Support has, traditionally, been an afterthought. An obligation tacked on to a successful product. A cost center. And so the dominant approach to support has been to optimize for cost. Large enterprise pioneered this approach, tooling has sprung up to support it and it has trickled down to smaller organizations who adopt it without much thought. After all, you can't go wrong following "best practices". But it does go wrong. Terribly wrong.

Cost-first optimization leads to perverse incentives; support engineers are rewarded for undermining the very value customers might assume they are there to bring. You probably have personal experience with the dehumanizing disfunction of the cost-first approach to support even if you haven't worked the in the role:

• You've hung up on an incompetent agent and redialed the 800 number hoping to get someone good next time. That organization probably hires agents based on cost, and competence is a happy accident.

• You've worked the system and demanded access to a manager, knowing the lowly front line agents are not empowered to solve your problem. Or perhaps you've waited on hold to gain access to the rare level two agent who holds the secret knowledge the level ones are not trusted with. This organization also hires on cost and has a strategy of only empowering a few higher performers. They optimize for cost over respecting their customers time.

• You have had the distinct feeling that the main goal of the person you are working with just wants to close the ticket as soon as possible, regardless of if they solve your problem. That's the mark of an organization that has delegated management work to metrics, your agent was just working on reducing MTTR (Mean Ticket Resolution Time).

• A service agent has made a promise to follow up on an issue, but they didn't. The management at this team may pay lip service to keeping commitments but might actually punish that behaviour when it comes into conflict with cost.

It's time to consider if cost-first support is the approach for your organization. This manifesto is an attempt to return to first principles and reason our way to an alternative: value optimized support.

Support is a hard nut to crack. High performing support organizations are the exception, not the rule. Sometimes a support team achieves high performance by gently de-prioritizing the metrics they are judged on by management. The prevalence of disfunction and misalignment is a signal that we need to challenge our basic assumptions. Starting with the value you want support to bring as a good way to frame the problem. It's also a good approach if:

• You respect relationships. Every support interaction is an inflection point in the relationship with your customer. An opportunity to showcase your value and build loyalty or to push them towards another organization or solution.

"The web gives people an omnipresent exit door and they won't hesitate to use it." - 37signals manifesto

• You prize reputation. Support is often the face of your organization after a sale. There is no guarantee that a support interaction remains a one on one communication. On social media that interaction can suddenly become a one to many interaction with broad impact.

• You value the resources spent on support. It's important to note that value driven support does not mean abandoning efficiency and cost. It's just that you organize efficiency and cost around value. If support does not achieve it's core mission then the resources poured into support (no matter how efficiently) are wasted.

• You strive for alignment. Making the value support brings explicit allows for better top to bottom alignment. Value and scale can be planned and budgeted for. The folks in the trenches will not have to read between the lines or have to assume what the mission is.

What value does support bring? It's not going to be the same for every organization. Take the time to identify the value you want your support organization to provide before you start working on strategy. Make it explicit. Define scope and the target audience. Every organization will differ but here are a few example values:

This is the definitive and probably universal support value. Think about the value these interactions and what effect they have on the organization. Can you explicitly describe the value? Is it retention? What is that worth precisely? What is the cost of not providing this service, or doing it badly? - Reputation - Relationship

Your customers are always telling you things; about your product and the organization. Do you discard these valuable signals? What signal is important to you? Try to quantify it, as best you can.

- Identify customer service recovery opportunities
- Bring signal to the organization
- Identify potential existential threats to the organization

Keep it simple. Identify your core values, if you pick contradictory or conflicting values make sure you express the nuance of your strategy explicitly.

At some support organizations avoiding commitment is the rule. Usually the agent making the commitment isn't empowered to actually follow up on them. This can be pretty frustrating as a user looking for a solution and getting evasive non-commital replies. Support should be empowered to make reasonable commitments. As a corollary, commitments must be kept and followed up on rigorously. Keeping commitments builds trust and is essential to value optimized support.

Don't ask the user to do support work; they shouldn't have to categorize their request before submitting a query. No heirarchical dropdown mazes! No they don't want to do a survey afterwards. Collect feedback unintrusively and keep it optional.

If your strategy cannot execute at the scale you operate at then it's just an academic excerise. - Google/Gmail approach

Value optimized support requires buy in at the highest levels of an organization. Leadership quantifies and accounts for support value in your business plan.

• Account for value: Make sure your business plan has a per customer value assigned to customer loyalty & engagement. Signal is harder to quantify, but I have seen situations where support pushing a signal has potentially saved a fortune in legal fees & lost business. The improvements signal can make to product are even harder to put a number on. Regardless you can't deny the importance that signal plays in a nimble, customer obsessed organization. This value should be present in the business plan in some form.
• Plan for growth: Your business scaling plan should include building out the support team. Fast response times are required to provide exceptional support. If you wait for support metrics to make the case for adding headcount you are already too late. It takes time to hire good folks, and time to train them.
• Hire/fire for value: