How Product Managers can strike gold
5 benefits of working closely with Support, and how to do so.
Your support team is a gold mine. They hold tons of information that could be valuable to product teams — you just need to know how to effectively sift for those nuggets. Having previously worked in Support at Shopify, I’ve seen first-hand the value that Support has brought to Product.
As a new-ish Product Manager on the Channels Platform team at Shopify, I maintain a close relationship with Support throughout the product development lifecycle. Below are the 5 major benefits I receive from this relationship, with some examples of how we extract this value at Shopify.
1. Unsolicited feedback, at scale
Your customers go out of their way to reach out to Support. Whether they ask for help, request a new feature, or simply tell you how much something sucks, this information can be leveraged to shape your product roadmap.
While UX research and customer surveys are great tools for gathering product feedback, the key differentiating factor about support interactions is that they are unsolicited. As a result, you get raw, honest, and often ample feedback that can help you make better product decisions.
At Shopify, we have a team called the Product Support Network (this is the support team I came from!) that embeds itself on product teams and acts as an intermediary between Support and Product, to help inform product decisions. One way they do this is through “deep dives.” The Product Support Network (PSN) will take a sample of 100+ support interactions for a specific product over a given timeframe, and review every single interaction. From this, they can observe trends, pain points, new product opportunities and get a sense of customer sentiment.
After every product launch, PSN will summarize the unsolicited feedback from their post-launch deep dive, and share it with the entire company.
A deep dive summary at Shopify includes (but is not limited to):
- Context: High-level product information, and details on what insights were gathered through this research
- Metrics: Overview of how the product is performing since launch (eg. funnel information, # of support interactions over the period, other KPIs)
- Takeaways: The top 3–5 trends observed in the research, and their current status (Is still a problem or has the team fixed this issue?). Each takeaway should have a data point (eg. % of support interactions over the period related to each trend)
- Quotes/Feedback: Quotes to help convey customer sentiment (both good and bad)
- Retrospective insight: Overall verdict of how this launch went (eg. what went well, and what could have been improved)
- Additional resources: Where to see the research inputs, how to get more information on open issues, and any other relevant resources
Try it yourself: Evaluate a sample of 100 support interactions over a given period, for a specific product or feature. Summarize your findings to share with the relevant product team.
2. Better customer stories
Compelling stories stick. Every day, your support team gets to know your customers on a personal level and gains an understanding of why they reached out for help. You can use examples from real customers to get your team and your stakeholders onboard with solving an issue. Things like quotes about why something is an issue, or videos showcasing a broken product flow all help build customer empathy — and Support has tons of these to share.
When you share the impact you’re having on your customers’ lives, whether big or small, this can help motivate your team to take action. This can be especially helpful as a PM, where you are often leading without authority and need to rally a team towards a shared goal.
When we first launched one of our sales channels, we saw a small number of instances where the shipment dates of products were being overwritten when we added tracking information to the order. We knew this wasn’t ideal, but we didn’t think much of it at first.
It wasn’t until our support team uncovered, through a handful of interactions, that these merchants were actually blocked from selling on this sales channel due to their shipment dates appearing to be late. PSN shared quotes from the conversations about how confused and defeated those merchants felt, not knowing what lead to their suspension on that channel. When our team heard the merchants’ stories about how one small data overwrite was impacting their businesses, we immediately set out to fix it, despite the limited reach of the issue, because we suddenly understood how much of an impact this had on each merchant.
We were able to rectify the issue and re-establish their selling privileges, as well as prevent any other merchants from running into the same problem. Had we not understood the full story, we would have let this issue persist for much longer, thinking it was insignificant.
Try it yourself: Find compelling customer stories by reaching out to your support team or reading support tickets. Share these stories with your team and gauge how it resonates with them, or use it to rally a team behind an issue that doesn’t have much traction yet.
3. Fresh Eyes
Support team members talk to your customers every day. They know your customers. They understand how your customers think.
Before exposing your new product to customers through beta testing or launch, run internal tests with your support team to get some preliminary feedback. Often, your support team can point out where your customers will struggle by drawing on previous interactions they’ve had. They can also highlight reasons why customers might not take well to a change which can help you assess your risk. What’s more, internal teams tend to be more accessible than customers, so you can set these up quickly and iterate sooner.
