Daniel Italiaander

The Garage of Technology Companies

The importance of the (technical) support team is often highly underestimated, leaving vast business potential untapped. Upgrade you support team and your bottom line will improve immediately

In most (tech) companies it is extremely easy to distinguish the support area from other business functions in the office. The block of cubicles that most resemble a garage is likely to be the place where the support hot-line is routed to. There is at least one naked girl on the cubicle wall, at least eight vulgar jokes are told per hour and the dress code is jeans thoughtfully combined with an old T-shirt (in many cases also displaying a vulgar joke). Contrast that with the shiny suites of the sales team.

 The resemblance with a garage is not coincidental. Just like the mechanic that fixes expensive Lexus-Nexus cars, these support guys know the messy reality under the hood of the cutting-edge technology that is being sold. These guys see the log files, the cluttered databases and know the CPU utilization of the main server. As with many things in life, it is often better not to know too much.

 While this may seem just outward appearance, it in fact reflects the corporate attitude and philosophy regarding support. According to this philosophy, support is regarded as an expense rather than as a source of revenue. Support is deemed necessary to sustain the company; but is not perceived as contributor to growth.

 There are several aspects in business where this philosophy is reflected. For instance, CEOs regularly send out emails complimenting the sales team on new deals. Also the brilliant technological breakthroughs of the development teams are publicly celebrated. But how often are the achievements of the support team shared with the entire company?

 When hiring a new technical support engineer, the human resource department will usually search for ‘ticket-closing monkeys’ - people with just enough technical skills to solve the most common problems and sufficient command of English to communicate the resolution.

 It is obvious that such attitude and philosophy leaves a vast amount of business potential untapped. Just imagine what could be achieved if every single support call is regarded as a sales opportunity or source of valuable business intelligence. Even a call to the support team to re-set a password, could develop into an intelligent conversation regarding the use of the product, possibly unveiling interesting customer insights. However, the ticket-closing monkeys that HR hired, lack the skills or interest to realize the potential of support calls.

 Your support team is the finger on the pulse of each of your clients. Treat them as such! Hire support people with the skills set of pre-sales engineers, give incentives to the support team for extracting valuable business intelligence and share successes of the support team with the rest of the company.

 You’ll see that the inappropriate pictures will disappear from the cubicle walls, the support dress code will improve and ultimately your bottom line will reap the profits.

Article Tags: Support Team

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