The goal of your agent support and product teams should be to make your customers successful. When these teams work together and share knowledge, it makes achieving this goal much easier. However, many companies fail to do this and instead create silos between teams. This leads to a lack of influence on product roadmaps and a lack of follow-up on customer feedback. To create real customer intimacy and improve feature adoption, integrate your support and product teams by gathering input from agents who interact with customers daily and providing them with in-depth product training. Here is a plan to get started.
1. Build customer intimacy through support shadowing
Product managers play a crucial role in creating solutions that meet customer needs. However, without regular interaction with customers, they may develop a product that does not align with customer preferences. To bridge this gap and foster customer intimacy, require product managers to shadow support reps on a monthly basis. During this time, they will work together to answer customer tickets, providing the product manager with first-hand insight into customer issues and the support rep with specialized product knowledge. To further enhance communication and collaboration, schedule regular Q&A meetings between the product and agent support teams, where they can discuss findings from these monthly shadow sessions.
2. Effortless feature requests and bug reporting
Support agents have a unique understanding of customer pain points and product issues. To capitalize on this valuable knowledge, establish a system that enables support agents to easily submit feature requests and report bugs. The method of submission can vary depending on the size of the company, for instance, a Slack channel or Trello board for a small startup, and gathering all requests from the support team and sharing it with the product team for larger companies. This will ensure that the product team is aware of the customer's needs and the product's vulnerabilities, helping them to make more informed decisions.
3. Enable support agents to be trusted advisors
Product managers play a crucial role in equipping support agents with the knowledge to serve as trusted advisors to customers. It is important for product managers to ensure that support agents not only understand the technical aspects of new features but also the reasoning behind them. This approach enables support agents to not only fix issues but also demonstrate to customers how to maximize the value of the product.
4. Leverage your support team's expertise
Support agents have a wealth of knowledge about customer behavior and preferences, making them valuable partners in developing effective onboarding experiences. By involving support agents in the development process, product teams can tap into their expertise and ability to tailor support to individual customers. This can be achieved by creating an interactive onboarding experience that mimics a conversation and adapts to customer responses, similar to their interactions with an agent. This approach not only improves the onboarding experience but also helps to foster customer engagement and satisfaction.
5. Streamline ticket tagging for better product data
Tagging tickets is an essential part of support agent's duties, enabling them to organize, filter, and measure tickets, and improve their performance. However, it can be time-consuming and take away from an agent's ability to solve tickets. To streamline this process and make it more efficient, use a system that allows for tagging while answering tickets. Additionally, it is important to consider the data needs of the product team and ensure that the support team's ticketing software easily integrates with the product team's task-tracking software. This allows for easy access to support ticket data, reduces the burden on support teams, and leads to faster response times and increased customer satisfaction.
6. Incorporate support into the release pipeline
Include your support team in the quality assurance process for product launches. Utilize them as beta testers to run a final internal validation before releasing new features or products to customers. This not only improves the product, but also gives support reps the opportunity to become familiar with new features.
Better Together
By building customer intimacy, streamlining feature requests and bug reporting, enabling support agents to be trusted advisors, leveraging support team's expertise and streamlining ticket tagging for better product data, companies can improve their customer experience and drive adoption of new features. If you're looking to improve your CX, consider working with a CX solutions firm like Smoothen to help streamline and optimize your support and product teams.
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