How important is it to provide good (or should I dare say "excellent"!) support to customers?

This subject is very important to me. All my professional experience in the life sciences and biotechnology industry?is built around customers and supporting them.

Perhaps the service aspect of my personality comes from my upbringing, my parents were in the hospitality sector and, with my siblings, we were introduced early on to serving customers and ensuring customers' satisfaction. We learned on the job, helping the family business which was a very valuable experience and taught me to be resilient, to manage stock, finances, customers' expectations and to handle difficult situations.?

Personally, I like helping people in general, and it gives me great satisfaction when I can resolve issues and make a customer successful. But from my observations, I feel that sometimes for companies, customer support is associated with spending money without observing a direct positive correlation on revenues. Therefore, at times its importance may be overlooked, especially in the early stage of a company's growth, where in fact it is an essential part of the business.?

Well, here is the scoop, research shows, for instance in financial services, that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can lead to a profit increase of 25% or more (Bain and Company, Frederick Reichheld, 2001) and that retaining customers, depending on industry, is 5 to 25 times more effective than acquiring new ones (Harvard Business Review, Amy Gallo, 2014). It does not mean a business should not chase new customers! But it highlights the fact that customer loyalty to a brand and company is very important to be a successful business. And guess what? Customer loyalty is directly impacted by its customer support and service, and overall post-sale experience!?

?Of course, having a good product is a must to start with, having good manufacturing, quality controls and a good sales team are very important, and a top-notch operations' team is essential.??

To me, these are mainly pre-sales or pre-"getting the product in customers hands" steps. Certainly, the sales representative will also manage their accounts and nurture their customers after sales to ensure satisfaction and that more orders come in.?

But the customer technical support team, part of the overall customer service and experience function, is the group of people who will help your customers utilise the product and make them want to come back for more!?This team will be the first point of contact of your customers post-sale. Additionally, they will?answer technical questions of potential customers (and internal stakeholders!), they are the face of your company and the experience they provide on existing and potential customers is of paramount importance.?

They will answer questions customers have about the product, they will solve issues the customer is having by troubleshooting and finding solutions which in turn will give a positive experience to customers, leading them to come back to your business.??

A recent survey commissioned by Forbes on customer service and customer experience?showed that 88% of customers emphasise the importance of customer service, more than before and 64% would go elsewhere even if the product is to their liking but customer service was not good (Forbes, Shep Hyken, 2024). In this article, Shep Hyken also mentions that bad experiences could be very costly globally, several trillion dollars per year – this is mind-blowing!?

?

Here I am asking you:?

• As a company, at what stage of growth do you start thinking about supporting your customers in the best way possible??

• How do you scale up your support in line with your growth???

• What are your challenges and hurdles???

• What is your plan at early stages of growth???

• Do you use your internal resources such as R&D to answer customers queries and solve issues???

• How much of their time is this taking and how do you measure this loss of time on your revenues??

?

I am writing this article to highlight that when you sell a product (e.g. systems, reagents, software, etc...) you need to build a plan to support customers, early on you need a strategy. For start-ups it may not mean having a full team of trained customer support people immediately but at least having a plan in place with responsibilities and time allocated to these activities, until such time that you will need to hire to fulfil the demand.?

I am curious to hear from leaders in my field of expertise - life science and biotechnology industry - but customer support applies to any industries and hearing from other sectors can only enrich the discussion! ?

What are your thoughts, comments and insights on this topic? Connect with me and let’s discuss!?

Sandra Bauer, PhD.?

Customer Support leader - I build and improve customer solutions teams to provide unparalleled excellent customer support. My mission is to help you support your customers better!?