The Trust Accelerator: How to Transform Support from a Cost Center to a Growth Engine

When a customer is fully engaged with your solution, leveraging it to its full potential, you see 23% more profit, revenue, and growth potential compared to the average customer.

This is the power of trust, and your customer success and technical support teams are the frontline ambassadors. Support isn't just about solving problems; it's about representing your entire company’s brand and values in every interaction. Trust is earned in seconds and lost in minutes.

But in the face of customer demand for instant, 24/7 resolution — what can feel like constantly "putting out fires" — how do you make support a sustainable, profitable part of your business?

Brie Clements shares her three-part framework, the Trust Accelerator, for transforming your support team. You can watch the recording above or continue reading below!

1. Build a Skills-Driven Support Framework

The traditional approach to support often relies on generic job roles and one-size-fits-all training. This overlooks individual strengths and leaves teams feeling unsupported and unempowered.

Instead, move toward a granular skills matrix to map individual capabilities and drive targeted development. This framework keeps it simple with four key areas:

• Technical Skills: Define proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced, subject matter expert) across all your solutions.

• Soft Skills: Identify crucial competencies like active listening or de-escalation for your service desk.

• Specialized Skills: Cover new feature education or unique technical needs.

• Growth Potential: Map team members' career aspirations to potential future openings within the organization.

This matrix empowers the team, gives them a tangible path for career progression, and allows managers to instantly identify the right subject matter expert (SME) to handle complex issues.

This translates directly to faster resolution times and improved customer trust.

2. Transform Support with Data-Driven Storytelling

Support teams traditionally report on metrics like ticket volume and response time, which focus on the what. However, executive stakeholders and customers are more invested in the why and the impact.

To prove the ROI of your support team (a common challenge for many organizations, you need to turn numbers into a compelling narrative using the four-step data storytelling framework:

• Context Setting: Frame the challenge by identifying the business problem, why it matters to stakeholders, and what’s at stake if the status quo remains.

• The Journey: Detail the actions taken, the obstacles overcome, and how the team adapted and improved.

• The Impact: Show the quantifiable results (e.g., $X savings annually, decline in escalation rate) and any qualitative improvements.

• Call to Action (CTA): End with what’s needed for continued success and what the next chapter of the story looks like.

Reframing Your Metrics: Instead of saying, "We closed 1,000 support tickets last month," say, "We prevented 1,000 potential customer defections.”. This simple shift in mindset makes the business impact clear.

One powerful example of this transformation: A support team tracked a customer's recurring network outages, which were impacting the court's public duty. This data turned a service problem into a multi-million dollar sales opportunity for a new cloud-based solution and allowed the customer to improve their own internal infrastructure.

3. Design Smart, Human-First Automation

When implementing automation and AI, the most important rule is to start with the humans first. A common pitfall is focusing solely on cost reduction, which can create a barrier between the customer and the human agent, leading to a negative customer experience.

A better approach is to automate the mundane and focus on enhancing human interactions. Some of these smart automation strategies include:

• Start Small: Begin with a low-risk task that has a high impact on overall process and use a small subset of tech-comfortable team members for a pilot. This allows you to gather feedback and measure initial success before scaling.

• Automate Mundane Tasks: Focus on high-volume tasks like information retrieval or smart routing based on your skills matrix. For instance, a complex issue can be triaged faster by automating the handoff to the right SME.

• Measure Quality, Not Just Efficiency: It’s easy to say you saved 10 minutes per agent, but the real question is: What did they do with that time, and was the resulting work of high quality? Measure automation by its accuracy and overall process efficiency gains.

By implementing these strategies, you build a foundation for continuous improvement, ensuring your support team is skilled, confident, and equipped to deliver experiences that drive revenue growth and transform support into the ultimate Trust Accelerator.

Your Next Steps

There were three main action items for you to focus on from this webinar:

• Assess your current state: Conduct a quick team skills assessment this week.

• Identify a quick win: Find one automation opportunity that your team spends a lot of time on (even a simple one) this month.

• Start planning: Outline your strategy for building trust, internally and externally, over the next 60 days.