Case Study: Nailing the right requirements to improve customer support
TL; DR: A short case study about using customer journey, UX audit, jamming sessions to consolidate the right requirements to improve customer support.
Background
Our company, TableCheck, is a restaurant industry startup based in Tokyo. We have two products; TableCheck, a B2C booking web app, and TableSolution, a B2B restaurant management web app. While we provide complete support for TableSolution, we can only provide limited support for TableCheck users as it is a lot dependent on the restaurant users are dining at.
P.S. Resource and budget constraints are real 😢
Problem Discovery
After the TableSolution website redesign release (check out the post here), we received an influx of inquiries. Now, I was spending time in analyzing the “type” of inquiries received. I would rather say absolutely confused to see TableCheck users funnel in through the pipeline meant purely for prospective TableSolution customers. Both products have different messaging, different use cases, different target users. Something was definitely going wrong 🤔
Customer Journey
To dig deeper, I started to map out the TableCheck users’ customer journey, and we nailed one of the problems. Having a user persona by the side through this process was truly helpful. When you KNOW the user, things get easier!
For ease of understanding, I’m sharing the most prominent user flow which stood out as a core problem for us.
Problems with this user flow:
- “For Restaurants” text is to divert restaurateurs to the B2B product website. However, due to the poor text copy, TableCheck users assume it to be something of their use. The text “For Restaurants” is not a good navigation item. 📝
- It is a fiasco when TableCheck users seek support on TableSolution website and TableSolution help center 😣
- TableCheck users have no satisfactory support option except a call 😔
User Experience Audit for TableCheck Users
The important stories related to user support for us at this point were:
- As a TableCheck user, I want to do a quick search for my problem so that I can my query myself asap
- As a TableCheck user, I want to contact customer support asap so that I can get my query resolved
In addition, we were dissatisfied with the general information architecture and layout of the page 👎🏻. We definitely needed a solution to this!
This image is taken after we changed the text from “For Restaurants” to “For Restaurateurs” to provide better navigation.
The overall picture was starting to get transparent i.e. the TableCheck users when desperate for support were unable to find it easily 🤕.
Getting the right team involved
Once I wrapped up notes about the concerns in the customer journey, I knew I needed to talk to our support team. We have a small but dedicated support team for TableSolution and TableCheck users.
Talking to them I realized there are greater operational problems causing users to struggle for support. The tools we were using for managing content and support tickets did not meet our requirements well. So following this discussion, we quickly scheduled a jamming session where along with the support team we sat down together to list down all the problems we are facing with our product support.
Nailing the Business Requirements
At the end of this process, we were able to figure out what users and we exactly needed now. We derived solid foundational requirements for our B2B and B2C products! Using these requirements we evaluated several product support tools in the market (FreshDesk, Zendesk, etc.).
These requirements hold true for generally for all products. Leaving the categorized requirements here for reference:-
User experience across services
- We want to support multi-language help content so that our users don’t need a translation service to read our content
- We want to have a clearly structured and categorized content so that our users can easily traverse information with no frustration
- We want the users to be able to search for their queries on our help center so that they can find answers instantly without having to wait for our support team
- We want the users to be able to search for their queries while using our app so that they can find their answers instantly without leaving the app
- We want the users to be able to search for their queries across the internet so that they can find answers instantly with a Google search
- We want the users to be able to instantly connect to us through all possible channels so that their queries get resolved asap
- We want the users to be able to instantly connect to us while using our app so that their queries get resolved asap without leaving the app
- We want to efficiently communicate using additional information via images, videos, pdf documents, etc so that we can hand-hold the user if they’re lost
Resource/Effort Management
- We do not want to spend time answering repeated queries from the users so that we can use our time to answer difficult ones
- We do not want to promote the users to raise tickets for trivial support so that they do not have to wait long to find answers
- We want the users to raise tickets for us so that we can solve technical issues and bugs
Success Metrics
- We want to measure our content quality against user queries so that we can continuously improve our content
- We want the users to give feedback on their experience of resolving a query so that we can improve continuously and provide a seamless experience
- We want to measure our response rate per team member so that we can evaluate our bandwidth and user satisfaction thoroughly
The points under Success Metrics were only a starting point to measure our customer satisfaction and our progress. We worked through to derive several other data points important in different categories like Content, Query Resolution, Channel Management, etc.
Result
- Our support team is now using one tool to manage all support efforts within the company. The number of support calls has reduced by 12% after launching multi-language help centers for TableSolution and TableCheck because the users were able to find help for easy questions quickly
- The influx of TableCheck users on TableSolution sales and support funnel has decreased by 30% after launching the new help center
- We have started to track Customer Satisfaction rate :)
Personal Takeaways
Nothing is better than getting closer to the user
Due to certain decisions, we made in the past, we were just drifting away from our users. But the moment we got proactive about resolving this and understanding the user journey in detail, we had our “Aha!” moments.
Deriving the right requirements from this understanding was pure gold since this helped to lay the framework for product support.
Effective communication and a great team are irreplaceable
Most of our team members face some sort of language barrier. So it was difficult to understand the operational problems individual member faces. But empathy and effective communication with the best of our abilities helped us work as a team and come to a solution which is now a foundation for all our customer support effort in the company.
