Boost your digitalization: customer support

So far, the posts in this series have stressed that the continuous value delivery to customers, rather than the transactional model, affects all parts of the company. One of the areas often ignored or seen too late as playing an important role is customer support. In many companies, this team is assumed to already have a continuous relationship with customers. In practice, however, most customers may have some interaction when initially starting to use the product and then again when the product reaches end of life and starts to show failures.

When transitioning to continuous value delivery, customer support runs into at least two main challenges. First, the team needs to build up knowledge about the latest software release to the field much quicker than traditionally. Whereas customer support used to have weeks if not months for that, when new software is released every two to four weeks, the knowledge about it needs to be built up in hours and days. Second, as not all customers upgrade their software at the same time, it can easily become difficult to know which version of the software the customer is experiencing issues with and how to best provide support.