Why It’s Important to Give Customer Support a Seat at the Product Table
Support is no longer a role where you’re just expected to answer the questions of customers. Support has grown to be a role which influences the decisions of every other department, and Product. If done right, you can use customer support feedback to hack growth for your business.
Product Managers can take advantage of a lot of help and guidance from Support for deciding features to be implemented or the prioritization of bug fixes. If both product and support work in consensus, it’s a win-win situation for both. Product managers can be confident knowing users are getting what they want and the support team can be satisfied knowing they advocated for the customer.
In this blog post, we will discuss the reasons why it’s important to give customer support a seat at the product table.
Support Knows What’s on the Roadmap (and What’s Not)
Imagine the quality of service your support reps can deliver if they can say what can be part of the product and what should not, along with a justification for it. For example, say a customer writes in to request the ability to edit a restricted code-block. An agent who’s involved in product meetings would understand that the code is not editable to make sure that nothing breaks when pushing new updates to all the customers, and can explain this to the customer.
This reasoning becomes clear to them when they attend the product meetings. It’s not just about what’s on the roadmap, it’s also about keeping them updated on the latest status of each item on the roadmap. We all know ETA’s depend on various factors but if the support team is aware of the upcoming changes in the product, they can set realistic expectations for the customers. Customer support is is always a collaborative effort between support and product. Don’t forget the upselling opportunities of Support conversations if agents know what’s coming up!
They’re the Ones Who Deal with Actual Use Cases from Customers
You might design your product based on a certain market or set of customer personas, but the real use cases often come from the Support team who deals with customers and see how they use it.
While it’s possible to use data analysis to see which aspects of your product are being used the most or the least, that information can’t give you the exact use case. This data can only be collected by having in-depth conversations like the support team does. Many Product Managers come from analytical backgrounds, so quantitative data is second nature to them. But anecdotal data from conversations is also important, because as Abby Griffin concluded1, just 10 customer interviews can reveal upto 80% of a customer’s unmet needs. Bringing support agents to the table and making them part of the discussion means you’re able to make use of the immense knowledge gathered by them.
Product Managers who do customer support themselves can begin to understand the use cases, but their time is limited. Imagine asking this information from people who do support every day and can share numerous use cases with you.
They Understand the Reasoning Behind Product Manager Decisions
Every product (and it’s roadmap) is designed with a long term vision in mind. Usually these decisions happen in isolation and the support team follows it as instructed. But making the support team part of these meetings means they can qualify the customers based on the future direction of the product. If support knows the vision, they can make better decisions about the workarounds they provide to customers. They can also gauge if their product is the right fit for customers in the long run – or if it’s best to let an ill-fitting customer churn.
It Gives the Support Team Confidence When Dealing with Customers
The simple psychological fact of being part of something and belonging to those decision making meetings can give them confidence2 in themselves and the product, and drive stronger engagement. As Joseph Folkman writes for Forbes, “Employees who felt a low level of empowerment were rated with engagement at the 24th percentile, whereas those with a high level of empowerment were at the 79th percentile.” This empowerment will reflect in their conversations. Instead of simply relaying what is passed on to them to the customer, they can also add an explanation. And being in control of things means they can actually enjoy these conversations with customers. In fact, it is not surprising that lack of engagement can often lead to burnout among employees.
How Support Can Earn Their Seat
Once Support is given a seat at the table, it’s a two way street where they will also be expected to live up to certain expectations. Some of the strategies which can help us, as support agents, deliver the best work are to:
Be Rational
As customer advocates, we tend to be driven by the idea of helping every customer in every possible way. As part of this drive, we advocate for every request that comes in, but in the real world not every request is possible. Adding every request to the backlog can stop your product from scaling. You’ll end up with a product like Homer Simpson’s car3 — it had everything anyone ever wanted, but was completely useless.
So, we have to showcase an analytical knack where we’re able to decide and prioritise the top things to fight for. The more we do this, the more we can contribute to the product meetings. We also need to make sure the requests we bring forward align with the product vision as a company.
Ask Why to Probe Deeper
We need to develop an understanding of the exact requirement the customer wants to achieve. Sometimes, it’s already possible to do what they want to accomplish in the product, but not in the way they expect. The customer can explain his/her pain point but we should not assume every pain point needs to be a feature request.
For example, if the customer mentions that they forget to assign the conversation to themselves after replying and wants to have an “Assign to Me” option when replying, it doesn’t mean you have to mark this as Feature Request.
The pain point here is forgetting to own the conversation. To which the solution could be an automation rule that already exists as an option.
Earn Respect
It’s not just about Support or Product but it’s a general rule where you earn respect with the quality of your work. If we follow the above two rules we automatically add quality to our work as Support. This quality will go long way in making the Support team’s voice strong when product decisions are made. The more we understand how Product Managers think the better this collaboration can be.
Conclusion
Support can bring a lot to the Product Table, but its a two way street. It requires a streamlined communication process between the two departments and an understanding of each other’s ways of thinking and working. Fortunately, with being in Support we’re naturally skilled at understanding others and can easily earn our spot at the table by contributing with helpful insights!
Source
1 — https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.12.1.1
2 — https://www.forbes.com/sites/joefolkman/2017/03/02/the-6-key-secrets-to-increasing-empowerment-in-your-team/#346d8d7f77a6
3 — https://medium.com/@marksweep/why-homer-simpson-doesnt-run-product-fa1789945045
