You’re pretty happy with the quality of support your customer service team provides.
They reply quickly to customers, get problems resolved ASAP, and offer empathetic support. And yet, you can’t help but feel like there’s something more they could be doing to leverage support for growth.
Rather than just keeping things afloat, you’re wondering how your tiny support team can use their support skills to build customer relationships that will grow your business (rather than merely keep it above water).
Support driven growth is designed to ensure longevity, and transform what is usually a perceived expense (customer service) into a productive revenue driver.
How Does Support Driven Growth Transform Service Into Sales?
As a strategy, support driven growth focuses on transforming customer service from a money sink into a source of revenue.
Unfortunately, some businesses have a warped view of customer support as an expense that has no added value. On the contrary, quality support can be leveraged for many revenue-generating strategies.
How can a support team drive growth?
It goes beyond just providing stellar service. Customer support agents can leverage upsells, cross-sells, referrals, and qualitative feedback.
The end-goal is to build stronger relationships with your customers. Through this process, you’ll increase sales as a direct result of added trust, loyalty, and customer integration (into your business’ ecosystem).
Internally, support driven growth cultivates an understanding of customer needs through direct experience and conversation. As you leverage feedback to improve service or integrate pre-existing customers into your ecosystem (incentivizing them to stick around or purchase additional products), you transform basic interactions into sales.
Putting Support Driven Growth Into Practice (4 Actionable Tips)
So what’s the practical difference between “support” and “support-driven growth” if they both involve helping the customer?
- “Support” aims to resolve problems as quickly as possible – the goal is to simply identify the problem and work to solve it.
- “Support driven growth” still tries to resolve the customer’s concern – that doesn’t change. But it also seeks to extend the conversation, ensuring customer success beyond that initial contact. Building a relationship allows the customer to grow with you, and incentivizes repeat purchases and referrals.
Let’s jump into some affordable ways you can implement the fundamentals of support driven growth within your own business’ support team.
Tip #1: Continue the Conversation with “Yes, and…”
With its roots in improv and marketing, “YES, and...” is a linguistic tool used to continue the conversation. It’s also an essential rule of thumb in support driven growth.
In an improv context, it means you take whatever line your scene-mate gives you (in agreement) and then build upon it (and…) to advance the joke toward its punchline. Customer support isn’t much different (minus the obvious punchline). 👀
In the above email, a customer has reached out regarding our AI features. They aren’t angry, but are clearly frustrated that this valuable tool is restricted to a higher-tier plan.
We need to respond in a way that validates the customer, but still explains the value inherent to those features. In other words, we’ll need to use “Yes, and…” to demonstrate that these features are worth the added cost. It’s here we can continue the conversation with the customer beyond merely stating the obvious.
In this example, we’re supporting the customer and then adding incentive for them to upgrade. And we do this by building upon the conversation we’re already having with the customer, so it remains relevant to their needs.
In most cases, just saying “no” actively decreases trust. It also makes you look less competent. If you’re unwilling to provide reassurance, why would a customer care to continue business? They can just as easily jump to the next competitor.
Keep in mind that the “Yes” always comes first for this reason – lead with help, then offer additional resources/recommendations.
Tip #2: Convert Trial Customers into Paying Customers with Proactive Outreach
Your business can use automation features and external software to trigger notifications based on customer behavior and usage, and proactively reach out to those buyers.
I would recommend you set up notifications in-app or through monitoring tools to alert customer support when there’s an opportunity for proactive outreach. For example, a notification or alert might be received when a customer who has signed up for a free trial doesn’t activate their email or use a particular feature.
You can leverage the email address gathered from their free trial to send them an automated or canned onboarding message, and provide them with specific directions on how to activate their email or use a particular feature:
- If you want to find out which customers aren’t using key features, you can proactively dig into the data using a tool like Usermaven or Userpilot. These platforms track how individual users interact with specific features, and helps you understand their overall workflow. It also proactively identifies any friction so you can reach out to rectify it.
- Email marketing tools make it easy to track information like open rates. If you prefer to keep everything in one place and send onboarding or trial follow-ups via your support help desk, our customer support helpdesk Groove offers an email tracking feature.
