4 Ways Tech Support Can Improve Your Marketing

Tech support is often looked down upon as a cost center as opposed to a money maker. This is a shame because tech support is an easy way to do some very inexpensive customer research. What you learn in tech support can help you improve your product, your marketing and your business.

Marketers often have a tough time finding customers who will talk to them. Your tech support team has people that are begging to talk to them. Treat tech support a little more like market research and you can get some great information while at the same time doing a better job at helping your customers.

Here are 4 simple things you can learn from your customers who contact tech support:

1. Who they are

One of the biggest questions marketers try to answer is who their target market is. When someone contacts tech support take a moment to ask them what they do. You may find that they fit the description that your marketing plan has drawn up. But you may find that they are someone completely different. This may be a new group you haven’t considered before that you should be marketing to.

2. What they want to do

People contact support when they are stuck. They are trying to accomplish something with your product and something happened along the way that kept them from reaching that goal. Don’t just find out where they are stuck. Find out what they were trying to accomplish. Is this a workflow you could optimize? If so, could it open a new market for your product?

3. When and Why they are using your product

I am grouping these together because in our case they are really the same question. Asking your user when and why they are using their software will help you understand what outside stimulus prompted them to open your application or go to your website.

When we initially launched ScreenSteps we saw it more as a software documentation tool. As we talked to customers who contacted us for support we discovered that many of them were using ScreenSteps and especially ScreenSteps Live for customer support. We updated our marketing message accordingly.

4. Where (or on what company) are they using your product

For some businesses, the physical location where the product is being used might be important. For us it is important to understand what other products are being used around ScreenSteps. We want to know where in the workflow ScreenSteps is being used. What products are the user trying to integrate ScreenSteps or ScreenSteps Live with? What products are they trying to support?

Recently we discovered, through tech support, that we had several customers that were trying to integrate their ScreenSteps Live content with Salesforce. A few tweeks to how ScreenSteps Live worked made this much easier for users and is once again opening a whole new type of user to both ScreenSteps Desktop and ScreenSteps Live. Our integrations with Mindtouch, Confluence, Blogger, and Google Sites came about in a similar fashion.

Conclusion

Next time you are in a support chat, email exchange or phone call, ask a few questions. You’ll get valuable information that will help you improve your customer support and your marketing.