Support-Driven Growth: Turning Support into Sales

Businesses typically see customer support as a source of costs, with the requirement to pay for support staff and support materials. There are businesses out there turning this model on its head. Customer support can be approached differently if enterprises are willing to invest and view it as a revenue-generating team.

What is support-driven growth?

Support-driven growth a business strategy that turns customer support from a cost into a revenue-generating team. Customer support is turned into a team that can drive revenue for businesses through upsells, cross-sells and referrals. Imagine having a support team so good it has this effect on your customers!

Support-driven growth focuses on customer service to drive business success, helping companies:

Build stronger customer relationships
Increase sales
Grow their business

This approach changes support from a cost to a revenue-builder.

Key Ideas behind support-driven growth:

1. Support helps customers and makes sales – customer support primarily drives revenue by incentivizing customers to buy further products.

2. Understands customer needs – they cultivate an understanding of customer needs which enables them to drive sales.

3. Build strong relationships – customer support builds relationships with customers to earn more revenue through helping and supporting.

4. Uses technology to improve – a key aspect of support-driven growth is the use of technology such as a smart knowledge base.

5. Is proactive (help before they ask) – customer support agents proactively reach out to customers in need of help without being asked.

6. Listens to customer feedback – teams have to take on board customer feedback to be truly revenue-generating.

7. Solves problems quickly – teams don’t wait around to solve problems but they strike while the iron is hot so customers feel supported.

8. Makes customers feel valued – a big part of building relationships is to make customers feel valued and that they are a big part of the company.

9. Trains support staff well – support staff need to be trained extensively to provide the right care for customers.

10. Measures and tracks progress – keeping track of key metrics means customer support is on the ball.

How to implement support-driven growth

Train and empower support staff.

1. Train support staff on products and services.

Like the customer success team, support staff should be trained on products and services that it’s possible to offer customers. Customers might need to be upsold if the product isn’t meeting their needs and support can intervene before customers churn.

2. Teach sales and communication skills.

Customer support staff can be trained in sales and communication so they can get through to customers in a way that moves more products. Sales and communication help persuade customers that they need your service.

3. Encourage helping customers grow.

To help customers grow you need to empower the team to understand how to support customers. Customers grow through nurturing and encouragement from the support team who should help them through the funnel and offer new products and services.

4. Foster a customer-centric mindset.

The focus should be entirely on the customer rather than internal regulations and policies. A customer-centric mindset places the customer in the middle and enables support agents to put the customer on a pedestal.

Use tools and data

1. Use tools to identify sales opportunities.

There are tools out there that will identify sales opportunities for you and allow you to keep track of points to strike. The proper tools keep your customer support agents on the right path for sales while allowing them to focus on the customer.

2. Analyze customer interactions and feedback.

If you analyze customer interactions and feedback then you can stay on top of customer support and understand how customers are behaving. Feedback tells you how customers are feeling and what they think of your company and support team.

3. Track customer behaviour and preferences.

Customer behaviour and preferences are important when it comes to support-driven growth because you can engage with them and understand what their taste is. If you track customer behavior then you can track customer preference for your product.

Offer proactive support

1. Reach out to customers before they ask.

Customer support teams should reach out to customers with help before they even need to ask. Keep track of customers and their needs so you can proactively speak to customers who might need your assistance before they have a chance to get stuck.

2. Offer personalized solutions.

Personalized solutions are custom solutions that engage customers and fix their problems. Customer needs are solved in a personal way that boosts customers up and makes them feel happier with your company.

3. Anticipate customer needs.

Anticipating the needs of customers is key to offering proactive support that makes all the difference to the customer experience. Predicting what customers need is important for revenue generation because it makes customers happier with your service.

Promote collaboration

1. Share customer insights with other teams.

Whatever you learn about customers through your efforts should be shared with other teams in the organization. The way that a support-driven team operates will build insights that tell you about customers and their preferences.

2. Work with sales and marketing teams.

Hook up with sales and marketing teams to make the support team stronger. Sales and marketing will be able to help the support-driven team to achieve their goals and they can lend their knowledge to the team to make it easier to convert customers.

3. Align goals across departments.

Customers should be treated centrally and that’s why you should align goals across departments so you can utilize shared knowledge. You have to have teams working together to achieve support-driven growth.

Measure and Improve

1. Track key performance metrics.

Metrics will help you track progress and reach your goals. KPIs teach you to improve your strategy through iterative development and make upward progress towards your targets. KPIs also give you insight into what you should do to improve customer support.

2. Measure customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction is how satisfied a customer is with your service and is measured by a simple survey. It’s a good KPI to measure because it is specific and targeted and companies always want to know more about customer satisfaction.

3. Adjust strategies based on feedback.

Feedback from customers will tell you how to change your strategy based on input. Customers can get through to your customer support team and instruct them to change their angle depending on how customers feel.

Reward and Motivate

1. Incentivize support staff for sales.

Give incentives to your support staff for making sales so the right behaviour is encouraged. Not that they are salespeople but support is responsible for making sales at the right time when helping customers.

2. Recognize and reward excellent service.

At the same time as sales, recognize excellent customer service because that is the whole point of the team, after all. Customers keep returning to your company for the excellent service and feel happier with your business overall.

3. Celebrate customer success stories.

Deliberately collect and cultivate customer success stories so that customers feel good and have positive examples to follow. Customer success is customers being successful with your product which can be shared on an email list, social media, or website.

Benefits:

1. More Sales (42% more customers buy)

Support-driven growth means that 42% of customers will buy from your company which results directly in more revenue. Increasing sales is one way that businesses can grow as well as reducing churn through fewer customers leaving the company.

2. Happy Customers Share with Friends

Referrals become more prevalent as happy customers share with friends and recommend your product. Obtaining a share is like free marketing so you have to treat customer support like a sales engine that generates sales.

3. Business Grows Over Time

Through these methods, the business grows over time and customer support becomes a revenue driver. Supporting the business is one way that customer support can operate and make the most of customers.

Conclusion

We’ve just gone through the many ways that we can achieve support-driven growth and why it’s important. Driving business growth is one way that support-driven growth can contribute to the company. Keeping customers around and attracting more customers to the business is another way that support-driven growth helps.

Being a revenue-oriented team in the business can help customer support feel more focused and able to contribute to the business. Making sales and improving customer retention a key aspects of the support-driven team.