folks, or this much budget.
Important metrics
This is where collecting good data and regularly calculating useful support metrics comes in—start gathering this information now, before you need it. There are any number of different ways you can slice the data that you are hopefully already collecting, but the following are some that I’ve found to be indispensable.
Ticket trends over time: this is a pretty large category, but generally speaking you want to notice and highlight any changes to the status quo.
Absolute ticket numbers: over time, you’ll probably be getting more and more tickets as your customer base expands. On its own this is not a revelation, but in conjunction with per-agent ticket capacity (below) you can show your team’s increasing expertise.
Per-customer issues: particularly during onboarding, you can expect a certain level of tickets per customer. If you can show this number is decreasing over time, it points to an increasing maturity in your product and its documentation, welcome news to Engineering and Product.
Other interesting correlations: one team I worked on, for instance, noticed that we had a predictable ticket spike with every new customer we onboarded, as a batch of new users got familiar with our product and its quirks, but that those issues would quickly drop to a much lower level once onboarding was successfully completed. This helped us more effectively plan out future capacity needs with projected customer growth.
Per-agent ticket capacity: how many issues are each of your team members resolving per time period? This is another metric that on its own is meaningless—some months are busier than others, some tickets are much more complicated than others, and so on—but looked at in relation to a few other metrics, can tell a compelling story. Is your team now handling 50% more tickets than last year, at the same staffing level? Is your customer satisfaction (CSAT) unchanged? Your team is probably gaining expertise and its tooling has improved to allow the same size team handle 50% more issues. If CSAT is decreasing, then it’s a sign that you need better training, better tools, or simply more bodies on the team.
Initial response time: how long does it take for a new issue to get a response from a real person, who is now investigating? The lower this number, the less a customer has to wait and the sooner their issue will be resolved. If this number isn’t decreasing over time, or is increasing, it’s a sign that your team is getting overloaded and needs, as above, more training, better tools, or more headcount.
Solve time: how long is the average ticket taking between creation and resolution? Again, you want to see this number going down over time on a healthy and improving team. One detail to this metric, though it can be very difficult a lot harder to measure, is ‘active’ solve time versus ‘passive’. Active is when a support engineer is actively working the issue—screen shares, bug reproductions, actual investigation. Passive, on the other hand, is when the support engineer is waiting on someone else. Maybe they have a question out to Engineering, or is waiting for the customer to come back from vacation, but if your system is able to distinguish the two states, you can learn a lot about how your team members are spending their time.
CSAT: if you’re measuring this, and you should be, CSAT is sort of a reality check metric to all the others. If tickets are being solved faster, or your engineers are taking on more tickets per week, it’s not a good thing if customer satisfaction is through the floor. Maintaining a high satisfaction rate is the most important: all of the throughput improvements can come after that.
Ticket categories: following up on last week’s topic, looking at the breakdown of ticket categories over time can tell a compelling story. If you’re receiving fewer bugs over time, this is good news for product quality. If you’re receiving an influx of issues centering around a previously little-used feature, this can be a strong signal to Product that more attention needs to be paid to that feature. If the mix of tickets is shifting significantly in one direction or another, that’s almost always a signal to look deeper, and maybe invest in further training for your team to ensure they’re still able to respond satisfactorily to the newest issues coming in.
Telling your story
The root of the problem I’m discussing today is this: Support has no direct ties to revenue. Do support engineers close new business? No. Do they chase renewals? No. Do they build and maintain the product that the company sells? No. So they’re a cost center, not a profit center. This puts Support in a precarious place when budgets are reviewed. Why should the budget allocated to Support salaries and tools increase, or even remain at its current level? After all, the company can get a direct return on investment by allocating it to R&D or Sales. Finding a compelling answer to this question is key to the long-term success—and maybe survival—of your team.
When at the mercy of the budgeting process, support leaders must be able to speak the language of money. An instructive example can be found by looking at another team that doesn’t directly generate revenue: marketing. (Put your pitchforks down, marketing friends!) Marketing activities cost money: press releases, media placement, advertisement, conventions, all have a significant cash outlay that can’t point directly to revenue generated. So what did the marketing field do? Found ways to tie it to revenue. Ad tracking and clickthrough attribution, tracking leads generated from webinars and conference booths, all let Marketing relate its activities much more directly to Sales, and hence to revenue generation. Support must do the same: show that its activities and outcomes can be directly linked to sales and retention.
In my experience, the easiest way to build that link is to forge close ties with your Customer Success (CS) team, if your organization has one. This is something you should be doing anyway, of course, but in practical terms CS is your closest link to revenue generation. By leveraging the analytics you’ve been collecting, you can often tell a very straightforward story. “In the last six months, we facilitated the development of twelve new major features requested by large customers. CS was able to leverage these customer wins into a 15% average expansion across our six largest customers. During the same period, we addressed seventeen urgent customer bugs, building customer goodwill during renewal season. Our CSAT score was 95% during these six months, and CS retained 100% of our customers up for renewal during this period, several of whom were affected by those critical issues.” In many organizations, Support is a part of the larger CS or Customer Experience (CX) organization, and this is why. Support activities naturally lend themselves to promoting customer happiness.
If your support experience is sufficiently good, it can become a strong differentiator during the sales process, lending your team another link to revenue generation. One of the support teams I’ve led was so fast and effective that our sales process relied on it as a competitive advantage. “Go ahead and open a ticket during your POV [proof of value trial],” they’d say to a prospect testing us out. “You’ll get a response within an hour. Now try that with our competitors.” In a crowded market, top-shelf support can really help a business stand out from the field. Every customer closed at least partially on the strength of the support your organization offers during the POV process is a feather in your team’s cap, and can be surfaced through metrics showing the speed and quality of support provided to prospects, as distinguished from existing customers.
If you’re not able to build these connections with CS and Sales, or even if you are, there are other ways you can show the value of your team outside the obvious fact that you’re promoting successful use of your product. Here are a few examples, though in your own organization your team may have other achievements as well:
Documentation: if your team writes, edits, or even just contributes to product documentation, that is valuable work that would otherwise go undone or have to be handled by engineers. Though it is hard to put a direct monetary value on quality documentation, it is important for marketing, customer acquisition, and customer retention.
Speaking of Engineering, Support is often involved in Engineering-adjacent activities like reproducing reported bugs and quality assurance (QA) testing of new features and bug fixes. By taking this load off Engineering proper, it frees up your company’s engineers to spend more time on improving and expanding your product.
In smaller organizations, Support tends to wear a lot more hats than just providing support. In those environments, a support engineer is often also doing presales work, technical deployments, integrations, Customer Success, and any number of other technical and customer-facing tasks. The value of those jacks of all trades is often beyond question in small companies, but each one of those roles they’re filling is a strong argument in favor of the relatively small budget for your team. Don’t be shy about pointing that out.
Strong organizations know that the quality of the support they provide is a key component to their success. Make it as easy as possible for your own organization to recognize the benefits you’re providing your customers, other stakeholders in your business, and the bottom line.
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!