The Future of Customer Support

Not all partners agree that vendor support is decreasing. But if it is decreasing, partners must evaluate their long-term operations model. Will they charge for project management and customer support? Will they add more staff? Will they turn to TSBs for extra support? And what do vendors expect of agents, and vice versa? 

“It becomes the question of, where does the supplier believe that our support, our implementation and our expertise starts and ends versus where do we think it does,” Salvage (pictured) said.

Salvage said that if vendors expect agents to own more of the technology life cycle, they’ll need to provide agents with more insights and back-end tools that they themselves possess. Especially if vendors are communicating less and less with partners about product updates and other pertinent information.

“Those are problems that need to be solved or talked about before we can go carte blanche and say, ‘We’re just going to own it end-to-end,’ because there’s a lot of visibility that I don’t have today,’” Salvage said.

David Wright said churn is one of the biggest enemies to agent growth. His firm ensures that account managers serve as “shepherds” of the technology Disruptive implements.

“This is a dedicated representative who’s literally in their ticketing system, fighting fires, finding ways to improve their environment and updating stakeholders like a full-time employee. And the beauty of that is, as time passes and there is an executive leadership change or turmoil within the account, that service makes us that much more sticky, because we’ve become an integral part of their operation,” he said.

Disruptive charges project management implementation fees for enterprises, although Wright mentioned that one of its competitive advantages is the discounts it can put forth on these fees compared to that of the larger consulting shops.