The Hotline Magazine
The Redefinition of Customer Support
The SaaS & Success Project

Thursday September 9, 2010




Page Two


The HotLine Recommends

For Customer Support Professionals

For Technology CEOs / CxOs

For Contact Center Technology Vendors:


Related Materials
Below Are Excerpts From Articles Related To The One You Are Now Viewing

A Litmus Test for Customer Centricity

The decision to transform a company, to recode its essential DNA for customer centricity, is not something to be considered lightly. The shift is not about changing what you do or merely improving how fast you do it for your customers; true customer centricity begins with the very definition of who you are and why as a company. The effects of such a profound reinvention of company identity necessarily will be global, touching every aspect and level of the organization's strategy, process, people

More on page 69

The Mission of a Customer Contact Center

The true mission of a customer contact center  is: Profitability . Stop; read it again. The mission of a customer contact center is its contribution to sustainable corporate profitability. Everything about the center needs to be directly connected to that mission. A customer contact center, be it about service or support, is about generating two kinds of profitability - direct profits from immediate conversion of contacts to additional sales, and indirect profits from the retention of customers

More on page 12

SaaS/Cloud & Support: The DNA of Success

There has been a lot of talk over the past couple of years about corporate DNA in the SaaS ecosystem. In various ways, the point has been made that in order to truly succeed in the new model, you have to have SaaS-thinking embedded in the very DNA of everyone at all levels throughout the company. But what does SaaS-DNA look like? Under the traditional model, a company selling perpetual licenses to use a software application at a customer's own premises is a software company. The employees descri

More on page 52

SaaS/Cloud & Support: The Right People

I've been reviewing position announcements posted on LinkedIn and other services seeking potential employees for customer support roles. The typical job description is explicit. VP or Director of Customer Support/Service/Care. Must have 5-10 years experience in all aspects of technical support operations. Must have [insert technical expertise details.] We are a startup On-Demand software company, and you will be responsible for building our Customer Support team from the ground up, etc. Major Co

More on page 60

SaaS/Cloud & The Future of Customer Support

CEO's of SaaS companies are beginning to notice a couple of vital aspects of their customer support operations. Their first wake-up call is the realization that they can't afford to staff their support team in the traditional way. The economics of an incremental income stream profits-realization model has no room for a cost-center support operation. The second realization is that they don't need as much of a support team. But in the space between those two realizations, there is a significant ri

More on page 74

Print Print
Comment Comment
Email This Post Email This Post
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Blogplay
  • LinkedIn
  • Live
  • Technorati
  • Twitter
By Mikael Blaisdell
Part of Series

In the previous SaaS/Cloud & Support Briefing, I called for a complete re-invention/redefinition of the role of Support and the customer contact center, starting with a total change in focus. The heart of what’s been wrong with Support all along is that the Break / Fix interactions between customer and company offer no real value or economic gain to anyone. The motivation for creating a new era of Support is clear cut: No one can afford to do business in the old reactive way anymore. Everything about the traditional customer contact center and its team shows its crippled and begrudged status. Valuable skill sets and knowledge are sidelined, left out of play until too late in the game for them to have winning effect. Evidence of the low status and regard for the group as mere repairmen is plain to be seen in their surroundings, compensation and perks. The very aura of the place is about waste. The only real way for people to succeed there is to leave. Is it any wonder that the reputation of Support in the industry, as a profession, hasn’t changed in the slightest from what it was ten or more years ago?

It’s Time for Something New

It’s time to recognize Support as a core strategic element of the company, a unique group facing many directions at once. To the customer, the role of Support is to enable them to gain maximum productivity and profitability from their technology investment. To the company, Support is about the timely transmission of vital data about the customerbase, product and market that will enable greater effectiveness and increased sales. The true role of Support is about generating value rather than trying to minimize waste.

The change that is required is profound, and can only come about with leadership from the executive team. Just as success in the new game of SaaS needs people who are capable of thinking in new ways about Sales and Development, making a fundamental shift in Support will also require people who can play on a new level. The whole functional organization of the company must be rethought so that people, skill sets and knowledge are deployed for maximum impact. That can only occur where senior management has a clear vision of what is possible, and is willing to act in order to bring it into reality.

Series Table of Contents