KevinDAmery wrote:The one drawback of this model is it doesn't scale well--it's one thing to have 1-5 product experts on staff, it's another thing altogether to have to employ 100 of them. So, in large companies, support is handled by junior personnel who frequently never even see the product (just a database with the pre-canned solutions to "everything"). That is, when it's not handled by an outsourcing company, of course. Either way, you're dealing with someone who doesn't have the knowledge baked into their DNA and for whom providing support is "just a job" - and a low paying one at that. For the support people in a company like Madcap, though, support isn't just a job: it's your baby. No one in the call-center support model gets a sick feeling in their stomach when it looks like a customer has a problem that will make them miss a deadline, but for small company support that's exactly what happens.
And therein lies the power of support, even for a company. Nobody else other than support knows the product and the customers better than support. No other department is that strongly involved in customer retention. No other department in a company than the support department produces well-trained subject matter experts. At the company I work for now all our business analysts, project managers, and some of the trainers started in support. Especially business analysts get the best training from support. They already have the skill to be able to understand customers and talk to management and developers on their level.
Also, the supporters are the ones who take the heat first when anyone else in the company screwed up. Trainer explains something wrong, sales guy makes a bunch of promises, or developers and QA just didn't get the features and quality in that is needed, support picks up the ball and is in charge to make things well again.
So support is not only an internal training department that produces top of the line talent for other departments like sales, training, development, QA, support is also a department in charge of a core competency. Depending on the company and product, it is not uncommon that companies make at least as much if not more on services than what sales bring in. And services are a great way to build up annuities, sales are a one time deal. In order to have customers renew service contracts support needs to be awesome.
Looking from a customer perspective, after being done with the sales reps, the remaining interaction during the customer-company relationship happens mainly at the support level. In our support department here the effort is not just to be reactive, but also maintain proactive and keep contact with all customers. If a customer didn't call in for half a year support makes a call and asks if everything is working out OK. And it isn't uncommon that this outreach generates more service sales for tutoring by trainers, renewal of service contracts and in some cases even additional sales.
I don't understand how companies that have substantial service revenues - or companies that care at least a little bit about their customers - can outsource the support function. I also cannot understand why developers get paid way more than support and QA. The real gods are in support. And for that it doesn't matter if it is a small or a large company.
KevinDAmery wrote:So it's really nice to see when that level of dedication gets recognized. Thanks, Rick and Neal and Ryan! (And anyone else I may have missed....)
Yes, well deserved indeed, because MadCap's support does support how it is supposed to be.