Everyone Should Read Customer Support Emails
A company can learn more from people sharing their experiences than from numbers in a spreadsheet
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At Stuff we do not have a bunch of principles and structures—but we do have one very important one: Everyone in the company reads our incoming support emails.
The past 20 years as a project manager, product owner, digital product developer, head of blah blah, and founder have taught me the importance of everyone spending time on support emails. Whether you are a two-man band, settled startup co-founder, head of product, or corporate CxO, you should spend at least 30 minutes per week reading real emails from your customers.
KPIs, MAU/DAU, CAC, and CLV are some of the well-established metrics in most startups and established corporations. A/B testing is touted as the current methodology for valuable insights and improvements.
Continually, startups have been tweaked and strategies have been changed based on an extensive aggregation of numbers in spreadsheets and dashboards. I love my numbers, and I love my spreadsheets. But the heart and soul of all the great people coming into contact with your service, product, and company is too often buried in a column in your beloved spreadsheets. Valuable insights, information, and data are too often ignored or forgotten.
I have always spent much more time on incoming support emails than on internal reports and numbers. Here are some reasons you should as well:
News you can use
Support emails are fresh off the press. They represent your current state of service, product, or company. This is not some week- or month-old aggregated information related to a discontinued feature or product. Getting to know what is happening in your business right now makes it easier to react before shit really hits the fan.
A great conversation starter
Support emails, no matter how aggressive the initial email, provide insights that cannot be put into numbers and tables. Customers writing you regarding support issues are often willing to engage in conversation, which can give you a much better understanding of how your company and product are…