You can use this approach in other areas, too.
For example, if a customer has signed up for a webinar or mailing list, but hasn’t signed up to trial your actual product, you can ask them to fill out a survey. Inquire about their needs, and then depending on their replies, you can target them with relevant use cases for your product related to those needs.
Tip #3: Upsell the Customer by Offering Free Things
Yes, you read that right.
It might seem counterintuitive to “upsell” by offering something the customer can access for free. But what you’re actually doing is further entrenching the customer into your ecosystem.
In one of my previous jobs, I worked for a supplement retailer. They would regularly leverage their mailing list to notify customers about upcoming webinars. They would segment customers based upon purchase history, then send out targeted emails to relevant segments.
For example, all the customers who ordered a specific “heart health” supplement would get webinar notifications for topics related to cardiovascular health. This had a two-pronged effect:
- These webinars would regularly incentivize thousands of customers to purchase the products, leading to increased revenue and growth.
- These webinars provided added value to the customer by educating them on a topic they had genuine interest in, and provided resources from licensed naturopathic doctors.
It’s a win-win scenario for both your business and the customer. It’s a positive way to retain them, since they won’t feel pressured into purchasing something that they don’t need.
Within the context of your own business, this doesn’t have to be a webinar. Your business might offer an online class, personalized training, in-person seminar, or e-book.
Tip #4: Identify Customer Segments at Risk of Churning (And Prevent It From Happening Again)
After a while, you’ll learn to spot the types of customers most likely to churn. Whether it’s those on a specific plan or who reach out to support about particular issues, you can identify who’s at risk and proactively work to keep them onboard.
A purpose-built support tool makes it a lot easier to identify your customer segments. You can sort them a number of different ways – identified problems, concerns, subscription plan, feature activation, etc.
Groove was designed as an inclusive inbox that integrates with CRM software and marketing tools like Mailchimp. It can help you use customer data to deliver on support driven growth.
For example, let’s say a number of your customers regularly reach out to ask about your integration features. They don’t see an option to integrate with Slack.
You know the option is there, but customers are having a difficult time finding it. Within Groove, you can create a “tag” (similar to a label in Gmail), and apply it to all the emails you receive with questions about integration:
You can even automate this process by setting up a handy “rule” that automatically applies tags to any emails with “integration” or “Slack” mentioned in the title/body of the text.
Then Groove will filter these tagged emails into a folder, and use them to segment the portion of your customers who require special assistance:
You can direct these customers to self-service resources on setting up integration, or leverage “Instant Replies” (canned responses) to send an automatic reply with all the information the customer needs.
Either way, the assistance you provide serves a dual purpose:
- Solves the initial inquiry. In both of these instances, you’ll be pointing out additional resources that customers can leverage for their immediate problems. It empowers them to self-solve.
- Uses the inquiry as a moment for product education. These resources can help the customer become more familiar with other key features. It also reassures them that there are supportive resources in place (that they don’t need to depend on you to access).
Perhaps you have a comprehensive database of video tutorials posted on your website that clearly explain every integration feature. You’ll want to leverage this as a resource that proactively prevents churn. When customers feel confident in their ability to successfully navigate your product, they’re far more likely to stick around.
Support Driven Growth Is Easier with the Right Tools
Most support driven growth strategies involve leveraging your team’s communication skills. They also call for an intimate knowledge of your audience – what do your customers need, and what do they want to see improved?
In both cases, customer support is the through line. They’re the primary point of contact between the customer and your business. Sometimes, they’re the only point of contact.
Who better to drive growth than the team members interacting with customers on a daily basis?
Many basic tools are prohibitive to delivering on support driven growth. While email is effective for freelancers, it doesn’t enable growth. And it’s not scalable. You can always add a bunch of costly integrations and external software, but you’ll never be able to leverage the same degree of customer insight when compared against purpose-built support software.
Groove is our help desk tool designed to make support driven growth easy. You can harness customer insight, track survey results, integrate with social media channels, and automate countless routine processes, all from the same shared inbox.
Sign up for a free trial of Groove today to see the difference support driven growth can make!
