I have worked at a dozen or so support jobs, and no matter how much the customers stayed because of the support team or how much we drove the value our clients got out of the product, we always were a cost center and treated as such.

That always meant they we got the second best of everything, were always last on the list for raises, promotions, new hardware, proper chairs, whatever. We were left out of planning, and whenever another department decided at the last minute it wasnt their job now became ours to complete forever.

The second I switched over to being a consultant and making money for people instead of helping to avoid lost revenue, their attitude changed towards me and became much more positive and friendly instead of unreasonable and demanding (both on management and customer side).

I dont even know if this is a conscious or unconscious decision, but support/helpdesk job position is reviled for a reason, and the reason is that it is an unforgiving job with little acknowledgement, pay, or chance for promotion.

It gets even worse if you are doing stuff like Apple support (I trained iphone/ipod then ios/cpu at a vendor site) and almost everything he said rang true about them specifically (and the call center management world in general.)

Apple's training team was pretty cool and one of the few saving graces, I am glad I got to hang with them in Austin, they definitely were trying to build a robust system to train people with reproducible results. It was the best training I had gotten from any corporation before or since, it was what got me into training in the first place.

>"customer support in any company is like this."

My post was specifically in response to that, because it was an inaccurate statement.

I'm really sorry to hear you've had such poor experiences in support. That sucks, and I realize how hard/impossible that can be to turn around from a business and culture standpoint.

Sounds like you have found a path that works better for you, so congrats!

My experience is that (1) most companies do a lot of things wrong (2) the respect which support receives varies from company to company as well as industry to industry, with business support taken more seriously than consumer support. I'd be curious to know what industry you happen to work in.

Well, it's not logical at all in the common sense of the word logical. It's like you're talking to a compiler...

In casual conversation everybody understands that it doesn't mean "absolutely every company".

That's not true at all! There are lots of people (myself included) who tend to interpret things very literally, and would not recognize this subtlety. So not EVERY person understands that...

... oh. Never mind.

That said, there are many companies out there that differentiate on support, so I still feel OPs statement painted with an overly broad brush. The example I gave from where I work was simply an anecdote.

No company is perfect and there will always be conflicting priorities when resources are finite (so, always). I didn't intend to plug, but since someone else in this thread accurately guessed...I work at SmugMug. We are a SaaS business, so keeping customers happy such that they never feel a need to leave aligns our business priorities very nicely with those of our customers. However it is also very much in our company's DNA.

I'm still not convinced though that a crappy customer experience is ever better than a happy one when it comes to growing a successful business that's in it for the long haul.

I think there's confusion about good/bad customer experience and what that means. Great staff doing great interactions is important, but if you focus just on that you're missing out on two important earlier layers.

No-one really wants to talk to customer support. Ever. So trying to be good at talking to people is nice, and you better be good at it when you need to or you will lose some customers (whether that be through lack of acquisition from bad stories or people actually quitting), but it's like the third level of defense, and it is arguably less important than the first two levels.

The first level is "Make sure your stuff just works". Actively work towards eliminating defects. The best product is the one that just works. People hate on Ryanair in Europe - I think it is vastly exaggerated. They get the point that having things just work is huge. They "just work" better than any other airline. They suck completely at the third level, and are only ok at the second level, but they are good at the first level. And sometimes good at first level, and good prices, is all you need.

Second level is - if things for some reason dont work, make it easy for me to fix it myself. Again - I dont want to think about your thing, I just want it to work, but if you're making me think about it by having it break, at least make sure I can do all my thinking and solving in one go - best way to do that is to let me fix it on my own. Sky broadband does a decent job of this. Their routers come with built in self-service menus rather than random error screens. Along the lines of "Something is wrong - lets start by plugging and unplugging the wires. Here's what a micro-filter is and looks like, check if you have one of those in place. Ok, lets power-cycle the router, you do that by just unplugging this wire..." 100% better than having a generic error screen or referring to online help.

Third level is - If you failed at the first two levels, make it easy and nice to talk to you. Important, not least for PR reasons, since people who failed the first two levels and also fail on the third will be really pissed off with you, but arguably less important than the first two layers, if they are done right. The other reason it is hugely important is that your improvement points on level 1 and 2 will come from 3. If your team isnt set up to continuously feed back what they are hearing from 3 and use that to improve 1 and 2, you're not going to get better.

The fourth bonus level is "f you failed the first three, at least have a decent social media setup to manage your awfulness".

A good CS organisation recognises all three levels at least, and spends time on all of them. You continually work on moving things from the third level up to the first, or at least the second, and doing that proactive work is part of what makes a good CS team.

It's not just the helldesk. Even an experienced, senior level sysadmin, if they are doing their jobs well, even if what they do is absolutely critical to the company, upper management won't even be aware of their existence.

The differentiation is so deep, even the frequency of outings and the places they take you vary. The work timing differs, shift timing differs, perks differs. After all, the people who make things are revenue generators for the co, and we were nothing but easily replaceable pieces.

