Design Out Support Costs From The Start

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Design Out Support Costs From The Start

As you grow your revenue and customer base, it’s natural to also grow your organisation. And often what happens is that later on you need to trim costs and you start an efficiencies programme. But how often do companies plan for efficiencies right from the start?

Tackling rising Support costs is often a missed opportunity. The focus is on building out new product and customers, while keeping the cost base down by restricting team growth, leading to the potential for missed opportunities through the inability to deliver in Tech and Operations. A better option is to plan to improve the bottom line with highly efficient lean processes right from the start, so that the teams spend their time on “cost of success”, not “cost of failure”.

To achieve Support efficiencies, your organisation needs to be joined up and communicating.

Support tickets tell you a lot about what your customers think about your product. So analyse them and plan to get rid of the ones that are a cost of failure:

  • Build knowledge transfer tasks and focussed training sessions into your schedule and sprints, so that the Support teams can deal with more issues and queries themselves rather than escalating to your R&D/Tech function and diverting them from higher value development
  • Build self-help into your helpdesk software, so that Support are clear how to handle particular issues, including for temporary product glitches that in time will be fixed
  • Build self-help into your products so that customers don’t need to contact Support – better customer experience and cheaper for you
  • Analyse the causes of faults and make product changes to remove the ones causing significant numbers of calls to Support
  • Produce simplified online information that customers actually want to use – test this out with them to ensure it is fit for purpose and genuinely helpful
  • Focus on user-testing your product so that it is easy to use

All of the above are simple areas that can be tackled to help you improve both customer experience and your bottom line. They don’t need to be cumbersome processes that divert from the need to grow the revenues. But ingraining this way of working into your organisation right from the start can really contribute to your profitability. If you would like some help with this, please contact us.

Contact us at Nimble Results to see how we can help

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