From San Diego, something old, something new

As I often do this time of the year, I gathered up some thoughts, ideas, and commentaries gleaned at the TSW conference last week in San Diego. Thank you to all the presenters and attendees that sparked them. I recorded attribution for only some so decided to go without. Anything that is not labeled as my thoughts comes from someone else. Thank you!

The theme of the conference was convergence of all services (and customer success) into one. I’ll call that a very old idea, in new clothing.

For customer portals, the first convergence was to gather *all* support functionality in the portal, and implement a global search across all support repositories. The second portal convergence is to gather all services, including Customer Success scorecards (I am a fan of sharing those with customers), various sales offers, training, etc.
To better serve customers in a convergent model, we need strong soft skills for individual contributors so they can move more easily between functions. (We can help with soft skills training!)
95% of members do not compensate support engineers based on customer adoption. That was presented as a bad thing. I’m not so sure: of course support engineers can help (and certainly hinder!) adoption, but compensating them based on adoption seems as dangerous to me as compensating them based on NPS scores.
Newer vendors are carrying forward traditional support and service habits (including strong silos between services teams) because the support executives continue the habits they learned during their formative years. My take: ask a millennial!
Members spend less than 1% of support revenue on marketing. Shame! Especially when so many of us need to pull all services into a coherent marketing framework