Reinventing Support

Now is a great time to make big changes, as you plan for 2025.

And yet, many of us find it hard to think about reinvention, as day-to-day crises often take priority, and to be honest it’s a lot easier to tinker with existing processes than to dive into a wholesale transformation. Here is some inspiration: first, some suggestions for how you can seed the discussion about reinvention, and then recommendations for how to get started with a reinvention initiative.

• Review the entire customer journey, not just the specific piece in your control. Most organizations I work with are incredibly siloed between acquisition, adoption, ongoing usage, and expansion–and customers hate it. Take time to model what various types of customers experience as they interact with your organization over time. I often see issues with capturing use cases during the sales cycle, weak onboarding support, and non-existent feedback loop from support to the product teams. Where can you do better?
• Consider all the opportunities to provide support other than through traditional, assisted support. Think about embedded diagnostics, self-service, community support, webinars—all working together seamlessly. Most organizations could do a lot more in non-traditional channels.
• Break down internal silos. We talked about silos between organizations, above, but there are often serious silos within the support organization itself. If we are reinventing support, we need to define the structure that will best serve customers.
• Think widely about AI. As discussed here, there are many options to offload manual tasks to a tool. If you’re starting out, focus on commercial tools before making a big bet on internal efforts.

How to Get it Done

• Workshop it. One person and a Canva board can only go so far. Curate a small team with various strengths (and seniority levels) and plan some live discussions. While some swear by day-long meetings, I find that most groups’ energy flags after about two hours (and many people need reflective time to move forward). Keep the session on the short side, and stick to a sustained cadence to make progress.
• Engage outside parties. It’s hard to reinvent from within. For a fresh perspective, bring in an industry expert (pick me!), or try asking a sympathetic colleague in another team, or even a newish hire who is not yet fully engulfed in company tradition. I’m always amazed at how often I hear commentary about “the way we do it now” during reinvention discussions, and how much it limits the creativity of the team.
• Commit to forward movement. Reinvention is uncertain. You will likely need to conduct experiments along the way, and some will fail. Keep the momentum going over the weeks, months, perhaps years it will take to make the changes.
• Sweat the external communication. You know what happens when a small team meets in secret? Outsiders panic. Give regular updates and use them as a means to get more feedback.

How do you work on deep reinventions? Share your advice in a comment.