Customer relationships aren’t that different from regular relationships. Trust is built on transparency, listening, communication, and delivering on expectations. Fail to execute on establishing these qualities and relationships start to crumble. How many of us have unnecessarily escalated a situation with a partner, parent, or child because we chose to push back instead of listen first, and then respond?

Customers may not be right, but the important thing is…they think they are. That usually stems from a problem or experience they had with your product, or a love for your product that runs so deep they desire for your product to expand into meeting even more needs. If everything was already meeting or exceeding expectations, why would they take the time to deliver the feedback or suggestion?

Companies that invest and focus in customer experience have 5 times the revenue of companies that don’t. Everyone seems to know that investing in customer experience is critical to growing a healthy business, but very few leaders know how to invest in customer experience, and very few support leaders know how to make a case for it.

The biggest hurdle expressed from C-suite and support managers alike is that it’s too challenging to quantify the success of investing in customer experience, making the ROI too nebulous to inspire action. But that’s just not the case. The problem is not that it’s challenging to see the ROI, but that we aren’t used to looking at support metrics in a way that ties back to key business metrics.

Where should we draw the line between sales and support, or sales, support, and success? Sometimes companies define the line as revenue. This is a dangerous place to draw the line for support professionals, as businesses often associate business worth and impact by revenue.

The Support Driven Growth methodology suggests an alternate approach: remove the idea of sales vs. success vs. support completely, unite under a singular customers team, and shift the discussion in models about the amount of high touch or low touch required instead.