Low Cost Solutions to Customer Issues

New products / features and sales can be where most of your income lies. The last thing you want to have to do is pay money to support your existing products, as that does not benefit your bottom line. Its a necessary evil of any business. So what can you do to minimize the support cost for existing products?

Consider all avenues of solving an issue, look at the amount of time it will take and overall cost, chose the option with the best solution to both.

What Options are There?

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It is human nature to want to solution a problem as quickly as possible to get it out of our minds. This can be a good approach depending on your level of expertise on a given subject, or it could pidgin hole you into a solution that may not be the best one. Here are some questions to ask to help guide your thinking for a customer problem:

What would the total cost be to fix this the right way? While this may not be at the top of your list, it has always been on the top of mine coming from an operational mindset as it can often be the "right choice". Coming from an operations background issues that are not solved right have past and future operational costs through the months and even years which are not always considered.

What can I do to just work around the issue? How many times would we need to workaround? What would the total time be for these workarounds? When doing workarounds also consider the time it takes for customer contacts and support costs for these workarounds.

Can we switch the customers product to something which does not have this issue? Often times there is already something new in the pipeline. It might be better to accelerate development and movement of customers with issues to these new products as its not worth the cost of investing in known issues for a no longer supported product.

Choose not to fix the issue. Always a valid option, granted not a popular one. There are some customer requests or features which product does not want to implement. The feature may be too costly or there may not be enough financial benefits to implementing it.

Define the Total Cost Per Solution

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With all of your options defined, there are some key aspects to look at per solution to determine what the total cost of that option might be. These will add up to the real cost of any given issue. Notice the key aspect here I am adding is the ongoing operational support cost of issues which is not always factored in.

1. Product / architecture cost for defining the issue and coming up with a new solution.

2. Implementation cost for production or development of that solution.

3. Cost of customer contacts on this issue per unit of time if left unfixed. Does this change with time / volume?

4. Cost of operational support of this issue from the people fixing the issue themselves (again factor in number of hours / cost per unit of time).

5. What is the cost to the company of delaying other projects to fix this issue?

6. What are the cost benefits of working on the current project pipeline and deferring this work?

7. What would the cost be of losing the customer if we are unable or unwilling to fix the issue?

From here its just simple math to determine the lowest cost solution. When you add up the factors: cost of tier's 1-3 support and replacement costs until the projected fix date, subtract that from the cost of development and benefit of ongoing projects you will have an answer.