Recently a software business came to me looking for some help with sales emails. During the initial discussion, they hinted at being a bit overloaded on support. While explaining the big picture situation that provoked their request about the emails, they revealed some details about support tying up development. This was also keeping them from attending to sales. Thus, the emails needed to improve so that sales can improve without needing quite so many phone calls to people wearing a sales hat right that minute, when they needed to be wearing a different hat.
When the phone rings, it’s important
You might wonder why the same people are doing sales and support. If so, you probably don’t have a small company anymore. Think back to how things were when your company had four or five people juggling business development / sales, customer service and whatever else you have to do.
Three calls come in at about the same moment. All three get answered by the four or five people you have. This is standard operating procedure in a small business. We do what has to be done with what we’ve got at that moment. When the phone rings at a company that maybe doesn’t know with absolute certainty where next month’s revenue is coming from – every ring sounds like “ka-ching”, either whether the money is heading in or out. The phone gets priority.
The idea seemed to be that better emails might reduce the demands on the folks trying to juggle sales and support. While that might be true, it’s the wrong problem, even though I totally understand why it’s the focus. Sales feeds the bulldog, folks.
The trouble with priorities
Jim Rohn once said that every time you say yes, you’re saying no to something else. Customer service calls can consume every moment of your day… week… life. Yes, they can literally consume the rest of your life.
Why? Because your priorities need to be adjusted.
Look, I’ve been there. I know those service calls have to be handled. I know you base your reputation on the quality of your support. But you’re missing the big picture, and I’m that guy who in this very spot has written many times about lame service and differentiating service and so on. I’m not waffling on that, but when support becomes all consuming, it means your priorities need to be adjusted.
It’s time to sit down with the sales, support, development and management teams. You might not do software, so you may have a manufacturing, installation, customization, and/or deployment team. Whatever. Point is, this is not solely a software business issue.
Customer service eats the world
Like a fire consumes all the oxygen it can, that’s also how service loads can work. Certainly you’ve heard “Your call is important to us, please hold for the next available agent, blah blah blah“. Normally, this means that a large company has understaffed their customer service department and simply won’t admit it, so they tell you they’re experiencing “unusually high call volumes”. Yep, sure they are.
Sometimes it means something else is going on, such as the entire internet is down, or Metallica announced an extra show, or similar.
The point is that this is the nature of customer service. It can and will eat the world unless you make an intentional effort to eliminate the need for it.
Eliminate customer service?
Yes. Eliminate it. Not the department. The need.
When ELIMINATING the need for service is the goal, everything changes.
Imagine if you told the people who write your user manual that you were giving them a new goal: Eliminate the need for a user manual.
Next, tell your folks in shipping (or on the dock) that all shipping customer service calls will go to whoever packed the box.
Finally, tell your product development / install / deploy / customization team that all customer service product questions will go directly to whoever made it.
After they finished howling at you, they’d ask why, how and so on.
Try something like this: “Let’s build something that people can use without asking for help.”
It completely changes how they think about what they do, much less how they do it. What about new users? What about experienced users? What about power users? Which one of those users does the dev team focus on now? Probably none of them.
It also completely changes how & what you manage.
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