The $5 Million Safety Net: How to Build Premier Support That Pays For Itself

What do you do when your highest-revenue customers need (and expect) more than your basic support offering?

If you're Miles Goldstein, you create a Premier Support program that delivers real relationships and real retention.

With 20+ years leading global support orgs at B2B SaaS companies, Miles joins our us to unpack how to design and launch a Premier Support offering that actually works—without overwhelming your team or alienating your customers.

What you’ll find in this episode

💡When (and why) to launch a premium support program

💡The strategy behind dedicated vs designated support roles

💡Why soft skills always win when hiring for premium support roles

💡What systems and tools you must have in place to make it scale

💡When to charge (and how much)

🔧 Check out our sponsor Supportman.io for instant AI quality review in Slack.

🔗 Links & Resources

🤝 Connect with Miles Goldstein on LinkedIn 

📬 Get Weekly Tactical CX and Support Ops Tips: Live Chat Newsletter

🎧 Keep Listening: Find more episodes of Live Chat with Jen Weaver

Transcript

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Jen Weaver (00:00.078)

Welcome to Live Chat with Jen Weaver. I'm here with Miles Goldstein. And I would just love for you to go ahead and introduce yourself. Hi, good morning. I'm Miles Goldstein. I've spent my whole career building and leading global tech support organizations for B2B companies. In the last 20 years, mostly SaaS companies have run a lot of programs, have run global support. And I'm excited to talk about Premier Support, which I've done at several companies along the way. I know you said you implemented

premium support at a few companies. So it sounds like you may have a sense of the typical way that this shows up for teams. When does it, what's step zero? When does it become apparent that this is necessary? Well, first it becomes apparent when you have a segmented customer base. You've got your couple of customers who are just way top end that just naturally, your top 10 customers or your top 10 % customers.

who have needs beyond your normal customers. Their ARR is typically much, I shouldn't use acronyms, their annual recurring revenue is usually much higher. They're the ones that if you can save one customer, you're saving this one. Once you get there, you've got to decide what it is they need that's different from what you're already offering. Are you going to make your standard support offering better for everybody, which is always a good idea, or are there specific things that this group needs?

and along with that, they willing to pay for it? And that makes sense. Something like premium support where you're going to have a wide difference between your lowest revenue customers and your highest revenue customers would be where you would eventually segment them out into a different category. Yeah. yeah. So could you talk to me about the very first steps of implementing this? You know, if I'm a support manager who has never done this before.

At first, you have to decide really what it is you want. I came up with an analogy this morning about buying a car. Do you want a new car or a used car? Do want gas or electric? Do you want a coupe, a sedan, an SUV? With premium support, there's several choices you have to make along the way. One of the ones that I lead with is whether it's a dedicated resource or a designated resource. And the difference there is the dedicated resource means one or two assigned accounts per engineer.

Jen Weaver (02:25.507)

Now, I'm full-time supporting customer X or I've got X and Y as opposed to the designated, which usually means it's a named resource. All of your cases are going to go to Miles, but Miles doesn't handle just your account. He handles several accounts or it may be a small major accounts team that's handling it. You're always getting the same small group of people and they've got their own special tools and rules and everything else. They've got to decide what level you want to go to.

The advantage of dedicated is you get a really strong relationship and really customer specific knowledge of what's going on. The con is that scalability and if somebody's absent, you've got to cover with somebody who's not as familiar with the account. With designated, you get much more scalable model. It's more robust, but it's less focused than a single resource would provide. you know, as a dedicated resource,

I know what you're trying to accomplish with my tool. It's up there with customer success. They're two legs of the same stool that the customer's use of the product, you live and breathe. When they say the flux capacitor is out, you know what they mean, how they're using it, why they're using it, why they've made their implementation decisions. And your support is geared towards that. You're not asking the standard 20 questions. What's happening, not happening? What's the last time it happened? Why did you do this? Why did you make that decision? Have you thought about upgrade?

It saves just a lot of that time, a lot of customers get frustrated. Normal support is an investigative chore. And with someone you're not familiar with, you've got to know, is it turned on as a plugged in? Are you seeing the green light? Even though your customers sometimes far, far more knowledgeable than you. So this saves that you have that relationship, you have that knowledge. Customers who spend a lot on your product or your service don't want to encounter that. you unplug it? First support.

