Tech Support is sales

Tech support should be treated as a sales and product development channel, not a cost center, according to an article that draws on the author's experience at Smart Bear. The author says the company made millions of dollars in individual and enterprise sales without a traditional sales function, because its tech support helped customers succeed with their jobs. The article also argues that support conversations reveal product insights, such as the questions that led Smart Bear to focus on peer code review rather than "version control data mining."