Customer Support needs to be more than fixing customer issues
Bridging the Support - Product gap
Summary: here Talkr COO Marc talks about his past experience in both customer support and product roles and how being part of both World’s helped him understand the importance of bridging the customer support-product gap.
My path to being a product manager for an early stage startup was a fairly convoluted journey but it was largely via first line and technical support, something that I came to realise was a bit of a blessing.
I may be the first person ever to see owning first line support for a tech startup, one where the user platform at the heart of the business was considered impossible to use by everyone that came near it, as a blessing but here's why…
I understood the pain both customers (users) and support teams faced with the products we were offering.
The voice of the customer (VoC) is crucial when improving the user experience and a key data stream for this I found was the interactions between support and the end user.
Understanding a user’s pain, or empathy with the end user, is important as it’s easy sometimes in the product world to gloss over an issue as you know there is a simple workaround or that the issue will be solved when the ‘new update’ is released. Problem is, the user may not easily know the workaround and in all likelihood during a time of frustration will not be checking the road map…
This user therefore has one outlet and that is the first line support team.
First line support empathy is something all product people should have. The support team are the face of the product, the tone of the product and almost certainly know more about what customers really think of the product and where it needs to improve.
Therefore I find the relationship between product and support should be a mutually beneficial one. The product team need to see support as easy access to a treasure trove of customer insights, genuine and non-biased data which I'll come to in a minute. The support team should always be gaining knowledge from the product team and share this with customers that will strengthen that support-customer relationship.
Now, the treasure trove of customer insights. Doing a customer survey is all well and good and does give you some great qualitative information however by nature these will often be slightly biased. In my experience those customers who go out of their way to complete the surveys are weighted towards having a favourable opinion of your company and product. They, in all likelihood, will not be giving a brutally honest assessment of your new product or upgrade. To find out what your customers really think you need to look at the conversations with the support team; what steps in the user journey are customers getting frustrated enough to contact support, where in your product is the most confusion for users, and what tools can you give the support team to help them serve the most affected customers easily. Beauty of this is that these insights are not hard to find.
Ways to get and interpret the data
The Intercoms, Zendesks and Hubspots etc. all have easy ways to organise your customer support data (through the use of tags and groups for example) and this can be easily shared and analysed. These platforms allow a user to create customer reports including high level metrics such as satisfaction, incident numbers and incident types to name a few - as a product person or in the support team you can make these reports work for you.
But, to really understand what the customer is feeling you need to get into the detail. Tagging incidents allows your reports to show which were the most common / had the greatest impact - using those tags you can then start to review what the customer has been saying and understand their pain. However your product team choose to prioritise changes this customer pain needs to be part of the conversation.
This is just one relationship that your customer support team should have internally but there are more. Sales and customer support should also be engaged with each other and looked at as revenue drivers - a prospect has reached out to your support team, they are ready to chat and so what better opportunity is there to offer them something that will solve a problem they are having?
Talkr is designed to help startups build successful remote support teams but to also get the most out of that team. One of the ways we do this is to implement processes where the support team becomes a crucial asset to various areas of the business.
For more insights into how your company as a whole should be utilising your customer support team and the information they have, follow and read more from Talkr.