No one with a plush, beautiful lawn wakes up in August and says “Criminy! My lawn is dead! Time to get a lawn care guy pronto”. The same is true for customer service in tech companies. Great customer service & support isn’t necessarily rocket science, but neither is gardening or cooking if you know what you’re doing. Success in those endeavors requires some knowledge, vision, preparation, and small amounts of time invested early and correctly.
Whenever I speak to someone about my business I find myself, ahem, as many good salespeople will, repeating a few nuggets I think help leave an impression. One of them is that any technology company in Austin, or anywhere for that matter, that attain any level of buzz or success does so as a direct result of the vision and execution of their founders. But it’s also true that the service or support staff at any one of these outfits will have played a major role in that success. It takes a lot of smarts, guts, commitment, and just plain good luck to get a company off the ground. Just remember that on some random Wednesday night at 2am a service or tech support guy somewhere in Austin is on the phone with a customer, or on a plane going to visit one. It’s what I call Austin’s “Silent Excellence of Service”. It’s always happening quietly behind the articles published in the Statesmen or Austin Business Journal regarding the funding of this company or the interview with the CEO of that one.
Glamorous? Not really. Product guys tend to get the press and the hype, and deservedly so. But the often overlooked heroes are the thousands of very bright and serious minded service & support teams that make customers successful with a product. Austin’s service culture is outstanding. I would go so far as to submit that while there are oodles of reasons to start a technology related business in Austin, the one that rarely gets any attention is that you can build out a highly competent customer facing service & support organization in very short order due to the large amount of talented people and resources located right here.
What is lacking can hurt though. This week I’ve had two responses to inquires from ‘young’ Austin tech firms indicating they aren’t ready for a support team yet. Perhaps. But while it’s possible to build out a support team quickly, it’s typically done as a reaction to product success. Wrong approach. Why? The need to develop and nurture a near maniacal devotion to your product happens with customer #1, #2, #3, and so on. It’s the only way you build out a reputation for service excellence and customer success. Unfortunately too many business wait until they’re already at customer N and are feeling the pain that comes with failure to prepare. Congratulations. It’s August and the lawn is dead. So they begin reacting, and embarking on what I call “Reactive Service Models”.
Reactive service models are awful. They cost more in hard dollars, and by the time a business has realized they aren’t executing they are losing the soft dollars embedded in opportunity costs, diluted brand value, reputation, and more.
There’s no excuse for not finding some good service & support folks and beginning to build out a service roadmap that aligns with your product roadmap. Consider: If you meet your success criteria 18 months from now, what will the customer experience be when they need help? Will you have everything in place to support that experience? How much will it cost you to build it out in 2 months vs. 18? A little time invested now goes a looooong way.
Jay
