By Francoise Tourniaire, founder and principal of FT Works
Whether you use overseas distributors, resellers to sell packaged products, or consulting partners that embed your products into more complex products or services, chances are that you will be asked to provide support as second line to the partners – with the partners, whoever they are, providing support to the end customers. This is the partner support model, or the indirect support model, or the channel support model and the focus of this article.
Indirect support has many advantages. For starters, you won’t have to deliver support in multiple languages, or in far-away time zones. You certainly never want to be in a position to deliver support to end customers for an unfamiliar bundled product that just happens to include yours. And supporting end customers is an expensive proposition. If your company uses an indirect sales model it’s usually worthwhile to explore an indirect support model as well.
Note that an indirect sales model does not dictate an indirect support model. For instance, most US retailers are not interested in delivering end-customer support, nor are they equipped for it, for the most part. They may be able and willing to sell your service offerings, however. On the other hand, if you are working with a Japanese partner you can expect that it will demand an indirect support model.
Many support organizations outsource part or all of their activities to outsourcers. Although outsourcing can be considered to be a special case of indirect support, the outsourcers are tightly controlled by the support organizations, much more tightly than is possible (or healthy) for a partner so the rules of engagement are very different. We focus here on support provided by partners, not outsourcers.
Include Support in the Partner Selection Process
This is often the big problem of indirect support: the sales team picks a partner based on sales criteria, and by the time support is brought into the picture it’s too late to backtrack and you may end up with a partner whose idea of support is to answer the phone “sometimes”, to track issues on random pieces of paper, and to them complain to the sales managers that second-line support is just terrible….
Avoid the problem altogether by including support staff or at least support criteria into the selection of partners. I’ve found that a short checklist, perhaps in the form of a white paper, can be a big help both for partner selection and for the initial setup of the partner support program. Include items such as: suggested support offerings including SLAs; basic infrastructure including dedicated hotline and electronic support address; suggested staffing models with staff qualifications, both technical and linguistic; and a tracking tool and metrics. If a partner already has all these items in place, great! If not, the checklist can set realistic expectations of what’s required for success.
Define the Business Relationship for Support
If support is “free”, the partner will build support into the cost of the product and you in turn will build the cost of second-line support into the cost of the product you sell to the partner. It’s a number-crunching exercise.
If support is fee-based, the partner typically splits the service revenue with you, according to a completely negotiable business agreement. For high-complexity support, it’s often a 50-50 split, with your share including both the cost of upgrades, which are typically bundled with support, and the cost of second-line support. Alternatively, many vendors like to use a simpler, fixed-fee method based on expected volume of second-line support requests from that particular partner.
In any case, define the business arrangement upfront. Allow for regular updates so you are not stuck with a too-small fixed-fee payment. And if the agreement is for split revenue include an audit clause or you may wonder at how few customers are renewing support…
Consider Integrating Pre-Sales and Post-Sales Support
If your partners are large distributors with extensive needs for per-sales support, it probably makes sense to keep pre-sales and post-sales support separate. Ditto if your sales cycle is very long and requires extensive pre-sales consulting.
But in many situations pre-sales and post-sales requests are really not that different and it makes sense to have just one channel for both. This works particularly well if your partners are smaller and tend to have the same individuals working pre-sales and post-sales accounts. You can of course segregate the pre-sales and post-sales requests in the tracking system and treat them differently if you wish.
Train and Certify the Partners
This is the most important step! A poorly-trained partner can consume enormous amounts of your time and resources while delivering pitiful service to the end customers. The issue is often that, although the partner trains a few staffers at the beginning, those individuals either leave or are transferred to pre-sales or consulting roles, leaving the technical support team depleted.
Think of training as a long-term effort and create training materials that can be used in self-paced mode. Short webinars are a good option for remote partners. They can even be recorded to be used in a self-paced environment.
Beyond training, I highly recommend certifying the support partners, requiring that each partner maintain a certain number of certified staffers at all times. (You can give partners a more advantageous business arrangement as an incentive to become certified.) If you’re starting out, you don’t need complex and formal certification process. You can simply present a few sample cases to the candidate and see how well the troubleshooting is conducted. I’ve also used a “grandfather” kind of certification: if you’ve been working with particular individuals for some time and found them reliable and capable, certify them!
Register the End Customers
In most cases, you want to know who your end customers are, whether it is to ensure that the revenue splits are computed properly or simply to be able to provide updates to the end customers on important issues.
Partners are obviously protective of their customer lists so you will need to have appropriate guarantees around your registration practices. Asking customers to register to get updates or to get access to self-service is usually a good strategy acceptable to all. (Note that self-registration requires that the end customers speak the language of your registration site.)
Create a Strong Self-Service Environment
You want partners to help themselves rather than asking you for help for every issue, and you also want to help your end customers when language barriers are not in the way. It pays to create a robust self-service environment, especially a good knowledge base and an electronic software delivery system (online updates). Allow partners to translate and reuse your articles (with attribution) on their sites.
You may want to tier your knowledge base so that your partners have access to more detailed documents than end customers – or you may not: many of my clients have found that sophisticated end customers have pretty much the same needs as partners and it’s easier to make all documents available to both groups of users.
Manage the Support Partners
All the training, certification, and self-service in the world won’t overcome a lazy or incompetent partner. Designate a partner support manager to monitor the support activity, facilitate escalations, ensure that training and certifications are up to date, and resolve any issues. A diplomatic, detail-oriented, well-organized individual who is not afraid to travel to the partner’s site makes a big difference here.
As part of the partner management program consider conducting satisfaction audits with the end customers. Unhappy customers often blame the product and the vendor rather than the distributor or partner – even if the problem stems from poor training or poor processes at the partner’s.
Be Prepared to Support Key Customers Directly
If you are using an indirect support model chances are that your larger, most demanding customers will want to get support directly from you. Take heart! Supporting the larger customers is not be that different from providing second-line support. The main issue may not be providing the support, but rather reassuring the partners that you are not trying to take business away from them.
With an appropriate structure and attentive management, indirect support can allow vendors to concentrate on what they do best: create new and better products.
Francoise Tourniaire is the founder and principal of FT Works, a consulting firm that helps technology companies create and grow their support operations. She’s the author of The Art of Software Support, a practical guide for managing support organizations. For more information, visit www.ftworks.com or call 650 559 9826.
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