Author: Karen Hyder
Has your company been throwing its after-sale support staff to the lions?
Think about it: Do your after-sale people have all the resources – particularly training – that they need to ensure that the customer is delighted with your product? Are you measuring how well your customer’s employees have learned to use your technology? Have your after-sale support people made themselves available and invaluable to your customer’s people? Do they know precisely how to serve your customers?
If these questions have you squirming, you’re not alone. Like most companies, you probably hire good technical people, and you count on them to do whatever it takes to make your customers happy. But do they truly know what it will take? By ignoring the missing link – training – your after-sale support people can become your customer’s enemies and ruin an otherwise-good relationship.
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer’s team: They’re eager to replace an archaic piece of equipment and are excited about the promises that a new system will save time, increase productivity, outdo their competitors, and increase market share.
After much research, the customer finally chooses YOUR machine. Your sales rep and installers work with the customer’s team to identify and prepare for initial problems, including downtime and a brief productivity setback. Your sales rep assures them that the support hotline staff will help smooth the bumps.
But when transition time comes, your customer’s users have trouble doing what they used to do, never mind learn the new and better features. When your customer’s employees call your support hotline, your well-meaning technicians unwittingly confuse them with tech speak, and the callers hang up empty-handed.
Beleaguered by complaints from his or her employees and unhappy that the new technology is not delivering as promised, your customer begins to regret the purchase and badmouths your sales rep and company. Convinced that you’re incompetent and wanting to avoid a confrontation, the customer doesn’t tell you the truth – that your “solution” isn’t working.
Having given up on you, the customer decides to institute end-user training. A few motivated learners who can decipher the user’s manual develop and teach a course for employees. Six months later, the customer has finally achieved the time savings and productivity gains that your rep promised. If you ask, they may tell you they’re happy. But behind your back, they’re destroying your reputation.
Be honest: Is it possible that some of your customers have experienced this nightmare with YOUR products? Did the fault lie with the customer? The technology?
Likely not. Chances are you made the same mistake that companies often repeat: You assumed too much about the skills of your sales-support people to understand the users’ needs and to translate from tech speak to English.
How can you ensure that your staff is providing good support to your customers, particularly the employees who’ll use the technology the most?
A fly on the wall at Vendor Inc. and its latest customer would discover some interesting insights:
Tim, the really smart and capable technical support guy, is asked to prepare the end users for the transition while he’s installing the new equipment at the customer’s site.
When Tim tells the customer’s employees about the equipment, they hear, “It’s a 72-gig scuzzy drive with a dual porcupine 4-zeon processor.” They smile and nod, but when Tim leaves, they realize they don’t know how to access the application they use daily.
A key operator, Bernice, who’s one of the company’s most valued performers but doesn’t speak “scuzzy drive” language, calls the support line repeatedly to complain that the new system doesn’t work. Some of her colleagues panic; others waste all their time trying to figure out the technology. Tim and other support staff try to explain things over the phone, but are frustrated that Bernice doesn’t “get it.” They stop taking her calls. Deflated by the whole experience, no other employees call Tim.
Flooded with complaints, the customer’s buying manager calls the president of Vendor Inc., demanding that the problems be fixed. He also mentions the incident to a few friends in his network. Tim gets a reprimand, and develops a less-than-professional attitude toward clients and end users.
Vendor Inc.’s wishful thinking and blind faith in Tim weren’t enough to ensure a successful transition. No one in senior management or the sales department acknowledged the need to train Tim and his fellow technologists how to use their unique knowledge to best support customers.
Support staff may have good technical skills, but they often struggle to simplify concepts, tasks and language for the end user. In fact, the more skilled someone is, the less likely he or she will be to understand the learner’s perspective. As a result, people like Tim consider the Bernices of the world stupid and resent wasting time with them -- unaware that Bernice and her co-workers are, ultimately, his customers.
By failing to view Tim as a trainer and to prepare him to work successfully with Bernice, Vendor Inc. fed Tim to the lions. No wonder he couldn’t succeed!
For the customer’s part, acknowledging later that the end users would need training was a step in the right direction, but the informal instruction thrown together was too random. Efficient training must be based on the learners’ needs and built on a structure where concepts are put into a context that makes sense for them, explained, discussed and practiced. Good reference materials appropriate to the learners’ comprehension level are also important.
At Vendor Inc., the sales rep and everyone above him or her should care that Tim and all support staff members are fully equipped to make Bernice a happy woman. (If that’s not true in your company, then your problems are much bigger that what we’re covering here.)
Consider the following:
© Copyright 2004 Kaleidoscope Training and Consulting. All rights reserved. Contact us for permission to reprint this article.
Karen Hyder is managing director and Trainer of Trainers at Palmyra-based Kaleidoscope Training and Consulting, and has been teaching people how to create effective adult learning relationships since 1994. Hyder is a board member of the CompTIA Cornerstone Committee, the decision-making body for the Certified Technical Trainer (CTT+) certification program.
Kaleidoscope provides technical presentation, communication and training skills through public and custom courses and individualized coaching programs. Kaleidoscope also offers software skills training, courseware development and more for clients including Eastman Kodak Co., Microsoft Corp., CIGNA, Ericsson, Morgan Stanley, Northeastern Illinois University, Unisys Corp., Diagnostica Stago Inc. and Pactiv Corp.
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