Customer Support has been defined for decades as anything other than Sales, Success or Strategy. We are the team that gets called in to clean up the messes that should never have happened in the first place. The messes are quickly and quietly resolved for as cheap as possible to the least amount of consternation to the business leaders, and to keep Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) in check so that they do not shoot back up to phone hang up levels.
This team has always been a bit of an enigma to me, but now in 2026 it has become a legitimate competitive threat.
The companies with the highest customer retention rates, the most expansion revenue, and the greatest customer loyalty are not necessarily the ones that have built the fastest support teams. Instead, they are the ones that have changed the nature of the work of support and given their support teams the ability to do far more with their time and abilities. They have fundamentally changed what it is possible to do in support and what it is possible to achieve given the right priorities, tools, and level of executive focus.
The following is a letter from our CEO and COO discussing a Support-to-Success Promotion.
This is a Support-to-Success Promotion. And it is one of the most cost-effective transformations available to a CEO or COO in the current operating environment.
The best companies do more than just fix the customer's problem of the moment. They take the customer's problems and turn them into competitive advantage that is uniquely their own and cannot be easily copied by others.
Take a moment to think about the last time you asked your customer support team to attend a companywide meeting. The last time you asked them to sit at a table for a companywide picnic. The last time you asked them to come to an all-hands company party and feel truly included as a member of the team. Our support team deals with some very difficult customers every day. People that have just had their day ruined because of some issue they are having with our product or service and for them, at that moment, it is not about being nice. It is also not about hiding their frustration to make a good impression. Our team must deal with many of our customers at their worst, long after any semblance of composure has been lost. But they also have the unique perspective of hearing the unfiltered feedback from thousands of customers each and every day. Feedback on feature requests, the support process, the mention of our competitors, complaints about pricing, and on the ongoing disappointment that our product or service has not met their expectations. Our support team are the first to recognize trends and patterns in our customer base.
Currently, in most organizations, the knowledge gathered from every single support request is only used to fix that one ticket and nothing else. The conversation ends, the ticket is closed, the solution is documented and the valuable insight is lost. There isn't typically a business process in place to report on the collective knowledge gathered from hundreds or thousands of support conversations each day. The knowledge is there, but the systems and processes to uncover it and gain business value from it are lacking.
We strive to compare our support product with the best SRE support organizations in the industry. The support teams of such companies position their support team as a listening infrastructure. Every interaction with the support is labeled by category of the fix, root cause, customer sentiment, competitive information and product feedback. The data is then re-used in product development, customer success, sales and marketing. We position our support team as an intelligence function with ticket resolution being a byproduct rather than a support team that collects some data along the way of resolving tickets.
One of the biggest differences between a lean organization and a traditional one is the level of formalization. Most executives underestimate the amount of work required to move from one side to the other, but they should not underestimate the potential for such moves to be financially feasible. The investments required to bring a traditional organization to the level of formalization needed to support lean practices are often lower than executives assume.
Moving from being a reactive person to a proactive person is a big change, but it does not have to be a dramatic change. The change does not have to be dramatic for you to become a real competitive asset to your business. All that is required is that you make three structural changes, each of which supports each of the other changes.
I’d like to introduce the first of three major changes that are occurring in the way organizations think about and measure their support experience. These changes are moving away from what I call “resolution metrics” and toward “relationship metrics.” Most people are very familiar with the “metrics of support” which generally include some combination of response time, resolution time and ticket closure rates. These are efficiency metrics and they are required, but they are not sufficient to measure the value of the support experience to the customer. Modern customer centric organizations will begin to measure relationship metrics in addition to the metrics of support. Relationship metrics measure the impact that the support experience has on the customer relationship. Examples of relationship metrics include the change in customer confidence in the organization, the generation of new business opportunities such as up-sell and cross-sell and a reduction in renewal risk.
This is a different conversation. We need to measure, report and hold accountability for different things to have a different kind of conversation with our support leaders. If we hold someone accountable for ticket metrics, they will naturally optimize for those. If we hold someone accountable for customer relationships, their team will naturally work to protect and nurture those.
Shift #2: From siloed resolution to connected intelligence We need to construct the underlying operational framework to deliver the right support insights to the right groups of people at the right times. In this scenario, product teams receive structured weekly support intelligence about customer problems and pain points they’re running into, as well as the specific errors they’re encountering. In Customer Success, support feedback flows into CS teams in advance of potential renewal issues arising from customers. For sales, the competitive feedback that’s gleaned from support conversations about competitors is delivered to sales teams to inform their conversations.
