Now that you have put in all the work, it's time to rollout your new technical support team to the other departments in your company and your customers. This article will focus on the best practices for marketing your improvements.


The Importance of Marketing

Have you ever been served a plate of food that looked exactly like the picture on the menu? Were you able to get those stubborn stains out like they promise on the bottle of cleaner that you bought? That's marketing - you have to talk about the ideal case. Take care not to shoot too high, using words like "guarantee and "perfect. Such claims will come back to bite you. Conversely, you should avoid shooting too low by saying things like "hopefully or "sometimes. Rather, you can say, "We have made some major changes in technical support. We are better trained and will be measuring ourselves to ensure that we consistently perform at a high level. You can trust us.

You should also do your best to focus on the benefits your team will provide them. When taking to other people in your company, let them know that your improvements will reduce the number of angry customers they have to talk to. With customers, tell them that it is going to save them time and headaches.


Your Colleagues

" Salespeople

The salespeople probably curse you behind your back and play darts with your picture up on the board. Yes, this might make it difficult to speak with them, but once they realize you are helping solve their problems, it should become easier. Your best bet is to explain how they will be able to close more sales. For example:

"When you call customers asking for more business, they won't have big problems to overcome, which will help you close more sales.

"You will have happy customers as references, which will help you close more sales.

Give your salespeople a new support transition script and encourage them to use it. An example might be: "I understand that this issue is important to you, so I am going to hand it over to our recently revamped technical support system. They will be able to take care of it quickly and effectively.

The salespeople also need a way to hand cases off to you. An email to the helpdesk with the customer's name is perfect. An indication of the type or severity of the problem would be ideal. They might also give you call and let you create the case yourself.

When I was first making the transition to a better support system, I made my staff walk through the sales offices once a day to ask for customers with problems. They said, "Things are kind of light over in the support department. I need more cases to work on. Do you know of any customers who are having any problems that I can call and help? This is all about perception. Eye contact builds trust.

Make sure to have your staff send thank you notes to Sales after they solve the customers' problems. They will not like the idea at first, so you must sell them on the whole vision. When the salespeople get those thank you notes, everything changes.

" Marketing

Marketing staff love nothing more than happy customers who will serve as references. Once they learn about your new and improved support, they will begin follow up with support case customers, sending them surveys and requests for quotes.

Effective marketing - the kind that comes from referenceable customer quotes - will help boost sales, reinforcing the benefits of your work for all involved. Getting everyone to work together like this is a great accomplishment, and you should be proud of it.

" Accountants

Better support performance and tracking means better cost accounting. There may not be an obvious connection, but trust me on this. The information you can provide for Accounting will help them allocate support costs to each customer, rather than inaccurately spreading the costs across each customer based on the amount the customer has paid. Knowing which customers are more profitable than others helps in all kinds of areas: Upper management and product planning will use this data to target products to more profitable segments of customers. Technical support will use this data to argue for raising the support billings on the least profitable segments. More profit is good, as you very well know.

Data on how much time you spend per customer also helps get the invoices paid. After all, the customers who use a lot of support time are clearly using the service and are bound to pay you on time. If not, a collection call that threatens to cut off support will do the trick. On the other hand, customers who are not using much technical support time need additional marketing about the benefits of your technical support.

If the helpdesk tool doesn't let you track time spent per case, get a timesheet program. Either way you will need your accounting staff to coordinate with you so that you can set up computerized mapping between the customer list in your helpdesk or time system and the customer list in the accounting software.

" Developers

You will need to work with the development team if you would like to hire your own bug-fix developer. First, gather some informal data about how much time the developers waste fixing bugs for technical support. Jot down some notes and then take the head of development to lunch so you can pitch your idea. This is important because you will need the head of development to interview the candidate you want, train your new developer and invite your developer to meetings.

You will have to let the head of development know that having your own support developer will result in less interruptions and headaches for them. If you are getting a performance bonus for improving customer satisfaction, offer to share it. You will soon find that it was worth it.


Your Customers

Your company probably already has a newsletter, cover letters for invoices and automated emails to new customers. Ask Marketing and Sales to include a recommendation of the new technical support system in those communications. They are better suited to find the right locations and messaging, so let them handle it.

Your customer communications can include announcements too. Every time a person opens a case in your helpdesk, they should get an automatic email confirmation. You can personalize this the way you want it. Here is what ours at Journyx looks like:

"Dear ________,

We have received your cry for help and have logged it in our helpdesk under this case number: #########

Our support ninjas monitor the helpdesk from 7am to 6pm (Central US time), Monday through Friday. They sneak in some other times, but we can't make any promises about that.

A real person will read this case within two hours (during the times listed above). We triage and deal with critical issues first, so if your payroll is threatened or your site is down you should expect to hear from us soon. We also try to reply to all problems that get to us before 4:00pm on the same business day.

You can reply to this email to update your case, or you can call us at 800-755-9878 ext 2 (US) or 512-834-8888 ext 2 (everywhere else).

Not everyone thought this was a good idea, but we have gotten rave reviews from customers, so clearly I won. I am now planning to rewrite it in free verse.


Good Feedback

Technical support doesn't often get compliments, so encourage your staff to ask for feedback after a job well done. It really helps them to hear it, which is important considering the morale problems that plague technical support. Not only that, but having a customer say something nice about you will reinforce their good feelings about you. They will be significantly more likely to repeat it to someone else if they have already said it out loud once, and that is the best kind of marketing!

Good luck with marketing your new technical support team. Drop me a note and share your success stories.


Click here to read part one.
Click here to read part two.





Randy Miller has 11 years of customer-focused experience in sales and services delivery. Prior to joining Journyx in 1999 as the first Timesheet-specific sales rep, Randy spent five years in the Corporate Sales and Retail Management divisions of leading electronics retailer CompUSA. Since then Randy has held many different positions at Journyx, including Sales Engineer, Trainer, Consultant, Product Manager, Support Team Manager, and Implementation Manager for Enterprise Accounts. Randy has personally managed development and implementation efforts for many of the company's largest customers and is a co-holder of several Journyx patents. Randy was named Director of Services in 2005. Randy can be reached at randy@journyx.com.