Exactly. You're part of their team. You understand what's going on. because of it, especially if it's a dedicated, you've only got one or two accounts, you're talking to them every day. It's not six months of silence and, by the way, now we've got a problem. You know it's happening. You know the decisions. You know what their plans are for the next 90 days and how they're getting there. You're doing proactive support because of that. Well, OK, you're rolling out 90 days. We've got this big release scheduled. Let's see if we can work with product.

Jen Weaver (04:45.814)

and alter the dates. We don't want to roll out the day before you go live with your new thing because one of us is going to break something, It allows you to be proactive. And another set of decisions you've got to make upfront also is whether it's fee-based or free. Now, granted, we're talking about your highest value customers. So implicitly, you're making the most money off of them. You've got to decide whether you want to invest in it. But a dedicated resource has a very high price tag.

Now, if I'm talking to a $5 million account, asking them for $300,000 to pay for that resource, yes, that's $300,000. I can't write that check. But compared to the rest of the product offering that they're buying, it's usually a good deal. And even for that $5 million, they're usually getting heavy discounting. So keeping you as the partner intact, you need to stay whole. You need to be able to provide that resource. You've got to decide whether you're cooking it into your license costs or whether

you know, this is an elite offering you've got to charge for it, you've got to pay for it somehow. Right, so that brings up sales. But before we get into that, I wanted to ask, you know, I love your analogy of buying a car. When I have bought a car, I've usually bought the model I'm familiar with. I know what I like, I buy the same thing over and over again. If I'm a support manager and I'm going to move up into dedicated support,

They might not know what the options are. So you mentioned dedicated versus designated, deciding how to handle that. That's really important. What are the other kind of add-ons and ideas I need to consider when I'm thinking about this? are several roles that you can choose to include in this kind of offering. So as the dedicated support engineer, first and foremost is being a technical support engineer. You're solving problems just as if you were a senior member of normal support delivery.

Second part is what I call a support concierge. And that means that you're not just handling the cases, there's issues that they've got that are on other teams that you're overseeing and driving through. You're working with engineering, tracking the bugs that they've reported or the feature requests they've reported. If they've logged a case that was after business hours because they're global, so they're logging the case with your EMEA support team while you're US based. You're watching that ticket when it comes in in the morning, you're finding out whether they want you to take ownership and drive it.

Jen Weaver (07:07.374)

Even if you're not owning that case, you're aware of what's going on. So you can speak to your key contacts and say, oh, and last night there was an issue in Europe, here's what we're doing about it, so and so in Europe is handling it. So you're guiding their issues. It's not just a blind, I only handle what's on my plate. A product advisor is part of it. Again, the release is coming up or how do we accomplish this? Oftentimes with support, people will ask, does this road go to San Jose? And the answer is no.

because that's the factual answer. That's not solving any problems. This road goes to Monterey. If you want to get to San Jose, you've got to take this other road. You've got to solve the problem at hand. And if a customer says, can I do this with the product? You can't, but what are you trying to accomplish? And this helps you get there. So product advisor, as opposed to being just that stereotypical, what everyone hates about the black hole of support. God help us if we ever get called that.

And last and foremost is the escalation manager and customer advocate. You're driving their issues through the other teams as necessary. You're lobbying for what they need. Please don't remove this feature. My customer uses it all the time kind of thing. So those all go together. And again, part of that overlaps with customer success. And when I've had teams like this, we've partnered closely with customer success. So it's not a competition.

They own stickiness and growth. We own success with the product. And there's a great intersection there. That's a really interesting point because I think sometimes there is a blurred line between customer success and this kind of concierge support. Because customers as a customer success manager myself, I have found myself just answering support questions because I do understand the customer's use case and what they need and they've reached out to me for it. Do you have, you able to implement kind of a boundary there where

support questions from the customer go to that support line and then the customer success manager is able to focus on their retention and renewal? Yes, yes. And at the end of the day, for as proactive and whatever as Premier Support tries to be, it comes back to break fix, right? If it's broken, come to support. If it's strategic, go to the CSM. And those are overly simplistic views of things. But again, the CSM is focused on

Jen Weaver (09:30.796)

What does this customer need? How do we grow the account? How do we grow our stickiness? How do we grow their footprint with the usage of the features? Support is helping that work. So it is a partnership and those lines do blur constantly. Like I said, as the product advocate and whatever, support is talking to the customer and telling them things and being a technical person who often lives on site with the customer, the CSM of course is going to answer questions. How do I do this with the product?

