In the course of The SaaS & Support Project research, I began asking companies about two related roles that have been popping up in organizational charts of all sized firms for some time: Customer Retention and Customer Success. I’ve found that Customer Retention managers tend for the most part to be “firefighter” positions, called in when a customer…
What is the SaaS Support Model? is a question that brings visitors from around the world to The HotLine Magazine every day. There are several variations seen in the search strings:
SaaS Support Structure
Tracking SaaS customers
saas customer support
support model for a SaaS product
customer advocacy and support saas
A complete answer to the question must address several…
New Resources
The Papers Page
For over thirty years, Mikael Blaisdell has been writing about customer retention through support and service. Long before Customer Relationship Management became an industry, he was engaging in online discussions via the early time-sharing resources and sharing insights and best practices in published articles and columns in the print media. The Papers page is where…
More than ten years ago, Ken Shevock, then the VP of Worldwide Support Operations for Cisco, commented “Nobody is really "winning' at Support. We're all doing the same things to try to keep up, but to get to the next level, we're going to have to do something new.” From the beginning of the technology industry, Support / Service — Customer Care — whatever the name — has been about reacting to problems reported by customers in their use of technology products. If ever we are to win, we need to recognize that how the industry has defined Support is inherently flawed. Invited to speak to a consortium of Support & Service executives in Bellevue, Washington, about The Redefinition of Customer Support, my presentation focused on why winning, under the current definition of the profession, is impossible -- and a vision of that something new.