Value-Added Support

Technology services have really not changed significantly in the last 40 years. Both professional services and support services are today largely packaged, priced, and sold the same way they were to mainframe customers in the 1960s, despite all the underlying changes in the technologies they support.

But the momentum of market forces – specifically, increasing product complexity and decreasing product costs – is quickly making that traditional model unworkable. A new model is emerging, called Value-Added Support.

When a customer purchases a product, he/she expects that product to deliver a certain level of value. Traditionally, support’s job has been to restore customers to that expectation of value when something goes wrong. The idea of actually driving customers beyond the expected level of value has never really been an issue.

That’s what Value-Added Support is all about. Value-Added Support services take a proactive approach to accelerating the customer’s time-to-value on a given product, and advance the total value of the product beyond the expectation the customer has at the point of purchase.

Value-Added Support embraces these essential attributes:

• Subscription-based renewable annuity
• Remote, rather than on-site, delivery
• Proactive, not reactive
• Use of integrated technologies to facilitate the identification, packaging and dissemination of knowledge
• Emphasis on one-to-many instead of one-to-one transactions
• Low incremental cost to serve new customers

All these help the support function maintain high operating margins and predictable revenue growth. Thus, Value-Added Support is built on this foundation.

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