After running a few of these internal review sessions with Support at Shopify, we received some positive feedback from product team members!
“They pointed out a number of things I just hadn’t thought of, because I was concerned about something else. It really was fresh eyes, and ones honed by interacting with merchants. In some ways it provides a lot of the benefit of talking directly to merchants, but in a way that’s easier to access. Doesn’t replace direct merchant testing but it’s an important tool in our toolkit.” — Design Lead
“It was really great to get input from [Support] early on in the design process for my project so that I could avoid common pitfalls that our merchants experience when dealing with our product!” — Designer
Keep in mind that feedback from your support team is still different from that of your customers. It’s worse, in that they are not your customers… but it’s better in that they tend to be able to predict what might go wrong. In other words, Support feedback is complementary to customer feedback, but never a substitute for it.
Try it yourself: Reach out to your support team and set up a few internal tests, or simply get them to try out a prototype and send some feedback your way. Use this as a way to get preliminary input before putting a product in front of your customers.
4. Access to beta testers
Beta testing with customers is a great way to prepare your product or feature for launch, which is why companies like Google, Apple and Facebook all use this approach to varying extents. However, who tests your product, and what feedback they provide, can make a big difference in how effective your beta testing is.
If you’re looking for specific customers to beta test a product or feature, Support can help you find them. Chances are, customers have reached out asking for the feature you’re building, and would likely be more than happy to test it out. Conversely, if you’re looking for users that meet specific requirements that are hard to pinpoint using existing metrics, you can leverage Support to help screen for these merchants.
For example, if you’re making subtle changes to a product, customers who are actively using your product will be much better suited to provide feedback on the changes over customers who aren’t as familiar with your product. On the other hand, you might be adding a feature that is used for a subset of customers. When we were expanding one of our sales channels, we needed merchants with a specific type of partner account who were selling in a specific currency to test a new feature. We worked with Support to help us find these merchants when they contacted us about using the channel. In fact, we’ve seen better response rates to joining beta testing groups when we engage merchants who contact Support directly with a problem.
Try it yourself: Work with Support to find the right customers who are going to use your product or feature to its full extent, in order to really put it to test before launching.
5. Real-time product pulse
Once you’ve launched your product, you’re probably looking at many indicators to get a sense of how it’s performing. While dashboards are a must, you can’t build dashboards to monitor the situations you can’t plan for! Unexpected things happen, but your support team will pick up on any red flags when they begin to see trends in customer interactions. Your support team needs to have a direct line of communication with you and your team after launch.
My team has formed strategic relationships with Technical Specialists on our support team who are Subject Matter Experts on our product. Our Technical Specialists see a multitude of inputs from our front-line support team, and have enough context to determine if something appears to be broken. We use dedicated Slack channels for each product that we own, so these specialists can easily chat with the right product team members and flag potential incidents as they arise.
This proved to be beneficial when we launched one of our international sales channels. Within the first week of launching, we ran into an API issue and some calls started failing silently. These issues were getting escalated to our Technical Specialists who were able to rapidly triage the issue and inform our team of a potential problem via our Slack channel. We quickly worked with our partner to address the issue and had the incident resolved within 2 hours. Had our Technical Specialists not been able to promptly alert us of this silent failure, the time to resolution may have been much longer.
Try it yourself: Connect with a few Support folks who are well-versed in your product. Work with them by providing access to the tools they need to quickly and effectively triage issues, and by creating a system for direct communication when these issues arise.
Easier said than done!
I know what you’re thinking… all of this is easier said than done. When you are already juggling multiple inputs and need to make decisions quickly, it can be difficult to comb through hundreds of interactions and constantly keep a pulse on customer feedback. For context, Shopify has over 600,000 merchants and there is no way one person can digest all of the information that our support team is gathering. This is why our product team partners with Support through teams like the Product Support Network and Technical Specialists.
Ask around your support team and find the person (or people, or team) who knows the most about your product. Start building that relationship with a quick chat, and plant the seed of what could turn into one of your biggest tools for extracting insights.
So get digging.
Support has proved to be a valuable resource throughout the product development lifecycle. Get creative in your approach to extracting value from your support team in an effort to build better products. You may be pleasantly surprised at what you discover!
What strategies have you used to engage your support team? Let us know in the comments below.
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