Chapter 6
Providing product support as a service
Making social media an integral element of the CX strategy will go a long way to reducing customer acquisition costs when changing sales and marketing direction and will provide a wealth of insights that can be fed back into the business. Likewise, people’s willingness to share both positive and negative experiences provides an opportunity for your brand to be seen doing the right thing by publicly engaging with these posts — something that will help in positively strengthening brand perceptions and earning enough goodwill so that when the brand does come short of expectations, it's more likely to earn a second chance.
However, there's also another way of diversifying revenues and strengthening relationships and that's through delivering services in support of products.
Providing technical support will give your customers greater confidence in your brand and products. Being directly involved in the post-purchase relationship is an opportunity to take back control of data that would otherwise be populating the systems of big box retailers or online marketplaces. In the long-term, these insights will prove invaluable in the development of future products and related services, but even in the short term, this direct connection will make it much easier to identify and resolve potential upstream issues or possible product defects or inconsistencies.
More importantly, providing this level of support can be a key point of differentiation and future business success in all forms of manufacturing and all types of customer relationships, wherever your brand sits within a supply chain.
Key takeaways
Providing technical support opens revenue streams and builds customer confidence in your brand.
Being directly involved in the post-purchase relationship is an opportunity to take control of data that would otherwise be lost to intermediaries.