I do it all the time, here's how you do it, right? But those two need to be talking because things have to pass seamlessly back and forth. Whether you've got something like Slack where they're talking or whether they're just talking offline from the customer about the cases and about what's going on so that when you're in front of the customer, you've got a united front. This is very important that you can't have the CSM saying go left and the support saying go right. That puts the customer in an unfair position. You're both the face of the company.

and there should be one voice coming from that. I wanted to go back to one thing that you said earlier about whether or not you're going to charge for your premium support. What teams, what executive teams or other teams would you work with to determine that as you're creating your premium support offering? Sales, finance and product all have to be involved. Product has to be involved because the company has a look and a feel, a voice.

marketing materials for the program, go through product and marketing so that they're consistent with the message we're trying to give. If we're going to say this is a premium offering that costs $300,000, marketing and product have to be on board with, we are packaging this as a high-end option. It's not available. If you've got a $10,000 contract, you don't get this level of service. Now, the $10,000 contract, you can't afford this level of service. Don't expect it.

Sales has to be on board whether or not they're getting a commission on it because they should get paid for things they sell. You want to make sure that if you put that price, the price itself is non-negotiable and don't throw that in. Or if you're trying to bundle things with the customer, say, and with all this, you should add this on because it works so well. But they've got to be on board. You can't have them saying, why am I trying to sell this thing if I'm not getting comps or if I'm going to alienate my customer? I'm about to bring in

Jen Weaver (11:57.262)

half a million dollars, why am I talking about paying for support? So everyone's going to be on board and that starts at the top. Your CRO or whatever, CFO, they've got to be there. If an individual sales rep doesn't buy into it, but the CRO is very much on board, that becomes a performance issue. It's no longer the worry of support packaging that program. What has worked best in your experience?

rolling it into a single package and they have to purchase the premium support as part of it or as an add-on where it's optional? Having it that you have to be at a certain level before you can add it on. So you don't want someone who paid for basic support and then for premier on top of that because there's part of that that is assumed in the premier price. You've got to be at a level where you're getting the best SLAs, the 24 by 7 coverage, the

higher number of named contacts if you're managing to that level. So you can't just buy this without rest of support. We are part of that support org and go back to the analogy about the gas car versus the electric vehicle. When we're on the road driving, it's the same thing, but when you're owning it and maintaining it and putting fuel into it, it's a totally different experience between the two platforms.

around the road and driving like every other driver. Well, that's that standard support. You need to have that level to to use everything that call that comes in on a Saturday or from a different continent or whatever. That's normal support. The bug fixes, the it's cooked into license fees. Take into account the fact that there's a certain amount of support online. Now, a lot of companies, obviously, especially in SAS, where it's a license model at different license bands, you become automatically

Entitled or granted into that next level of support. So your $10,000 customer is getting basic support. Your $100,000 customer is getting your silver level, your half a million, whatever is getting your gold level, and you can buy dedicated or top. And I find that layering works best and helps give value to support. You talked about what are the steps to do this while the very first step is confirming.

Jen Weaver (14:15.362)

the market needs. Who are those top 50 customers? Is there a market in it? What things do they find value in that they would pay for? Again, if your standard support offering at your gold level is already giving them the SLAs that they want, the response times, the bug fix times, the access 24-7, if they're getting all that and that deep knowledge of the account isn't critical, they've already got a CSM or the product isn't one that needs that.

I don't need someone to know how I'm using Excel every day. I just use it every day. So you do have to find out is there a market for it and what pieces are in there. Again, that's probably why you need marketing and product in there as well to say, is a differentiator? And we as a company, what do we want to be known for as a differentiator? Back when I was growing up in support 100 years ago,

HP was the model. HP gave outrageous support. It's like Nordstrom as a retailer. That was the gold standard. How do we get that reputation, right? But nowadays, things are a lot different now than they were when I started. The intelligence to support and the ability of support to respond are fantastic. So do you need this? What value do you get? And how does that differentiate your brand? You've got to know that going into it. You're a support.

leader in this conversation with marketing and finance of product. There has got to be some data that you need to bring to this conversation about what the satisfaction has been from the customer, how the top accounts are performing. What do you bring to that conversation? What do you prepare? The things for the ROI tend to be the retention rate.

which especially since you're talking about your high value customers, matters. mean, retention matters. Very important. But yes, if I'm helping us keep that $5 million account, you can't afford to lose that. It's a lot of work that has to go into replacing that kind of revenue. Most companies are really somewhere higher, somewhere lower. And the other thing is customer satisfaction. My last team, our customer satisfaction for the company overall was in the high 80s, which is good. That's a very good number.

