This past week I had two significant customer prospect meetings, one with a legacy customer of backup software company X (one of the largest in the business) and the other a legacy customer of SAN vendor Y (also one of the largest in the business). The reason these prospective customers were talking to me is that they are both ready to kick their existing vendors out, and are looking to me for alternatives. I absolutely LOVE when that happens.
What struck me was that they both had the exact same complaint about their legacy vendor – lousy support. They both had similar experiences: long hold times, round after round of level 1 know-nothing support techs asking “Is the system on?” and “What is your current software/firmware revision?”, and on and on. If you’ve read any of my earlier blogs you know that customer support is a frequent topic for me. I’ve been on the warpath about how many major vendors in the IT industry treat customer support as a cost to be managed – down – rather than a marketing tool which can drive sales – up.
This is an excellent opportunity to introduce a concept I call “Spreadsheet Management.” It is an illness infecting many large US companies. Spreadsheet Management has a very simple philosophy: If it looks good on a spreadsheet, it must be good, right? Many large companies in the IT industry, it seems to me, lead the world in Spreadsheet Management. How is this evidenced with regard to support? They see the costs of customer support for a particular product line as a percentage of that product line’s sales. The objective is to reduce that percentage to the smallest possible number, thereby increasing the profitability of that product line. There is no concern for how this affects the customer experience; it is simply a cost to be managed – a number on a spreadsheet. This is why customer support is so frequently so awful – support is simply under funded. If you’ve ever been tempted to punch a wall after a support call with one of your vendors, congratulations, you’ve been a victim of Spreadsheet Management.
Not all IT vendors, however, have this philosophy. The smart ones know that customer support can be a strategic component of the company’s marketing plan. When you think about it, support is one of the most intimate forms of contact a vendor can have with its customers, and an invaluable opportunity to make a good impression, thus increasing customer loyalty and driving follow-on sales. Smart companies know that the value of a positive support experience is many times that of almost any other interaction that can be had with a customer.
At my company, Southern Data Storage, there are four criteria that MUST be met for a vendor to qualify for our line card: financial strength, state-of-the-art technology, ease of use and, most importantly, excellent support. So far, six companies meet all those criteria: Nimble Storage, Unitrends, Nasuni, NexGen Storage, Veeam and Nexsan. If you are sick of being a victim of Spreadsheet Management, contact us immediately – we can help!