Happy campers now, unhappy campers laterCompanies eying new markets should avoid “Marie Antoinette” and “Frankenstein” support strategies. Here’s why.

You can tell a lot about a company’s prime customers by its Website—and even more by how customers fresh from acquisitions and market gambits get lost in the shuffle.

Examine companies like Dell, that has moved from its consumer roots into enterprise markets. Or, IBM’s, CA’s and Cisco’s endeavors to translate historical successes in the enterprise realm into SMB markets. And then there is Oracle’s attempt to execute simultaneous vertical and horizontal market strategies by lashing together its software applications with Sun’s hardware and storage products. There are plenty of examples.

If you think the “tell” of these (and other) companies’ successes or failures are found in their online marketing content, you would be looking in the wrong direction. In reality, the “tell” is found in their support and training zones.

Before support and training Web teams even entertain the hope for a successful market move, they must take these two approaches off the table: 

  • Let ‘em eat cake. Some companies assume that all customers are created equal – and simply dump new customers into existing support and training zones. Think of it as the “Marie Antoinette (let ‘em eat cake)” strategy. In this scenario, enterprise customers don’t get the complex answers and training they need – and consumers get lost in messy support & training sites optimized for large accounts. In either case, it’s a bad behavior.
  • Watch the birdie. Other companies decide to bolt market-specific support and training sites onto their existing venues. Think of this as the “Frankenstein” strategy. In this scenario, the company’s favored markets get center seat, while new markets and acquisitions get the “oh by the way” links in the right column, or at the bottom of support and training home pages. There’s nothing like an invisible link to tell “acquired”customers that they are second class citizens.

Both of these approaches tell new customers two important things. That (1) the vendor is more than willing to sell them products, but (2) won’t do the hard work necessary to deliver “after-sales” support and training optimized for their needs.

From our POV, two memos should be sent when a company decides to move up or down market.

The first should go to the marketing teams, giving them a heads up that they need to open and populate new product zones.

The second (and arguably most important) should be sent to the teams managing the company’s support and training zones warning them that “Marie Antoinette” and “Frankenstein” gambits don’t work. These teams need to put on their thinking caps, and recalibrate how they view and deliver their training and support sites.

Tags: , , , , , , ,