Jen Weaver (16:33.006)

The customer satisfaction for my team was 98 % because we've got that relationship. There's an old story, if a customer's trying to go from point A to point B, they get there successfully, they're happy. If they go in and they fall into a ditch, they're not happy. If they go in and they fall into a ditch and someone pulls them out, the support team or the CSM or the account team, that customer's ecstatic because they know you will be there for them if they have a problem.

Things like this get the higher customer satisfaction ratings because sooner or later, an account that large is going to have a unique, inexpensive problem. This is the real world, that stuff happens. You're there to get them out of the ditch and that's the heart of the relationship. Now there's a trust relationship. Now there's knowing that you are a part of the team and that CSAT goes up and that retention goes up. Yeah, I can change to another vendor who's got a lower license fee, but I don't know that they're gonna get me out of that ditch.

And that's the ROI, the retention in the CSAT. It makes total sense. Are there staffing numbers or information about what it would cost to upskill some of your existing specialists or add new specialists to be able to achieve the goal? It seems like finance would definitely need to know what those costs would be. And I've had a couple of different staffing models. My last one, I first got there.

it was just-in-time staffing, which meant that if a sales rep sold a PO, the contract said, I've got 90 days to hire somebody before the contract starts. And even that was unrealistic because it takes me, or it took me 90 days in most cases to find someone who was qualified and another 90 days to train them. So it depends on your product and on your Kennedy pool. But during that second 90 days, I would typically

give that account to one of my existing people to ramp them up, get to know about them. And yes, that means my person was handling more than 100 % of their identified account load. It was a risk that as a company they chose to take. In later years there, I got it into actually the budget. They said, you can't have this just in time. It wasn't in your VP's budget. Okay, well now let's do better forecasting. So now we're forecasting, I'm gonna add.

Jen Weaver (18:54.158)

two or three people every quarter, so a person a month, put that into the budget, let's get the hiring pipeline going. And if we're hiring at that rate and truly growing at that rate, my 90 days for hiring goes down to 45. Because I was hiring at a pretty good clip a couple of summers ago, we had the training optimized. had, here's what happens on day one, here's what happens on week one, here's everyone gets a mentor from within the team, here's the product things.

And we had that down to about 60 days. So we basically cut our ramp up time in half by doing better forecasting. And as the team got larger, having a better internal process for onboarding, that's a luxury. you're first kicking this off, you tend to recruit a couple of the best people from normal support delivery. Make sure you get a really good relationship there because you can't be stealing their people, especially their best people. And sometimes their best people aren't the right people for this kind of offering.

technically most knowledgeable person might not have the soft skills and the time management skills and other skills necessary for this. You want someone who's going to be able to be a diplomat with that customer, someone who's going to be able to follow up on their commitments and be able to say, I don't know this thing, but I will go find out because I'm that support concierge. I'm going to get your answer for you. One call and you're done, even if I'm not the person with the answer right now. So it's not always recruiting.

just the smartest person out of support is recruiting the best person with the best customer skills and other skills. It really is looking in that regard more like a CSM, who's got the technical skills but has the account management skills as well. So what are the characteristics of the ideal candidate for a premium support role? A technical background, I mean, it's still a technical support role.

Whereas someone who's worked retail is going to have great people skills. If they've never thought about enterprise software, I can't teach them how these 12 servers together all work to get a front end and a back end. They have to have some knowledge coming in or be trainable. Show me transferable skills. I love it. Sometimes I've hired former system administrators because they understand how the technology works. We teach them the product if they come in again with those soft skills. Sometimes I've brought people of

Jen Weaver (21:18.19)

CSM into my team or my team growing out to CSM. It's two sides of the same coin, right? I like the business aspects of my job more. I'm going to move to CSM. I really like the puzzle solving of the technical problems. I'm going to go over to the sports side, but they've got those skills. So I look for the communication skills, the time management skills, the ability to communicate good news or bad news, the ability to think three steps ahead.

