Does your CEO Work the Help Desk?
In any organization, there are two primary groups that talk with customers: Sales and Support.
Sales typically works with prospects and their job is to convert them into customers. They are the best group to understand how your prospective customers view your company and product and what their perceived needs are. Most CEOs are pretty good about working with the sales teams and interacting with prospective customers, and in fact it is common for CEOs to go on sales calls with their sales teams.
However, once the sales team has closed a sale, their focus goes to the next prospect and the relationship between the customer and the company is transferred to the Customer Support department.
In most companies the relationship that the Customer Support team has with the customer lasts much longer than the sales process did, and they get to the know the customer on a more intimate level. Innovative companies are using this relationship to garner customer trust and increase sales (see this article about using customer service to drive growth), and they are also using customer generated feedback to improve their products.
In running several tech companies, I’ve found that the best way to get the pulse of our customers is to spend time with the customer support group. No matter what technology we used, I have always been a user on our help desk application and have used it to keep track of the interactions that our customers were having with our support team.
A great deal of that experience has gone into the development of TeamSupport.com, and of course I use TeamSupport every day to keep up with our customer base.
In fact, customers of TeamSupport will often see me responding to a support ticket or answering a chat. Why? We’ve got a great customer support team, but I feel the single most important thing we have as a company is our customers, and I want to make sure I understand their problems and concerns. I don’t want this information filtered through layers of management – I want to be right out there on the front lines and see what’s really happening. This methodology has served me well in several companies and it continues to with TeamSupport.
In my opinion the question is not why I am active with Customer Support but why more CEOs are not. I understand that many CEOs don’t have the deep technical knowledge to actually work tickets and that’s fine, but they should be spending time with the support team and with the tool they are using to understand what is going on.
Spending just a few hours a month with the support team will gain CEOs invaluable insights into their customer base and help to better understand the issues and problems that they are having.
Does your CEO work the help desk? If not, why not?
- Robert
