3 Reasons CEOs Should Provide Direct Customer Support

development. But it's important to make sure you don't get so focused on the"high-level" tasks that you lose touch with what matters most—your customers and their experience with your company.

As CEO, you have a strategic vision for your company, and if you fulfill that vision, your business will thrive and grow. But that's only true to the extent that you can keep customers satisfied. Since you can't be around all the time to oversee customer support delivery, you must build the best team possible and ensure that everyone in the support group as well as employees across all departments understand the importance of the support mission.

There's no better way to underscore the significance of customer support than to spend time delivering it yourself. By participating in delivering support directly to customers, you're telling the support team that their job is critically important, and you're sending the same message to the rest of your employees, which can inspire greater levels of cooperation.

3. When you provide support as a CEO, you show customers how much they matter.

No matter how great your support team is, as CEO, you'll bring a different perspective to the customer service table. Many companies focus on building an "ownership culture," empowering employees to solve customer problems, and that's a good thing. But, still, the helpdesk rep's point of view will be more narrowly focused than yours.

As CEO, you have the ability to look at the issue from a unique perspective, using your 10,000-foot view to spot issues that may elude a rep focused primarily on maintaining high customer satisfaction scores. You can use this vantage point to effect changes in other parts of the organization that cascade down into the customer experience.

Also, think about the message you send when you, as CEO, jump on a helpdesk call and interact directly with a customer. You're letting that customer know how important her business is to you. It's an incredibly affirming experience for you and your customers.

For these reasons and more, you should make time to interact with your customers directly in a support role. Make it a regular thing to spend a day or at least a few hours working with your customer support team and speaking directly to clients who have contacted your company to resolve an issue. It will help keep you grounded in a way that no stack of data or consulting report ever could.

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Girish Mathrubootham is the CEO of Freshdesk, a provider of SaaS-based customer support software.

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