Smugmug?

Smugmug's support staff is great. There is a huge difference when dealing with regular customer support, and customer support that goes above and beyond to provide exceptional service.

Smugmug Crutchfield Dreamhost Nordstrom All provide great, consistent support.

Thanks for the kind words! I'm not a Support Hero, but have to say that everyone who works here from the top down has nothing but utter respect for our amazing Heroes. It is an exceptionally challenging job and thus warrants exceptionally talented individuals--I sure as heck know that I couldn't do what they do.

I wish all companies had our level of customer support, but I know that isn't realistic. Fortunately for us, that creates a great opportunity to win customers for life.

What motivates us to excel in that area? If I had to take a stab at it, I'd say there are two main reasons...

First, we view our support and our product as two sides of the same coin. We are immensely proud of what we've accomplished at SmugMug, and it simply would not enter the thoughts of the caliber of people who work here to have an awesome product and mediocre support.

Second, and more to the point, photos and photography are intensely personal pursuits and businesses warranting equally personal service. Whether we are protecting customers' memories and art or enabling them to live the dream as a pro photographer, they need to know they can rely on us no matter what when things hit the fan (as they unfortunately do on occasion).

That trust is a non-negotiable part of our relationship with our customers, and our Heroes are amazing at earning it through every ticket they help with, large or small.

Not only that, but support tickets are also an excellent opportunity to turn unhappy customers into evangelists.

These days when I phone or email a company and get someone capable who can actually help me I go around the next few weeks recommending the company to everyone who will listen.

In some ways could a few small glitches and fast useful responses could actually be better than it just works?

I think this can even be rephrased to "your engineering-team is doing something wrong".

Where I work we had a product which represented without any doubt the majority of our customer-service's tickets. Almost all of the tickets were related to deployment-issues.

This got communicated back to engineering. We fixed deployment, and now it's hardly in the support-stats any more.

If the organization just ignores feedback like this, customer support being costly should come as no surprise.

Platform lock-in is a negative, customer-hostile approach. The positive alternate version of "lock-in" is "stickiness." Ie. the concept that your product/service/experience is so amazingly awesome that your customers have many reasons to keep coming back and using you.

Platform lock-in has always come across to me as a crutch for some flaw in a product/service/pricing model. I understand businesses need to manage risk and their investment in customer acquisition, but focusing on customer-positive ways to do so seems better aligned with all parties interests, no?

Absolutely.

At my office, it was amusing when others would adopt the latest iPhone, but the charger was different... yet again! People would scurry about looking for a compatible charger, while the few of us with android phones would look at each other and mouth the words, "micro usb". Simple.

Good products can still be good while conforming to industry-wide standards -- something I seem to find less prevalent in my years of experience working with Apple products. (Design agency)

But Google showed us that you can build a billion-dollar multinational with abysmal customer support.

Valve Software performs similarly well, and is renowned for having awful customer support.

Apple's approach to "customer experience" is many-fold: I would argue that the first line of customer support for Apple is actually the Apple Store. Here, they spend money to make it a good experience because it's a revenue driver. They can provide personalized assistance, but the techs can also build a relationship they can use to sell more stuff. Apple also spends a lot of time making their products intuitive (or at least "fail safe") so many customers don't need support in the first place.

Phone support? Not so much. It's 100% a cost center because they would prefer their customers use other methods of support that involve them walking into a store and getting the full Apple experience.

Your comments are probably true for a small or medium sized company, but not for a global behemoth like Apple. Everything is so siloed (out of necessity due to the size) that any customer feedback likely wouldn't make it up the 15 layers of middle management back to the product teams anyway. You can't have 10,000 support agents feeding things back to a team of 100-200 product developers; there's just too much noise. The product teams make enough revenue anyway that they can afford in-depth market research on a scale that small companies can only dream of.

I'm a little unclear from how you worded things--was the question around the notion of firing people as heroic juxtaposed against what we call our support team (ie. Heroes)?

Can you provide any examples of industries where there is no opportunity to turn CS into a profit center vs. a cost center? Sure it might be very difficult to model and prove out the exact impact it has on the bottom line, but I'm not convinced there are any scenarios where pissing off your customers with a poor experience is better for business than making them feel loved and, well, supported. :)

I would argue you're seeing the same narratives play out in the ride sharing space right now. Lyft tried to compete with Uber with their friendlier drivers vs we'll get you there faster and cheaper messaging and we'll see how long that differentiation lasts since Lyft seems to be rapidly backing away from their branding and into competing on purely on price.

Markets which are natural monopolies like Comcast also don't profit from extra CS. When your choice is shitty broadband vs no broadband, there's little CS, good or bad can do to sway your decision.

