Can support drive sales?
Let’s start with the obvious: satisfied customers tend to be repeat customers and also make referrals to others. Unhappy customers, on the other end, restrict their add-on purchases and try harder to extract discounts on mandatory purchases such as support renewals. They tell others of their woes and discourage them from buying. And it’s clear that support plays a big role in fostering customer satisfaction — so support drives sales, right? That may be well true, but the difficulty lies in proving it.
Here are some ideas to measure support’s influence on sales:
- contrast (very) satisfied support customers with (very) unsatisfied support customers when it comes to add-on purchases
- compare discount percentages between satisfied and unsatisfied customers (balance that with deal size)
- compare referrals by satisfied customers with referrals by unsatisfied customers (it’s tough to measure anti-referrals, unfortunately)
Other ideas? Please comment on this post.
Net Promoter Scores can be a useful way of tracking the value of support. Of course, there’s no way to do a controlled experiment to *prove* the NPS impact of satisfied and dissatisfied support users, but it’s worth looking at the correlation between support experiences and activity and NPS.
Pop quiz: are you most loyal customers the ones that user support the most, or the ones that use support *least?*