difficult things because they're all very subjective. A lot of that is not objective, I get that. But for this kind of role, it's typically somebody who has been face-to-face with customers, has been on a support line or in the field. Somebody who, I joke about retail, somebody who's worked retail and then got into tech for two years. I I was in retail in high school, many of us were. There's skills you pick up there that

I mean, they're wonderful, right? If you can look face to face with a retail customer, you can look face to face with the CIO and telling good or bad news, you know? Is it easier to hire for technical skills and build soft skills or hire for soft skills and build technical skills? Definitely the latter, because soft skills are personality thing, either you're type A or not, either you're detail oriented or you're relationship oriented. So

Someone who, some of my best people have just been naturals. One of my lead guys at my last job, he had the bedside manner of a pediatrician. You just can't beat that, right? I I can't teach that. I can mentor it, I can model it, I can coach it, but either you're a pupil person or you're a misanthropic, whatever. I can't teach out misanthropy. The technical skills, they have to have some. They have to have the baseline.

Now, if we're going to say, here's what the front end does, here's what the back end does, here's how you get to the database, I want at least those concepts to make sense. I want them to understand the trip across the network from the user's terminal or phone or whatever, and how it balances off all of these different things. I can show them a diagram, but they have to understand why those boxes were in that diagram. But again, the soft skills are harder to teach. They have to come in with those.

Jen Weaver (23:40.874)

and they have to have a baseline of transferable skills for them to. What are some of those anecdotes about your very best staffing situations where you just you found somebody who really fit this role? There's been good hires and bad hires. I had one bad hire. Let's start there. I brought in who had all the technical skills, but throughout his onboarding, I kept getting feedback from his mentor that he just wasn't keeping up.

And at 90 days, we had a mutual decision, a mutual agreement. He left. He wasn't the right person. He was technically smart, but he just wasn't following the program. On the other hand, as I alluded to a couple of summers ago, I actually doubled the size of my team. I had to hire 12 people over two months. And that was a riot. But we ended up getting multiple people on the team involved and bringing people in. And some of these people were just amazing. They got it. And because we were doing so many

We knew in our interview process what the red flags were and what the key things were. I talked about it was very subjective, but we agreed on that subjectivity. This person knows how to talk to a high level customer about a high level problem. This person knows how to seek out help from engineering and how to get engineering to cooperate. In support, we often have to beg and plead to get attention and, I'm my bug, right? You got to look at my bug. But I've gotten engineers.

on repeated daily calls with customers because we've built that relationship. And it's the person on my team who has built that relationship across those departments. It's that person on my team who's built that relationship with the CSM. So we go back to those soft skills. During the interview, that's what I'm looking for primarily, is soft skills. I've got technical people on my team who'll do the drill down, can this person speak HTTP? I don't know. But I don't try to intimidate them, but I try and, you

Here's stuff on your resume. Explain it to me. I want to know, ultimately, did they do what they said they did or were they in the room when someone else was doing it? And I'll ask about difficult customer problems. Tell me about the problem you couldn't solve kind of thing. All right, well, there was this crash that kept happening and I did this and I went out there and I worked with a customer on that and we collected these logs and I brought engineering. Cool. That person said all of the key points. I met with the customer, I brought in engineering, I collected data. That person understands.

Jen Weaver (26:03.864)

how to do the job. And they expanded to be in a calm, story-like manner, telling stories. This is why I like doing a podcast like this. I'm a storyteller, you can tell. I want people to tell me a story when I'm asking them these kinds of questions. Did you ever do this? Yes or no, again, goes to those binary support answers. But yeah, here's what happened when, and that's what I look for in those candidates. Can you tell the customer a story, bring them on board, have them take that journey with you?

Your bug's not being fixed today. I spoke to engineering. In all likelihood, they're targeting Friday, but we know that they often miss that. So probably by Monday, I'll have an update. If they fixed it by Monday, I'll have it to you by Wednesday. Give them the story. Don't just say, I checked on it, I checked on it, I checked on it. Just give them the story. And if I can see that in an interview, if I can see that in a person I'm raising through the ranks from junior to senior to team lead, I'm looking for that kind of thing, that relationship building and that storytelling.

And again, I have the people on my team check those tech skills. Storytelling, that's brilliant. I think that gives us some real concrete things to look at when hiring for these kinds of premium support roles. And so you mentioned dedicated versus designated. I think from what you're saying, what I'm getting is dedicated support means I'm a support specialist and I am the one person that Acme Corp turns to for their needs with our product. Exactly.

