B2B High Tech

Perspectives

Next-gen customer support in B2B high tech

Customer support in business-to-business (B2B) high tech is evolving—discover the strategic choices support organizations must make to elevate services and meet customer needs in today’s rapidly changing tech landscape.

The next generation of customer support in tech

While all eyes are on artificial intelligence (AI), specifically generative AI, as a panacea to achieving the goals of customer support organizations, there are foundational decisions for support leaders to make that go beyond technology. The right choices today have the potential to transform the customer support function into an ace up the sleeve of B2B tech companies—a key service offering differentiator, which is just as critical as go-to-market and product teams in driving efficient growth and value for organizations.

To understand how high-performing support teams differentiate themselves from the rest, Deloitte conducted a two-part study to determine how tech support leaders are evolving their organizations. We collected qualitative insights through detailed interviews, and then we leveraged a survey to get a broader set of perspectives to validate and quantify our findings. Given the rapidly evolving space and technological advancements, we then added insights from real-time conversations with subject-matter specialists and our clients.

Explore our full report for the findings.

Creating next-gen customer support: Strategic considerations

Based on our extensive work with customer support teams for technology companies focused on enterprise software products, high-performing customer support organizations1 are expanding their purview across three key value drivers and dedicating resources and efforts into building capabilities toward earning revenue, saving costs, and delighting customers2. Insights from the interviews and survey helped us identify the trade-offs support leaders are navigating as they evaluate options related to these five questions:

Click each tab to explore each question.

For more insights on creating high-performance customer support in today’s B2B high-tech landscape, download our full report.

Get in touch

Marybeth D’Souza

Principal

Deloitte Consulting LLP

mardsouza@deloitte.com

Karl Rupilius

Senior Executive

Deloitte Consulting GmbH

karupilius@deloitte.de

Jaden Herrin

Managing Director

Deloitte Consulting LLP

jherrin@deloitte.com

Anu Tadepalli

Senior Manager

Deloitte Consulting LLP

antadepalli@deloitte.com

Tejas Joshi

Manager

Deloitte Consulting LLP

tejoshi@deloitte.com

Sierra Smith

Manager

Deloitte Consulting LLP

siesmith@deloitte.com

Contributors: Gopal Srinivasan, Aftab Khanna, Murat Ozturk, and Rohan Gupta

Endnotes

1 For most support organizations, “high performance” means resolving or responding to a customer request in an expedited manner. Regardless of the metric used, we focused on those companies that outperform their internal expectations. The top 25% are the high-performing customer support departments that, by their own accord, are delivering excellent customer service.
2 Customer Experience stands out as a key value driver as companies who lead in customer experience are winning over customers and setting themselves apart as shown in our 2021 study, "Close the expectation gap with your B2B customers", by Tim Greulich, Gopal Srinivasan, and Deepak Sharma.
3 For more on "right-channeling" and other trends facing support and contact centers take a look at our latest contact center survey report at https://www.deloittedigital.com/us/en/offerings/customer-led-marketing/digitalcustomer/contact-center-survey.html
4 Gopal Srinivasan, Marybeth D’Souza, Deepak Sharma, Aftab Khana, Lindsey Cash and Anand Mohan, “Customer outcomes: The cornerstone of exponential growth” accessed July 24, 2023.
5 Rohan Gupta, Gopal Srinivasan, and Marybeth D’Souza, “The Growth of NDR as a measure of Enterprise SaaS performance” accessed July 24, 2023.

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