I don’t get excited when a company tells me they have excellent customer support. In fact, it often has the opposite effect. Because “excellent customer support” usually means the company has invested heavily in helping customers recover from problems. What I really want to know is this: how many problems are customers experiencing in the first place?
That’s the conversation businesses rarely want to have.
Instead, we’ve created an entire industry around celebrating customer support. We hand out awards for it. We build conferences around it. We proudly display response-time metrics on dashboards. Some companies talk about their customer support teams the way football clubs talk about trophy cabinets. “We respond in under five minutes.” Fantastic. But what exactly are customers contacting you about every five minutes?