Overview

On the surface, customer support centers appear not to be much different from other types of call centers. They employ people who receive calls, answer e-mail messages and conduct text chat sessions with customers, many of whom may have already looked up information by themselves on the company's Web site or by interacting with the center's interactive voice response (IVR) system.

But support centers are different in a few key respects. The calls and contacts can get hellishly complex and sometimes takes hours if not days to resolve, the solutions sometimes entail shipping the piece of !#$%^&*(() to the depot and having field repair to drop by and fix the wretched thingamabob.

For those reasons support centers are almost always more costly to operate than customer service/sales centers. Labor costs alone are 10%+. While you can offer as low as $7 $8/hour for a customer service agent you will have to fork over $20 to $25/hour for a senior rep. The costs of resolving a support issue, like 'my cellphone died' can range into hundreds of dollars compared with the tens of dollars to answer a customer service/sales issue: "Where can I sign up and get one of your phones. My old one didn't work and their tech support stunk."

But support centers can also make money on the service they provide. Support contracts have become, for an increasing number of firms, profit streams almost as valuable as the profit streams for the products. Like razor blades rather than the...