Throwing up barriers to tech support
Don't annoy customers (more than you have to)
This week is a little change of pace: I’m speaking to sales/customer success leadership as much as I am to the support team. Read on to find about a common mistake: gating access to the support team behind a sales or customer success meeting.
Story time
Recently I was in the market for a new software tool for my team. When I had reached a decision, I started a free trial in anticipation of converting to a fully paid deployment as soon as the trial expired. Because I’d used this tool before, deployment and configuration went smoothly until I ran into one less common configuration option that required that I reach out to the vendor’s support for some changes on their side. So far so good, and I didn’t anticipate any issues with this request either. Until I actually tried to get it done.
First, the recommended method for opening a support issue with the vendor was via their web chat. So I opened the window and put in my question. The result: a long autoresponse, AI-generated, that came nowhere near solving my issue which was simply ‘I need configuration X set by the support team, per your documentation.’ Already irritated, I clicked on the ‘this did not solve my issue’ response, and was promised I’d receive a response from a live support person shortly. I rolled my eyes and began to wait.
The next morning I woke to two messages in my inbox: first, a response from the vendor. However, it wasn’t from a support engineer, but a sales person who wanted to ‘hop on a 15-minute call’ to ‘better understand my use case and learn about my problem’. They shared a booking link, and I noted that no calendar slots were available sooner than the next day. The other email was automated, from their ticket system, indicating that the issue was closed and asking whether I’d had a good experience.
Friends, you might well understand my increased frustration at this point.
I responded, politely enough, that my issue was simple and in fact was fully encapsulated in the subject line of the ticket: I simply needed configuration X set. Perhaps this might be achieved without the need for a call? I was, after all, in a bit of a hurry. To the CSAT survey, I indicated that no, the issue was not resolved to my satisfaction, being that it had not been resolved at all, and noted as much in the free-form response field.
A few hours later I received a longer response from the sales person, reiterating that a call would be preferable but in the meantime they’d set configuration X for me. Somewhat mollified now that my issue had been actually solved, I agreed to a live call in the near future.
Now, I don’t share this anecdote just to complain about the state of support today, particularly from large companies, but because it brought to the front of my mind something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Creating barriers between customers and the technical support they need is almost as bad as providing no support at all. Not everyone is going to be willing to sit through a sales call before getting their questions answered or technical issues resolved, particularly if they’re not already paying customers. So how should things work instead?
Solve the problem first
Simple: solve the issue first, then ask for the meeting.
Speaking to my friends in sales and customer success: I sympathize! Prospects (and often even paying customers) can be hard to get hold of. The times that they reach out without prompting may be few and far between. So when they have a problem and contact support, it’s tempting to jump right in and try to book a meeting, or at least reopen a dialog, before passing the request on to the technical support team. But you need to resist that impulse. Why? Two related reasons:
First, this is not the time you want to talk to them anyway. If a customer is reaching out for help, they’re probably already frustrated with your product and not in the right mood to discuss purchasing, or renewing, or doing a business review, or whatever nontechnical reason you need to speak to them.
Second, if they weren’t frustrated already, they probably will be when they realize they aren’t going to get a resolution to their problem immediately but, instead, they have to sit through a meeting. Maybe their pilot deployment is completely down, maybe their budget is blocked until they get some technical answers, but their priority right now is not talking about business topics. They need a solution first. This kind of runaround can turn a champion into a detractor really quickly.
Instead, the time to make this request is after their issue is resolved, or at least in progress. The customer will be in a better headspace and you’ll have more standing to say ‘hey, we helped you out, now let’s talk.’ Better yet, you can enlist your own support team to open that conversation and do a warm hand-off once the customer is satisfied with the solution and feeling more amenable to business discussions.
Sidebar: support for non-customers
As a side note, this discussion touches on a common point of contention among sales, support, and sales engineering: who is responsible for doing technical support for prospects? The answer is going to differ from organization to organization, but whoever is handling those support inquiries, the points above stand. Provide your prospects the technical assistance they need before asking them to sign the contract. Obviously there will be exceptions, particularly if the technical requests are particularly large or involved, but the default position should be to answer their questions, then loop in the account executive later to make their own requests.
Conclusion
Staying in touch with customers is hard, and it’s natural to jump on any opportunity to connect with them. But when they need to solve a technical problem, make sure it gets solved first before trying to rekindle the relationship. The customer will be in a better mood, and you can use their recent experience with your no doubt excellent support team as an additional selling point. Keep in close contact with support, provide them all the information they need to understand the business context, and let them do their job before passing the customer back to you.
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!