"Cost center" can be transformed into something else given both an understanding that support can and should contribute to future sales, and an organization capable of putting that understanding to work.
I have seen a similar scenario in manufacturing where various setup, prep, quality tasks are seen as cost centers and minimized.
Doing this kind of thing has ripple costs. Always.
In a perfect world, we make software, or hardware, and it just works and people grok it.
In the one we live in, these are fantasies and we can choose to understand, recognize the value, or not and get the benefits or not.
The users, customers, move from role to role, and support often determines their willingness to use the product again. That is straight up powerful marketing by referral.
Support often is the first to understand a user, customer needs an option too, or add on, replacement, preventative maintenance. Done right, these leads into lean, consistent sales.
"Cost center" to me has always been a bit silly in this way. There is opportunity to add value throughout the chain of people, process, machines, systems that are all necessary to properly conceive, realize and deliver something to others.
One thing often missed along with failing to understand value is failing to ask to be compensated for it.
Doing things in a robust, high value for the dollar way is not the cheapest way, in terms of raw product price, and depending, size of margin.
But, we do get what we pay for too, and the lowest price often comes with externalities paid by both the enterprise and its customers too.
Sometimes I see this all framed as a luxury. That is just as much of an error, and does come with unnecessary costs and or poor alignment with actual value.
Our support team is not technical in any way (they are support for our entire moderately sized membership-based nonprofit), but they are consistently a source of extremely high quality feedback, for the reasons you mentioned.
If there are serious UX issues, your designer might not uncover them, but support will hear about it. If there are edge case performance issues, your dev team might not uncover them but support will hear about it. Very few people know more about how real users interact with your products than support.
"Cost center" can be transformed into something else given both an understanding that support can and should contribute to future sales, and an organization capable of putting that understanding to work.
I have seen a similar scenario in manufacturing where various setup, prep, quality tasks are seen as cost centers and minimized.
Doing this kind of thing has ripple costs. Always.
In a perfect world, we make software, or hardware, and it just works and people grok it.
In the one we live in, these are fantasies and we can choose to understand, recognize the value, or not and get the benefits or not.
The users, customers, move from role to role, and support often determines their willingness to use the product again. That is straight up powerful marketing by referral.
Support often is the first to understand a user, customer needs an option too, or add on, replacement, preventative maintenance. Done right, these leads into lean, consistent sales.
"Cost center" to me has always been a bit silly in this way. There is opportunity to add value throughout the chain of people, process, machines, systems that are all necessary to properly conceive, realize and deliver something to others.
One thing often missed along with failing to understand value is failing to ask to be compensated for it.
Doing things in a robust, high value for the dollar way is not the cheapest way, in terms of raw product price, and depending, size of margin.
But, we do get what we pay for too, and the lowest price often comes with externalities paid by both the enterprise and its customers too.
Sometimes I see this all framed as a luxury. That is just as much of an error, and does come with unnecessary costs and or poor alignment with actual value.