How We Turned a 24/7 Customer Support Operation into a Profit Center
0%
Return on Investment From Support
0/7
Customer Support
1+
Year Partnership with GlowTouch
0's
of Thousands of Customers Served
0M
Websites Hosted Worldwide
Relationship:
Since 2002
Service Provided:
Customer Support
Service Channel:
Live Chat
Industry:
Web Hosting, Small Business Services
For more than 15 years, one of our clients has provided a one-stop-shop for online presence management, serving hundreds of thousands of businesses, non-profits, groups and individuals. With a feature-rich control panel, they deliver access to the industry’s leading tools. It’s no surprise our client takes pride in eliminating complications and providing a great customer experience — making quality support crucial to their business.
We delivered our client 177% ROI, turning thousands of daily chats into sales opportunities.
Innovative Support Operation Creates New Opportunities
01 The Opportunity
Our web hosting client responds to thousands of chats each day. In searching for ways to improve customer stickiness and generate more revenue, they looked at these customer touch points as an opportunity to do both – by changing a customer support center into a profit center.
02 The Solution
For 15 years, GlowTouch has provided this client’s customer support. When they sought to improve customer stickiness and boost revenue, we helped them design and implement an innovative cross-selling and upselling program within our existing support operation.
03 The Results
Leveraging upsell and cross-sell techniques, we turned many support contacts into sales opportunities. In six months, we were revenue neutral, then kept improving and now generate 177% ROI on average each month — while still exceeding customer satisfaction goals.
01 The Opportunity
For the vast majority of businesses around the world, customer support is considered a cost center. Businesses accept this because they recognize that to achieve long-term success, it’s crucial to be responsive and keep customers satisfied wherever possible.
While it’s always crucial for every business to be responsive, keep customers reasonably happy and ensure customer success, customer support costs money.
But does it have to?
Our client viewed every contact with their customers as an opportunity, not only to create a positive experience that would help retain customers, but also to introduce them to other relevant products and solutions. When they were looking for ways to improve their Average Revenue Per Subscriber (ARPS), they decided to take advantage of the thousands of daily chats they already had with their customers. The challenge was finding ways to monetize those existing touch points — and doing so in a way that kept customers highly satisfied.
02 The Solution
Working collaboratively with our client, we designed and implemented a program to turn support-related inquiries into sales opportunities. The process looked like this. We:
- Coached our staff, broadening how they viewed their role to include cross-selling and upselling as part of great support
- Introduced training, tools and techniques to help our staff guide support interactions toward sales opportunities at the appropriate time
- Put in place a staff sales incentive program to motivate the new behavior we were trying to encourage
- Empowered agents to close straightforward sales of our clients’ products and services during chats
- Collaborated with the client’s team to create an easy escalation path to generate leads by mapping high-value, long-sales-cycle products and services with specific customer inquiries
- Held weekly meetings with our client’s team to fine-tune our approach in a continuous improvement process
One of the most important aspects of this process was the soft-sale approach our team took with our client’s cross-sell and upsell opportunities. We ALWAYS began chats by resolving customer inquiries and ensuring customer satisfaction. Then, within the context of each chat, our team would listen intently to customer concerns and suggest helpful products and services.
03 The Results
Our client’s investment in this innovative customer support approach has more than paid for itself. Today, they generate, on average, 177% more revenue from our cross-selling and upselling chat support service than it costs them for chat support. In other words, their support is profitable.
Just as important as increasing their ARPS, we’ve also maintained their excellent customer satisfaction. That’s one reason they’ve stuck with GlowTouch for 15 years and counting.
