When does customer service end? Not at the sale, and not when the ticket closes. It ends when the customer no longer needs you to get the value they paid for, and that is usually much later than your process assumes.
Have you ever noticed that the small entrepreneur will go that extra mile, while the big businesses don’t bother? The easiest explanation is that smaller business owners are closer to their customers. They see the repeat business that good customer service
Why don’t the big companies do the same?
The easy answer is that they are too far removed from the customer. That isn’t really the heart of it.
More and more often you see businesses and senior staff who think they are where they are forever and that nothing is going to change. The one good thing to come out of this recent recession is the realization that this is just not the case. If you don’t care about your customers and have a good business model to boot, you won’t be in business for long. I know that’s a bit harsh, and a lot of innocent people suffered. But maybe the realization that growth is not the final objective is a lesson worth learning.
Distance is only half of it. The other half is how big companies measure themselves. A large support operation gets judged on what it can count: tickets closed, calls handled, minutes per contact. None of those numbers can tell you whether the customer got what they bought. A ticket marked resolved is a statement about your queue. It says nothing about the customer’s week.
How does a big company lose touch with its customers?
Nobody decides to. It happens one sensible step at a time. A sales team hands off to an onboarding team, onboarding hands off to support, support hands off to a specialist group, and billing sits in a different building. Each handoff makes sense on its own. Together they put four or five people between the customer and the person who could actually fix their problem.
Every one of those people is measured on their own piece. Sales is measured on closed deals. Onboarding is measured on how fast the account goes live. Support is measured on tickets. Nobody is measured on whether the customer is still glad they bought. That gap is where after-sales service quietly disappears.
The small business owner has none of this. When something goes wrong, the customer calls the same person who sold them the product. There is nowhere to hide and nobody to pass it to. That is the whole secret of the extra mile: it isn’t extra when you are the only one standing there.
What does after-sales service actually cost you, and what does it return?
It is essential that every business provides an appropriate level of after-sales SERVICE. That should be more than a phrase on the website. It should deliver VALUE.
The money argument is not subtle. Harvard Business Review reports Bain & Company research showing that a 5% increase in customer retention can lift profits by 25% to 95%. Keeping the customer you already won is the cheapest growth available, and after-sales service is where retention is decided.
I thought the sale was the finish line for the customer relationship. It’s the starting gun. The first purchase tells you the customer took a chance on you. What happens in the weeks after tells you whether they would do it again.
That is the same point I made in Exceptional Customer Service: a customer who feels looked after after the sale will tell people, and the ones who feel dropped will tell more people, faster.
What does good after-sales service look like in practice?
It is less dramatic than people expect. Most of it is small, boring and scheduled.
- A check-in shortly after delivery. A short call or note asking whether the product arrived, works and does what they hoped. It catches the quiet problems that customers never bother to report.
- Plain answers to billing and warranty questions. These are the contacts that feel most like an argument. Make the answer easy to find and easy to act on.
- Proactive notice of known problems. If you know a batch is late or a feature is broken, tell the customer before they find out. Customers forgive a problem. They don’t forgive being the last to know.
- A real person at the end of an escalation. When the first answer fails, the customer needs a name and a number, not another queue.
None of these needs a large budget. They need someone to decide that service continues after the sale and to put it on a calendar.
Who owns the customer after the sale?
If you can’t answer that in one sentence, you have found your problem.
In a small shop the owner owns the customer. In a larger company the honest answer is often “everyone,” which in practice means no one. The customer calls, gets transferred, explains the situation again, and gets transferred again. By the third explanation they have stopped being a customer and become a case.
The fix is to name an owner for every customer problem, and keep the same owner until it is resolved. That owner doesn’t have to solve it personally. They have to stay with it, chase the other teams, and tell the customer where things stand. In a support operation of around 180 people, that single rule does more for the customer’s experience than any new tool I have seen.
It also changes how the internal teams behave. When someone owns the outcome, handoffs get cleaner, because nobody wants to explain why their piece went missing.
How do you measure where service should end?
The easiest way to measure it is to ask your customers. Don’t be afraid to send out surveys and questionnaires, but make sure you pay attention to the responses and do something about the issues your customers tell you they don’t like.
Three questions are enough to find the real edge of your service:
- Did you get what you bought? Not “was your ticket closed.” Did the product or service actually do the job?
- Would you buy from us again? This is the retention question, and it is the one that links back to the 5% above.
- What was the last thing that annoyed you? An open question gets you the issue no tick-box survey will list.
Then close the loop. If a customer tells you the setup guide was wrong and nothing changes, they have learned that answering your survey is a waste of their time. I’ve run support teams of around 180 people, and the pattern holds at that scale: the survey is the easy part. The follow-through is the work. The same listening problem shows up in Communication and Customer Service.
Where do you start on Monday?
You don’t need to rebuild anything to begin. Pick the next five customers who bought from you and do the following.
- Look at what happened to them after the sale. Not the system view. Read the actual emails and ticket notes. Count how many times each customer had to repeat themselves.
- Find the point where the trail goes cold. It is usually a handoff. That is where service ends in practice, whatever the policy says.
- Ask the customers. Call two of them. Ask whether they got what they bought and what annoyed them last. Write down the answers word for word.
- Fix one thing this month. One handoff, one missing follow-up, one unanswered question. Small and finished beats large and planned.
Then do it again with the next five. Within a quarter you will know more about your real after-sales service than any report will tell you.
So, when does customer service end?
Here is the version I would put on the wall of a support floor. Service ends when the customer stops needing you to get value from what they bought. Until then, every contact is part of the sale, whether your org chart says so or not.
The small entrepreneur knows this without a dashboard. The big company has to decide to know it, and then build the measures, the survey follow-up and the habit of asking. It’s not a staffing problem. It’s a decision about where you think the job stops.
Hutch Morzaria is a Director-level CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building global support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has hired dozens of support and CX leaders across his career and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
