From the course: Creating a Business Plan

Supporting your product

From the course: Creating a Business Plan

Supporting your product

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- Another operational area to cover in your business plan is how are you going to support your product or service? Just because you sell it doesn't mean you're done. What's it going to take to deliver aftercare, to handle returns, to deliver customer service when your customers have questions? How are you going to staff that service? Are you going to insource it and have people within your organization who do it? Are you going to outsource it to another organization? Are you going to make it self-help? What are the expectations that your customers are going to have for this support? How many calls do you expect? How many incidents are you going to handle? What's the return rate on your product going to be? And what expertise is going to be required to handle some of these issues? You need to spell out all of these operational components in your business plan because if you don't think about them, you're going to have operational challenges down the road. Let's look at an example. When the internet was first booming, America Online used to sell internet access on an hourly basis. And their business was supported a certain way from an operation standpoint for customers who had questions or concerns with that hourly access model. They then decided to go to unlimited access. And people's usage of the internet exploded well beyond what people thought was going to happen. That had huge customer service implications. Now, you had more customers using the service. You had some service issues that they had to deal with, and that larger customer base placed an operational strain on the business. The business recovered and dealt with those operational issues, but there were periods of difficulty when it first went with the unlimited model. The lesson here is, think about how you're going to support your business before you make any operational changes. And this is exactly what you'll be doing as you write this section of your business plan.

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