To provide support in local time zones
Most obviously, you may want to
provide support in local time zones.
Your growth market may already have an on-the-ground team; in which case you’re lucky.
Most businesses, however, must seed new markets by providing great support and building a reputation
without the paying customer base in place.
To offer support as a component of a premium product
You may want to offer support as a component of a premium product, often the case with
mid-and high-priced B2B services.
This is moderately easy to handle, as support becomes a profit center: customers are explicitly
prepared to pay for the effort of delivering it.
To meet customer expectations in a digital-first world
CMost challenging of all, though, is sheer customer expectation.
In today’s digital-first world, customers demand instant service day and night; and that expectation
is not tied in their minds to the cost of the product or service delivered.
We have the same expectation of support on a $10-a-month cloud service as we do to the $100 a month
we pay for home utilities or the $1000 a month for a high-end B2B service.
At scale, support is a manageable and predictable business cost. Indeed, smart businesses today
treat it as a business driver: a way to differentiate from the competition and feed ideas back into
the product roadmap.
The challenge is minimizing costs during the transition from a small business with one HQ or one
customer community to something more substantial.
And the most effective businesses see this transition not just as a challenge, but a chance to
optimize their support function for the future.
For some companies, like financial services or healthcare companies, offering live support around the
clock makes sense.
But research shows that customers increasingly prefer to communicate with brands the same way they
do with friends and family: asynchronously. That means conversations can occur in real-time if
necessary, but more often than not, the customer can focus on other things and pick the conversation
back up at their convenience.
Companies are increasingly turning towards messaging channels to give customers the gift of quick,
personal, and asynchronous communication.