[Published 6/14/2023 via Mind the Product industry blog ]
In my earlier article Why customer support is a vital part of brand promise I talked about how customer support that’s integrated into product strategy and executed well can become a valuable differentiating “feature”. Within that, impactful and effective support is the outcome of intentional business strategy, highly functioning operational capabilities, and organizational leadership that can recruit, empower, engage and grow teams alongside customer-facing tools and technologies to deliver the intended customer experiences.
Taking the next step, what are some tangible ways organizations can introduce and integrate support into a product strategy? I have some insights based on experience, but every organization will have its own needs, parameters and requirements. Perhaps this can spark discussions or ideas for your own organization. And if you’ve done this or had some learnings, please share in the comments, I’d love to hear!
Customer Support as a Product Management perspective
Some ways Product Managers can integrate with Customer Support is to treat it like a product feature, both literally and as a stakeholder collaboration.
Planfully bring support into the product as a frictionless connection in the UI to resources and content when and where customers may have a support need. Intuit is one example that’s very good with this- where a workflow or element may be complex or confusing, they surface a “whats this” tag that links to relevant help content and then to support contacts if users still need more help. Tools like Pendo and Whatfix make these kinds of integrations seamless and powerful.
Partner with support to build, brand and operate self-help, online, interactive and direct support resources. There are huge collaboration opportunities across product and support around which content and channels might be needed by users when and where they might have questions and need supplemental resources. One example of this we leveraged at Microsoft during release planning was to tag all low severity customer facing defects that weren’t prioritized for a given release and create support knowledge content for them, on which product and support engineers collaborated.
Pull together marketing, product and support to extend the brand promise through support. If your brand mission/promise is “To inspire and innovate”, are product and support partnering to make the support model innovative, and is marketing helping tell that story? At athenahealth, the brand promise could be summarized as innovative healthcare technology and services to help deliver better outcomes”, and we worked closely across product and support teams to build support that was innovative and delivered better (support and product) outcomes.
Leverage support data and insights broadly. Support organizations should work to build and deliver robust value through the data that is their best resource. Support is often the highest volume of interactions that customers have (by far) with a product post-purchase- whether your company has 100, 1,000, or 100,000 support interactions a month, these are a source of tremendous insight around customers, product usage, use case, usability and many other parameters. To capture, synthesize, analyze and create value from this, support can partner with product, onboarding, success, experience, sales and other teams to architect tooling, analytics, reporting and engagement platforms that provide shared value and collaboration around customer and support insights. There are also huge AI opportunities with creating proactive, actionable, real-time support data that can serve as valuable support-product ecosystem platforms.
Customer Support as an organizational framework
Another opportunity to connect product and support is through organizational means. As a support leader, I’ve found a lot of success in structuring formal and meaningful points of collaboration across support and stakeholder organizations through monthly or quarterly joint business reviews to assess strategies, initiatives, results and ongoing planning. This type of engagement can benefit from organizational leadership level support, with visibility through internal communications channels.
An even further step that I’ve seen work extremely well is to embed support resources within product or scrum teams. These can be well structured and defined roles and responsibilities that work as a bi-directional organizational interface between support and these teams to surface and drive joint strategy, plan and roadmap information with support leadership, and formalize the same back into product teams with data from support tooling, analytics, reporting and engagement platforms I mentioned above. At Microsoft, I was in such a role on a database product that was complex to support, with issue handle times 3x to 4x other products. In working with product on a new release, I brought data on the most intractable customer issues, from which with the product team developed UI “wizards”- step by step setup and configuration aids in the product. These eliminated several downstream support issues and were enormously popular with users- a true win-win.
Conclusion
If you connect customer support into the product strategy and execute it well, it can become a valuable differentiating feature because when they are aligned and work well together, they create enormous brand and customer synergies with tangible impacts to retention, LTV, NPS and more. Are there opportunities in your organization to do so?