© David Grant - http://www.flickr.com/photos/fusionpanda/363012054/
Put yourself in their shoes, and try to understand the pressure they may be facing.
[author:alex]
Having worked at large companies and startups for nearly 15 years, I can safely say I’ve been on both sides of the enterprise coin.
The most important thing to realize in working with enterprise companies, is that it’s all about the relationships. On the enterprise side, if your provider isn’t available when you need them, you should look elsewhere. On the supporting side, you might believe the enterprise is a big faceless corporation, but that assumption is wrong, as I’ll explain below.
If you’re supporting enterprise customers, have a dedicated enterprise support channel just for them. This could be a different email address, a separate support phone number, and even a staff member/team supporting only those customers.
If you’re an enterprise customer, know the name of someone at your service provider, and make sure you know how to contact them when you need it most. It also helps to be polite.
Corporations have people
The people working in big corporations are humans just like you. In fact, if you receive a support request from a big corporation, chances are the person you’re communicating with has a few people above them on the corporate ladder. They may have quite a few responsibilities, and you’re their best option for resolving their problem.
Don’t treat them like idiots, and definitely don’t do anything that would potentially make you lose them as a customer.
You need to remember that. Put yourself in their shoes, and try to understand the pressure they may be facing.
Rarely will a CEO of a large corporation make a support request to a service provider. If that happens, I doubt it would be good news.
A story about Dell
Back in the day, we used to order a lot of Dell workstations, servers, and laptops for our staff. I discovered a hardware defect in about half of the workstations we received (only one specific model had this problem): the power supplies would randomly die. After seeing dozens of these failures, I knew it wasn’t a coincidence.
We always paid for Dell’s highest support level, which gave us access to their best technicians. Unfortunately I still had to go through the first level on each call. It was always the same: “No I didn’t spill any liquids, yes we swapped with a working one, blablabla”.
I eventually grew tired of this Dell Dance™, and found a different number to call to reach the higher support level much quicker.
The problem was: not once did I get the same technician, not once did they know about my previous calls, and not once did they offer to fix the problem for good.
This, in my opinion, is minimal support, borderline bad. The worst part was paying for such a high support level and still not being recognized as a valued customer.
The support request
Enterprise customers are generally awesome customers. I say this not only because they pay well, but because they don’t make support requests unless they’re really needed. They also usually have skilled staff for you to communicate with.
Important note
When an enterprise customer makes a support requests, YOU NEED TO RESPOND.
Support requests from enterprise customers are usually very important for their business. It’s not really life-and-death, but for a businessperson losing money every hour, or having 100 people breathing down their back, it almost feels like it.
You need to realize the impact of your product on their business. If they rely on you and pay you the big bucks, you should take those funds and reinvest them in tools, personnel, documentation, phone lines, pagers, and whatever you can think of in order to give them the greatest support possible.
Do you really want enterprise customers?
When considering the option of reaching enterprise customers, the decision requires you to heavily consider if you have and can dedicated the resources to support them.
It’s sometimes scary because the support levels they require can be quite high.
My opinion: go for it! The effort is entirely worth it.
The price of supporting the enterprise
As I mentioned earlier, you’ll need to invest some funds to correctly support enterprise customers.
On the other hand, this leads to yet another sales opportunity. If your business is still getting started, it’s understandable that you might not have a 24x7 hotline. Use that opportunity to offer an additional support plan which is financially interesting enough for you, and provides the correct amount of support for them.
I recommend to our customers to include this in the price of their yearly virtual appliance license, but nothing stops you from adding another layer to make both parties happy.
Conclusion
If you have more questions about supporting enterprise customers, or questions on how to be a good enterprise customer, contact me by email or on Twitter, or even in our chat room #Jidoteki on Freenode IRC.
We at Unscramble are also available for consulting, and we really want you to sign up for Jidoteki if you’re looking sell your SaaS, behind the firewall, to enterprise customers.