Markets where the purchaser is not the end user like enterprise sales also benefits from investing more money in sales than support. Every doctor I've ever been to has bitched at length about basic usability issues with the software they're forced to deal with but they have no real power so the software stays uniformly bad.

Markets where purchases happen infrequently. I recently had to buy a spare part for my refrigerator. Amazon didn't carry it, and the sites that did seemed uniformly low rent and amateur. I ordered from 1 site that said it was in stock and chose reasonably fast shipping. After not hearing from them for 2 days, I sent an email and they got back to me saying that due to a clerical error, it was actually out of stock and wouldn't be shipping out for another 4 days. Meanwhile, the website still listed the part as in stock. They didn't care, what's the worst I could punish this retailer for? Denying them all of my future spare fridge part purchases?

Sure, there's always exceptions to be found in all of these areas but by being the exception, you relegate yourself to a niche of the market and it becomes hard to expand outside of that niche.

It's hard to believe this is true. I'd gladly pay $20 extra for a trans-Atlantic seat with more legroom and my experience shows that I'm not alone--all those "improved economy" seats are usually sold out well in advance (and they cost a lot more than $20 on a 1k extra).

Admittedly the Lyft example was unknown to me--I'll have to dig in, sounds interesting.

Specifically to airlines, I'd direct you to some interesting info on Southwest[1]. While TBH the case study doesn't really prove to me the causation of success by being customer-centric, it does show that they can compete in that industry with that approach and be successful.

For the cable industry I'd argue that Sonic.net has carved our a nice business for themselves in part because of their amazing service. That doesn't really disprove your statement that it relegates a business to a niche of the market and makes it hard to expand outside the niche, but I again think back to the question of correlation vs. causation. Comcast, TWC, etc. were all well entrenched before Sonic.net even existed. So it is hard to say how much of a factor that played in their limited ability to compete vs. the fact that they focus on customer service.

Respectfully, what I still remain unconvinced of with your examples is what exactly Comcast and others like them are leaving on the table by not having awesome customer support experiences. You don't necessarily need to break the bank to have one, but you do need strong direction and culture, and that comes from the top down.

I go back to the notion of customer acquisition costing potentially 5x as much vs. retention costs (all hypothetical averages of course). If an industry has razor-thin margins and cost-focused customers, wouldn't you think it would make them a lot of money to maximize the LTV of said customers?

[1] http://digitalstrategies.tuck.dartmouth.edu/cds-uploads/case...

As you mentioned, it's always hard to separate out cause and effect but I'd argue Southwest's unique fleet and labor arrangements gave it a temporary structural advantage. Now that those advantages are disappearing, it seems to be reverting towards the mean (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023039497045794596...).

But often this is not the case. I find that while good CS can make customers happy in normal circumstances, CS really makes or breaks a customer relationship when something goes wrong. Good CS and you have a brand advocate. Bad CS and you may have a nemesis that will go to irrational lengths to tarnish your brand out of pure spite.

I left my old cable operator for two reasons: 1) they were unable to fix my cable internet for two weeks, 2) their customer service kept giving me the wrong information.

Of those two, the latter was by far the most important factor. The former was just the trigger that put me at the mercy of their abysmal CS processes. Before that, if you'd asked me, I'd have recommended the company, and been totally neutral about their customer service, as I'd not had to deal with them for anything of substance.

Leaving did not get me internet back faster. It did not get me better service - just different. But it gave me the satisfaction of telling them to f-off, very publicly, after I'd suffered through multiple days of regular calls to their customer service team.

The downtime made me annoyed to start with, but their CS team who could have defused the situation just with some basic courtesy - others have - massively escalated things by being unsympathetic, not passing on the right information, not calling back when there were changes to the situation, and the final straw: after I'd decided to cancel, and had waited in line 45 minutes, I was told the computer systems were down and when I asked if they could take my details and arrange it later, they said no - ok, but could they call me back? No. I was expected to call back, wait in the same queue again for who knows how long, without knowing if they'd manage to cancel for me then.

So just by attitude and a few process issues that would not have made a material difference to their cost, first they lost me as a customer, then they pushed me into publishing a scathing complaint on my blog and tweet about it. I "only" have a direct reach of a few hundred people, but apparently that worried them enough that I had a call from someone claiming to be an assistant to the CEO the following (Saturday) morning, asking how he could help.

While that calmed me somewhat, had they just had better processes in place, they'd have had several thousands pounds in additional revenue from me by now, and not wasted a dozen or so CS reps time with all the repeated calls that arose from their poor internal communications.

That's why good CS matters.

It's those cases where long term previously satisfied customers decides to blacklist you for life and starts to badmouth you to every friend, co-worker and relative just because your CS processes made them angry by unnecessarily escalating some minor problem.

[1] http://www.helpscout.net/blog/disney-customer-experience/

That stupid stretched-out bitch made us a pile of money. Of course we never called her a "stupid bitch" to her face, that would be tactless. We called her a "hero".

I think she died of kidney failure or something.