From Miguel Perez at Media Temple:
From the beginning, our support team has been engaged in a conversation with our customers. We have been listening, talking, and sharing our knowledge in a way that unintentionally fulfilled that unwritten social contract.
In return, our customers have rewarded us by staying put and telling their friends. Our support effort to honor the “social contract” together with the efforts of Engineering and Product are why (mt) Media Temple can boast a very respectable customer churn rate of 1.3%.
Interesting way of putting it. There definitely is this unwritten contract between customers and the support team. Miguel’s got some solid points here.
I like his “no talk time” philosophy. We have that at our company as well and we’ve noticed that the time you ‘lose’ with support-needy clients you make up for with the clients whose questions can be answered in a few seconds.
I was talking about that with a friend the other day. Everyone’s going to have some support-needy customers. But I think those customers that rarely (if ever) contact you balance those people out nicely.