None of this is technology expensive. It requires process design, accountability structures, and leadership that views the support organization as an intelligence function, rather than a cost reduction function.
Shift #3: From Separate Teams to Integrated Customer Architecture There is a universal understanding that that support, success and experience should not be siloed from one another. In our previous post we discussed the importance of integrating customer operations teams and ensuring that there are clear handoffs and accountability for the entire customer lifecycle. This means that a customer should have a seamless transition from a support conversation to a success conversation. In addition, there should be a clear understanding of a customer’s support history that can indicate opportunities to grow their business and therefore advance that information to the success team well in advance of renewal so that the success team can act.
The business function will not be integrated into the operating model by itself. It must be deliberately designed by the CEO and COO by creating the necessary structural conditions and by confronting the organizational forces that tend to bring the business function back to the traditional and siloed functional model.
The number one reason that CEOs and COOs give for not investing in operational support is cost control. Support is always a cost category, and the hiring of staff to work in this category should be limited to what is strictly necessary. The costs of staff working in the support category should be reduced, either by trying to reduce the number of employees or by attempting to reduce individual salaries. Any opportunity to replace such staff with automated solutions or with the use of artificial intelligence should be seized.
This is logical from a financial perspective, but it is a disaster from a strategic perspective.
Cost Optimized means that the support function is minimizing costs, at the same time as delivering the minimum level of business impact and value. Problems are being resolved more quickly and less business insight is being delivered. More automations are being implemented, and more customer relationships are being negatively affected. Resources are being cut, as well as the people who can use their judgement to ensure that even as costs are being cut, that the customer is still having a good experience.
The companies that are winning on customer retention are not the ones cutting the costs of their customer service to the bone. Instead, it is the companies that understand that cost efficiency and cost cutting are not the same as investing in the customer. While automation and AI can bring about significant cost reduction to transactional customer support, these cost savings should be reinvested in meaningful ways that allow customer service representatives to build stronger human to human connections with customers, specifically when it comes to the most critical and value-added issues.
I love the phrase “retention price” and have one simple example to prove what is meant by it: I once worked for a CEO who viewed our customer support team as an “expense line” that needed to be reduced. His argument was that costs needed to be decreased and, although he wouldn’t quite admit it, the support team was a “cost” that was deemed cheap and therefore fair game to slash to keep expenses low. His belief was that short-term decreases in the customer support team’s budget would have a minimal impact on customers. Unfortunately for the CEO and the business, these decreases in customer support funding had a predictable short-term impact on the customer base—and an equally predictable “retention price” had to be paid in the short term to contain the dissatisfaction that the support cuts had unleashed. Conversely, I have also worked for another CEO that disagreed with cost-cutting.
The Support-to-Success campaign will not succeed by accident. Our CEO must champion the program by clearly articulating the role of Support and how closing tickets is no longer a measure of success to our team and instead focus efforts on the company’s four key areas of focus: customer retention, customer growth, and competitive intelligence.
We need a COO who builds the operational foundation - things such as data sources, KPI’s and info sharing between CS, Customer Success, Product and Commercial teams.
It all starts with support function leadership making an investment. An investment in the people who do this work every day – the people who must have the tough conversations. An investment in the systems that allow them to capture and share their knowledge. An investment in recognizing that the frontlines of your business are not commodity customer support teams.
Our experience is that the transition to an Accountable Finance Function can transform Shared Service Operations (SSOs) into a highly asset that sets an organization apart from its competitors. Not necessarily because the finance operations become dramatically more effective, but rather because the SSOs are a key component of the Finance Function and as such hold a unique position in the organization. They have a complete and end-to-end view of the business covering everything from procurement to the final sale to the customer, and from all departments to the general ledger and final accounts of the organization. And for the first time they have an Accountable Finance Function that enables them to turn insights into action.
The answer is easy: Yes, it is possible to make support teams more strategic. The harder answer is: Are your leaders ready to address the fundamental changes in purpose, metrics, and accountability that this requires?
If customer support is the end of the customer journey, it will be seen as a cost. If customer support is the most honest window into the customer relationship, it can be turned into something powerful, a competitive advantage that no one ever thought would be possible.
That’s the promise. And it all starts with a simple decision from the CEO to stop even asking how you can cut the costs of your support organization. Instead, you must ask how you can think about your support organization in a completely different way and what could be accomplished if you were to start treating it like a real department.
Author: Sandrine Moreau
At International Executive Consulting, we excel in driving business transformation and organizational change - enhancing corporate performance while optimizing efficiency.