A Love Letter From UX to Support
Because no one sees users’ experiences more than the support team
I consider myself an accidental UXer, and I think that’s something worth embracing. Many people in UX come from other places, and this wealth of perspectives is what makes the field so great — a lot of great end results come from unexpected means. (Case in point: beer was an accidental by-product of how Mesopotamians stored grain. Look it up!) Considering how popular UX has become, it was never my personal ambition until I realized I’d been doing it all along.
Now, I’ve stumbled across one of the most fulfilling roles I’ve ever occupied — and it only happened because of the time that I spent on my company’s support team.
When I started at CallRail, I joined the support team in hopes that a stint in support would be a launchpad to other positions, especially at a growing tech company. Spending time on the front lines can be a thankless task, but it gave me an invaluable perspective on the inner workings of the company.
With that in mind, I’d like to take a moment to speak to the millions of customer support representatives who man America’s call centers. (And if you aren’t in a support role, what’s below is just as — if not even more! — important for you to read.)
Dear support agents,
You all get put through a lot. I’ve been there too, and I know that customer support doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves.
The fact of the matter is that anyone who can do a good job of spending 40+ hours a week directly hearing the concerns of customers serves not only as a means of keeping clients from fleeing the business, but also as the eyes, ears, and mouth of the business as well. (They also deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor if they’ve had to work late because of a platform-breaking bug.)
Everyone at your company is incredibly reliant on you for more than they know — and now that I’m in the UX department, I’m more aware of that than ever.
Our teams have one major thing in common: we both think about our customers all of the time. We know that your role keeps you in constant communication with the customers that keep the business going, and as UXers, we find that incredibly valuable. That’s why it’s so important for us to be friends.
While you’re talking directly to customers, UX is in the background, obsessing over the customer experience. We’re in the support inbox almost as much as you are (surprise!), and we study how you explain solutions to customers for problems we didn’t even know existed yet. Your team provides an endless reference for us since you’re who customers go to first. (And before you interpret this as living in a surveillance state, just know we are never anything less than appreciative — it’s not our job to judge you because we’ve got our own jobs to do, and you are instrumental in helping us do them.)
I strongly encourage you to feel empowered to form relationships with UX folks, because we really benefit from knowing what you see. My connection with the UX team while I was a support agent helped us both do our respective jobs better: I gained broader perspective via my insights into the company’s decision-making, and the UX team used the raw information I provided them to make a stronger, well, user experience. Everyone won.
Email them, get lunch, schedule a quick meeting, however you can get the information across. Support documentation not clear? You’re going to hear about it. Button placed in a weird location on the site? You’re the first team that will know. You handle all the weird outlier cases that targeted user research doesn’t.
You definitely have a powerful voice, even if it’s easy to feel powerless after an hour-long phone call with someone who’s forgotten you’re human. There’s a difference between the customers your company has, the customers they think they have, and the customers they want — and you understand that disparity better than anyone. When you speak up, you give your company valuable knowledge about who your customers are and what they need. Always remember that you have the power to steer your company in the right direction and be recognized for it.
Love,
Dan
The fundamental takeaway from this is that there’s a lot of power contained in a good support team, and it’s easy to forget that and not utilize it to its fullest extent. This is especially true for UX teams: UX writes the record, but support plays the live show. They’re the ones that know all the hits by heart.
Even if you’re not on a UX team, the time you spend connecting with the support team will never be wasted — whether it’s empowering your support agents by acknowledging their impact or picking their brains for what they’re noticing.
Introduce yourself when you see them in the break room. Find some space on your calendar and get them into a conference room. There’s plenty of ways to do it, choose your own adventure. But any good therapist will tell you that communication is the key to any relationship, and I strongly recommend you exercise that with your support team. Your company will be better for it and so will you.
Dan Wakefield is a UX Content Strategist at CallRail. Between his numerous projects writing words, he occasionally writes music as well and spends as much time as possible with his cat Refrigerator.