Okay, and so how would you describe designated? So the dedicated, like I it's the relationship. I'm the face, I'm the single throat to choke. And you want it just like the account rep does, just like the CSM does, again, three legs of the stool, but they're each that single throat to choke. The designated means I'm part of a team supporting you as part of a group of customers. So it's more the direct line to a senior resource unless this person is a member of my team.

I'm always getting one of the same three, four, five people. depending on the part of the product, Billy always handles the front end and Sally always handles the back end and whatever handles reporting. It might be that we've got expertise within that special focus team, but I know I'm always getting a specialist. And with this part of the product, I'm talking to that specialist enough times over the course of a year that they know who I am. They know what my account is.

Jen Weaver (28:28.114)

Asking those, you know 20 questions every time you're still getting around the 20 questions and building relationship But it's slower and more multifaceted. It's it's a team, you know, you're playing first base I'm playing third base and it depends where that ball is going today and it sounds like it that depends too on what kind of Hours you're offering if you're offering 24 7 support that person is not always going to be able to get their dedicated support special

Yeah, and that has created some interesting things. I'm on a variety of Slack communities, which we talk about stuff like this all the time. But one of them is my last offering. was during the customer's main business hours. If you're located, if your HQ is on the East Coast US, you get Eastern US time. If your HQ is in London, a standard time or whatever. If you're calling after hours, the entitlement is to standard support.

You still get flagged as a premium customer. You still get better SLAs. I'm still going to follow up on your issue in the morning when I come in. And for a couple of my accounts, the truth is was three that were on the top of my 35. And for them, after hours, I had staff in all three time zones. if it's during Monday in Europe until Friday in APAC,

I'll follow the sun within my team for these couple of accounts. They were global accounts. in one case, I actually doubled their fee and gave them a person on each continent for twice that fee. It was a very fair deal. They agreed. You're right. We need this. We've got people in Poland that they can't wait for somebody in Florida to wake up. OK, you're right. Let give you my guy who's in London. OK, cool. So it's dedicated support, but with

multiple specialists covering all the time zones. Yeah, the Florida person owned the account, but I gave them direct access to the other two people, APAC and Europe. Because of the nature of that relationship, I wanted to make sure that nobody ever dropped the ball. And with one of these accounts, they had even special things for it. Usually if there was an instance of server down kind of thing, we had a communication process and we reached out to our customers and so on. But two of those customers.

Jen Weaver (30:48.972)

had even above and beyond that where we were on calls and on Slack, communicating with them constantly rather than giving them updates. And I need to have a global team to pass the baton on that. again, isolating your very top most customers and what do they need that differentiates and all that, protect that 5 million, $10 million accounts. There's things you will do. How often ask, how much will you pay to save an account, right?

Well, in this case, I paid by giving them extra access because this was an account we needed to make sure it never was out of risk. That's a wealth of information. And I just want to review step one for this process is confirming your market needs. And step two is identifying your staffing model. Anything else about those two steps you want to cover before we move to the next step? The needs and the model and

Understanding, you want to play all four of those roles? guess that's the model. So dedicated versus designated, fee based or free, which of the four or five roles identified do you want to make sure are part of that in the market? If you do the survey right, we'll tell you those. So that rolls up into what I had called step one in some notes we exchanged earlier. And then the staffing model is step two to figure out how you're going to look for those candidates. What's the

ratio of accounts to candidates, how are you going to get in front of this? How quickly do you want to ramp this program up? The next step is you've got to have the systems to support it. So do you need changes? And my systems, I need to make sure they were flagged as premier accounts. I need to make sure there was routing built in that wasn't going to a product-based queue that going directly to the person on my team. needed to have

workforce management software in place that if this person was out, it routed to the other person. it was, or after hours it was routing to standard support. So you need to make sure your tools can support this. If your tools aren't going to support it, you're going to fail. It doesn't matter how well designed the program is, if the customers can't get where they need to go. We talked about do you have to the sun, for example, like we just talked about. For premium support, do you feel that it's always necessary to have phone support or do email and chat?

