This is part 2 of a 3-part series about the challenges support teams might face during an acquisition. You can read Part 1: The Good Stuff here)
It seems every week another acquisition is announced here in the tech industry*. Last week, I gathered a group of customer support friends new and old on a Zoom call to discuss our experiences, cheers, jeers, tips, frustrations, and questions related to companies either acquiring or being acquired.
Here is some of the gripes that were shared:
The Downsides
While this conversation was fairly informal, the tenor of the chat thread that preceded it gave me a pretty good sense that emotions would be…a little heated on this topic. So, I made sure to structure the discussion so that we started by focusing on the positives. Once people shared what had gone well in their acquisitions, I opened the floor for honest complaints and expressions of frustration. This is some of what I heard:
Prolonged Uncertainty for Employees and Customers
In many cases, acquisitions can involve months of negotiations and due diligence, and they often cost the acquiring company millions — if not billions — of dollars as well as the time and energy of a small army of staff members. Despite the hefty investment, it often felt to our participants like there was no plan for where the acquired company would fit within the existing structure of the acquiring company. Even in cases, where the acquisition makes sense in terms of the overall technical stack, the plan for technical integration and integration of teams often felt opaque or else non-existent.
One of the people on the call mentioned feeling strongly like they would have like an “itinerary for where the cruise ship was headed”. In another case, someone who worked at a company that was acquired mentioned being told that their company was going to be a “business unit” — basically an independent organization under the umbrella of the acquiring company — and that “nothing was going to change”. This all proved to be untrue. But the interim was confusing and painful, as most of the team kept doing business as usual while another smaller team was being drawn into meetings and discussions that made it clear a LOT of things were going to change.
While employees on both the acquiring and acquired side can be confused, the customers are often even more so. Acquisitions can sometimes lead to product names being changed, the acquiring company’s name totally disappearing, and a bunch of links that — seemingly overnight — throw 404s. As one person, who’d been on the acquiring side, put it, “Acquisitions are usually not about the customer. They often lead us to provide less value for the customer than before. One plus one sometimes doesn’t equal two; sometimes it even equals less than one.”
As CS leaders and professionals, it is painful to wake up one day and feel like you have been hampered in the critical work of supporting and retaining customers. Dealing with bugs and outages is tough enough without the added burden of having to reassure customers that your product will continue to exist for their mission-critical applications — especially if you are not sure that’s the truth.
“Acquisitions are usually not about the customer. They often lead us to provide less value for the customer than before. One plus one sometimes doesn’t equal two; sometimes it even equals less than one.”
Hurry Up and Slow Down
Despite the uncertainty of acquisition, wheels can sometimes still get put in motion in service of one or another effort to integrate the acquired company. One participant on the call spoke about a situation where they were asked to submit a comprehensive list of all the software they were using to the acquiring company’s IT department, who then repeatedly lost and requested it for several months in a row. After which point, the newly-acquired company’s CS team was sent invites to join new systems without having ever spoken to anyone about plans for how to offboard from old systems.
As you might imagine, the CS team at that company politely pumped the brakes on migrating to new systems until a real and realistic plan could be devised that would, not only, give them sufficient time to wind down from old systems, setup and get trained on the new ones, but also communicate any customer-facing changes to the customers themselves — giving them time to internalize the change before shutting down the old systems. The feeling across the room was that all this frustration and wasted time could have been avoided if the people at the acquiring company had taken the time to sit down to work on a plan with their new team members rather than trying to roll everyone down a “one size fits all” conveyor belt.
No “We”
The final theme is one that permeated the entire discussion of downsides to an acquisition, and that is the lack of team integration. Acquisitions can sometimes feel like arranged marriages where the leaders assume that the two teams will grow to love each other over time.
However, many of us found this to be painfully untrue. As one person commented during the call, “Years have gone by and it is still a very ‘us versus them’ dynamic.” People also spoke of never really being given a space to understand the “other side” of the business and how the pieces fit together. Without deliberate ownership of the integration project, it doesn’t happen and people stick with who and what they know.
Even in cases where an olive branch is extended, it can oftentimes be totally rejected. Someone on the call mentioned reaching out to the CS team on the “acquirer’s side” and either being told that “they didn’t think it was wise to be talking to them” or that they could talk but were better off keeping the communications a secret, since they were not sanctioned by senior leadership. It all led to a needlessly paranoid and hostile environment.
Participants also spoke of the hierarchy inherent in acquirer – acquired relations. There sometimes seemed to be the assumption that because the acquiring company had the money and power to acquire the other one, that the people at the acquiring company where someone better, smarter, more interesting than the acquired. As someone whose company had acquired several others called out, “The little company was probably crushing it in their space, which is why you acquired them in the first place.” The feeling was confusion about why companies were essentially “leaving money” on the table by underinvesting in nurturing the relationships that would make the acquisition a success.
Wanna know more about how support teams fare in acquisitions? Click here to read Part 3: The Tricky Stuff
You’ll already know who to talk to and can (hopefully!) avoid wasting time going down blind alleys.
* Non-exhaustive list of new acquisitions
Camille E. Acey 
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