A CMO's View on Customer Support

In May the CustomerThink editorial calendar is focusing on contact centers with some attention towards their financial impact. As part of the management leadership team for a small ISV I’m as committed as any of my counterparts to improving efficiency and saving money. I also know that delivering top flight customer support is one of Seapine’s key competitive differentiators, and the fact that we don’t outsource customer support – or measure our technical support group by how fast they can get a customer off the line makes my job easier. Delivering superior customer support may sound easy; however, it’s not. In fact, according to a survey by Harris Interactive and RightNow Technologies 85% of consumers say they’ve sworn, shouted, cried, smashed things, or experienced chest pains while waiting for help on tech-support call lines. In other words, many support organizations may be contributing to our rising health care costs!

In my marketing role I’m very thankful to have a world-class support organization standing behind our brand. Our support organization is staffed by individuals who are truly customer-focused, and their efforts positively impact our customers. That impact was recently reflected in our March customer satisfaction surveys. The attached is an amusing and fun message that was originally sent only to our employees to congratulate our support organization on their recent performance. I’m going to take a chance and share it with you:

You’re invited to view a short presentation titled Seapine Software Customer Support:
http://www.brainshark.com/seapine/Great_Customer_Support

OK, OK - my impersonation of Harry Caray isn’t world-class, but now you know why I’m excited about customer support as a competitive advantage. Great support is part of our customer experience strategy, and with back-to-back record sales months and quarters the future financial impact looks solid.