Design Supporting Support: An Unsung Relationship
Collaboration is an important skill for a designer, and we find ourselves having to hear and balance many opinions. Design teams often work very closely with product teams (for product direction) and engineering teams (for executing on the designs), and then less closely with sales teams (to sign contracts that involve key new features).
However, one team that often doesn’t get enough design team collaboration time is the customer support team. In this article, I’ll highlight the reasons behind this often unsung relationship, discuss the benefits of working with support, as well as a few communication methods and results.
Why Support Support?
The most obvious benefit of design/support collaboration is being able to hear the most common user gripes directly from the source. Support teams have ground level access to usage metrics, direct complaints, support tickets, and cancellation reasons. Leveraging these insights allows design teams to directly address user issues and produce a better experience. Ideally this loop is cyclical. Insight begets change begets new insights, which all leads to the creation of a more user-centered product. Having support as one of the voices in design ideation sessions helps prevent early pitfalls and is one way of ‘having the user in the room’ while the product is designed.
Another reason for this is that support has access to the actual users the product is designed for. The support team is building relationships with users on a daily basis, whether it’s addressing their requests for help, processing cancellations, or talking to them directly about the issues they may be having with the product. This means support is uniquely able to schedule user interviews and provide potential contacts for user testing, ensuring design teams get the user feedback they need to proceed in the design process.
A close relationship with the design team also allows support teams to ask for assets more easily. A Knowledge Base or Help Desk is better when design has had a chance to ensure it’s up to usability and current brand standards. Updated and current image and video assets allow for the creation of webinars that match a company’s current visual style.
Channels of Communication
I think one of the things RocketReach does exceedingly well is that we generally have great interdepartmental communication and design/support communication is no exception here. Most companies have a channel where people can report bugs and software issues to the engineering team, but in addition to that, we have a channel where we offer the same, but for design. This allows anyone (but in our case, especially support) to highlight UX and usability issues. This ensures we as a design team know what’s going on and can provide a fix as soon as is sensible.
Being close to the support team is also a boon for us. Mishelle, our Digital CSM, runs an ongoing system of churn interviews, allowing us regular facetime with customers who have just left our platform. She also helps us with contacts for user testing through the Maze platform, which enables us to spin up quick flows and get feedback from actual RocketReach users before having to undergo the costly development process.
Through this process, we’ve been happy to discover that our customers are kind with their time and give good, targeted feedback while being really nice. That’s given us a ton of insight into how to build and how to price our product.
Thinkific Platform
One of the culminations of the support/design collaboration here at RocketReach is our Thinkific course. At some point, through our conversations, we realized that a video course on how to use RocketReach would not only help customer retention by ensuring that customers who paid for the product know how to maximize its potential, but also reduce support workload by allowing them to refer users not only to the entire course for completion, but also specific chapters as standalone videos. This means that they can simply send a link to a user instead of having to record their own video to demonstrate a certain part of RocketReach’s functionality, saving them lots of time in the long run. The Thinkific course currently has 14 modules with interstitial quizzes, and is continually being expanded with new content as new RocketReach features launch.
Conclusion
Though it’s important for design to work closely with engineering and product, support is another relationship that often doesn’t get the credit it deserves. When design teams collaborate closely with support teams, the product receives better user feedback and support, support receives better assistance from design, and the company is better for it.