Jen Weaver (33:07.704)

I've always been a fan of email support and here's why we're talking about enterprise applications, right? You call and say I'm getting this weird error message. what does it say? And the person reads it off the screen and I can tell you from God knows how many years of experience people never read what's on the screen. They their mind makes up words. It says failure. Now what kind of failure? Eventually you go on and on. So with email you get.

screen grabs, you get to send technical information, you get to send logs, attachments. To me, that's just wonderful. If you can do a screen share session, that works great too. I can see it happening. As far as things like chat, I've never been a fan of real chat, but for certain accounts, I've set up Slack channels where we can talk to them over Slack. But to me, the requirement has always been if you're logging a new issue,

Log it through email or through a portal. I love having customer portals. A portal is even better than email because you can put knowledge base on there. They can search the knowledge base. They can get other answers while waiting for you. But you know, log a case through the portal or through email and then we can exchange notes or have discussions on Slack on chat. But don't log a new case there. It's not a real time mechanism. It's not going to tell me what's going on unless you hook up certain integrations. Salesforce and Slack do have integrations where you can send some stuff back and forth.

I did have it set up. Okay, I was using Salesforce at my last company. But we had it set up so Salesforce, we send a message to the Slack channel when a case was logged. So if you're watching Slack, you saw that there, other people like the CSM who are watching that channel don't have to watch Salesforce, they don't have to watch email. I'm interested in Acme Corp. Acme Corp, I can just see the logged a case, I can see what's going on with that. So those kinds of tools are nice. Yeah, that makes sense.

So we're talking about step three, identifying your system requirements. So I think what you're describing there is if you're going to start offering premium support, are there tools and resources you need to add in to your support team to enable them to do that? Am I getting that step right? Yeah. And for example, that Slack contact is standard support with 3,000 customers is probably not going to set up customer specific Slack channels. I handle two accounts.

Jen Weaver (35:24.448)

I'm setting up Slack customer specific Slack channels because that's all I do all day is talk to these two accounts and they're special and they're paying for it. It's no problem usually getting IT to open up those channels for me. But again, for the general case, no. So that's one tool, for example. With a previous company, I did have it set up. was one company, my company grew by acquisition and we acquired a company whose biggest customer had some stuff in their contract that we didn't previously provide.

It was basically a view of the bug database, which I'm normally religiously opposed to, but they got it. So we had to figure out how do we give them access to Jira without exposing everything to them. So that was a requirement that was given to me as part of this acquisition. Okay, let's figure this out. Now, while I wouldn't recommend it as a general rule, it can be done and it depends on your company, on your customers, on your culture.

I know there's one company out there I read about all the time on LinkedIn that exposes their case stats to the general public. So how often are you meeting a customer? You're just telling customer X how often you meet it for them or your customer base in general. You're exposing it to the public. Okay, that's confidence. Good for them. But it depends what level you want to expose to people.

I'm thinking through system requirements and really practically, if I'm a support manager and I've gotten buy-in from execs to do this, this is a part of a whole team push and I'm implementing this practically what's kind of a checklist of what I need to make sure will work. I think you mentioned the CRM and making that work for the whole team so that folks can get that information in there. And also the help desk would probably, whatever help desk support is using.

needs to be configured to route those conversations to the right team, right? The routing is going to be there. The flagging is going to be there. If you've got the features in your CRM system, doing the SLA reporting and sending you notifications so that you don't have to wait to violate an SLA before you get told, that's partly why the redundancy putting things in Slack from Salesforce was if you're not refreshing your Salesforce screen every five minutes.

Jen Weaver (37:45.08)

you'll see it come in on Slack and you can set up notification rules on Slack to send it to your phone. And okay, now if this thing comes in from that customer, my phone is dinging, even if it's two in the morning, I know an after hours case came in and I can decide whether I want to wake up and get involved right now because it's a P one, you know? So, you know, having that right tools again for, normal support delivery, you're mostly, I mean, some customers, some companies might go that way, but you're not going to go that hard crazy on it. But for,

that $10 million account, you're going to want to be able to set up special things to make sure that they never worry. All right. So you're a support team manager. You've updated your system requirements. You're ready to launch this support. What's next? Next is what I would consider a trial launch. So you want to find three to five customers from your step one for the proof of concept. Can we do this? Does it add value?

