[Crystal ShullerParticipant]

Hi!

We are a monthly subscription software that helps business owners monitor and analyze online reviews. I really want to keep our support team as a support team who works on all accounts, instead of going in the direction of old school account managers. However, as we’re scaling and taking on very large corporate accounts, I’m worried I might loose this battle.

I’d love ideas on how your B-to-B SaaS team keeps from going in the account manager direction and reasons/benefits you give for why it’s important?

Thank you for your help!

[Andrew MoyerParticipant]

Hi @CrystalShuller,

We’ve definitely come across this decision as well in a few different capacities. The best way I could think to begin answering that question is to first understand why you are concerned about going that route? Why not a hybrid approach with some folks focusing on tech support and others focusing on the Account Management aspect?

When I think of the differences between Account Managers and Support Reps I see a clear distinction in responsibilities. An Account Manager would likely focus on proactive support, thus keeping the customer happy, maintaining a better relationship, spend more time with the customer optimizing their use of your tool, and serving as an escalation point for large scale issues.

Your large customers could still rely on your support team to for day to day support requests like “how to” questions and bug reports. Not to mention, many support reps may appreciate taking a more proactive approach to helping and nurturing customers. It could serve as a great step up in their career development as well.

But with this all in mind, what is your hesitation? Would it have to be an all out shift for all of your support team?

[Carolyn BreitParticipant]

Hey @CrystalShuller,

Our company eventually adopted the account manager structure as well. I’m the head of our support team. So we focus on squashing bugs, answering educational questions about our platform, and handling billing issues. But for more in depth training and lengthier educational requests, we generally rely upon our account management team now. Our support team is still small so we need to have our hands/minds free to answer emails, take phone calls, respond to live chats, etc as they happen. Often, if a customer team needs to schedule a demo or something, that can really cut into our ability to provide quick and efficient support. So we refer them to an account manager that they can form that relationship with, especially as they grow their team in the future. It seems to be working so far! And that’s not to say that the customer support team WON’T answer educational inquiries. We just try to transition our larger customers to rely more heavily on their account manager for those and to contact support if they’re seeing any kind of issue or bug. I hope that helps!

 

[Evan HamiltonParticipant]

I think that I think the split Andrew and Carolyn mentioned makes sense.

One of the problems with having support be account managers is then they’re put in the position of upselling/trying to retain customers when that might conflict with providing genuinely great support (see the Comcast “why do you want to cancel” fiasco).

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