What did we miss? There's processes that probably you forgot to update. There's relationships and communication to sales and engineering that you may have forgotten to communicate. You want to make sure that you identify a couple of your engineers that are going to handle that daytime load. Are you doing just the daytime load for that first trial? You probably don't want to go full-worn and 24 by 7, but if you're having problems during Pacific hours,

Here's what we're going to try and do for you. Let's see how this works and tune the program with you and for you. Work closely with the account teams. You want those relationships. You want the role clarification we talked about, that's strategic versus break fix and where's the overlap. You want to make sure there's an engagement process. If the CSM is on site and becomes aware of something, how do we want to engage support? Are we going to tell the CSM to tell the customer to log a case through the portal? That sounds actually kind of annoying for a customer that's that high end.

Is there another process? the CSM log the case on behalf of the customer? Or do you want them communicating directly to support through a different means? And whatever works for you. I've got my prejudices and my preferences, but if you go I'm curious what that is. In your experience, what's the best way to handle that? I prefer that either the customer or the CSM put something in the case tracking tool. The case tracking tool is the single source of truth. If it's not logged, it didn't happen. Right?

Jen Weaver (40:06.336)

No, DMing an engineer. Yeah, we were done all last week. Nothing worked. When did you tell me? This morning? Then I can't help you until this morning. We don't have... Well, actually, I also do like to lobby for tools in the product itself that'll have a call home feature or something bad is happening. So if the tool itself, the application, whatever you're selling, can create a case on its own saying, hey, performance is awful today, open a case.

The thing about knowing beforehand, if the customer then calls and says, performance is awful, you can say, yeah, we got notified from your system an hour ago. Here's what's going on in our AWS, whatever. And that's being ahead of it. So I love it if the product's actually call home. But again, until you notify support through the CRM, there's no record of this. There's no record of it. How can I report on it? How can I fix it? How can I take care of this problem? So those tools are critical.

That makes sense. yeah, I know where I've used up a lot of your time here and I really appreciate it. I wish we could dig in further, but I want to wrap up with one really important thing that maybe sometimes we neglect, which is how do you measure your success? You've implemented this program. What are the data points that you're looking for to say, okay, this is good. We're going to go from trial launch to launch and we're going to maintain doing this this way.

There's a few things, most of them look back numbers, I grant you, but customer satisfaction is a look back number, but it helps. If you're doing anything like customer effort scores, which I've not done, but I respect customer effort scores that are finding it easier to deal with you. Just the direct feedback from the customers themselves, because when you're selling a premier service like this, customers are not shy about calling you to tell you what's working or not working. When I say I'm moving Sally off your account and moving Billy onto it,

no, no, we love Sally. You can't take her away. I've got a data point on Sally. Okay. Let's sit down with her. What are you doing that your peers aren't that they love you so much? Let's figure this out. Retention, of course, is a big one. Whether or not the sales team is out there actively selling. Do I have to sell sales on this so that they get me accounts? Or do they see the value from those first couple of accounts saying, I want that for my account. Those couple of key accounts at my last job where we had even above and beyond my normal offering for them was because

Jen Weaver (42:34.091)

They had an issue and sales said, can Miles team do this? And we said, well, yeah, let's figure it out. Give me a month and I'm going to work with this other guy in support leadership and we're going to put together something. We put it together and it works so well for that account. Two other accounts jumped on the bandwagon. It's like, okay, if you have a success, word spreads. But like I warned people with knowledge bases and customer portals, make sure you're ready when you go out with that trial. If you miss.

it's hard getting a second shot at it. you know, think it through, get the processes, get the, what you think you're going to offer, do the surveys, get things in place. Now, again, the first couple of trial customers, they're friendlies, they realize they're getting, in this case, usually something for nothing. So you're probably not going to burn the bridge too poorly, but internally, you want to make sure you still have the support of sales and product and marketing. They're didn't we try this last year? Yeah, but.

We want to do it again. Well, what have you changed? So make sure you get as much of this right as you can. It's going to be wrong. It has to be dynamic. Every time I run one of these programs, we've morphed it and grew it and changed it. It's a dynamic thing. So changing your account ratio is changing your pricing, changing the tools, adding a tool like Slack, adding a process like the assigned backups. This is a growing thing. You learn as you go along. And even having done all these years,

If I get this job again, I'll learn more. I mean, that's what happens. You've got to grow with it. With AI, how can we leverage AI to make a premier offering even better? I'm sure there are people asking that question. That's great. And I appreciate you sharing all the learning you have done so far. I'd love to chat again sometime, maybe about another process.