Giving Customer Support a Seat at the Table
In my first week after joining Drift, one of the first things I immersed myself in was customer escalations. For anyone who has been part of an early-stage growth company, you’ll recognize the pattern: Customer requests were in multiple spreadsheets, every production issue was treated with the same crisis level, and internal requests from sales and customer success were scattered across wiki posts, email, and Slack messages.
It was time to develop a customer support process before it got out of control. We could follow the typical SaaS playbook where we’d hire a head of support, have her hire a few support representatives, and start building process and tools. However, I wasn’t convinced this was going to work. Support would be able to work through the support ticket queue, but how could they fix the systemic issues causing those tickets? Also, how would they continuously provide the context of where customers were struggling so developers would become empathetic? In the old support playbook, getting any customer issue fixed relied on politics and internal relationships. If we were going to sustain our customer centricity while we scaled, we knew we had to innovate on the role.
It was then that our CEO David Cancel sent me the following message:
Yes! That’s the answer, but how will it actually work? I did a lot of research on how other customer centric companies provided support. The most impactful piece I came across was Amazon’s career site for support. The second paragraph brought it home:
The Customer Advocacy team uses customer feedback, customer activity data, and metrics to identify current customer problems with the intent of eliminating them for future customers. Our website product management team develops self-service tools for customers that are relevant and contextual. We take fast action to solve problems with innovative programs and products. Our role is to advocate for customers by providing compelling business cases, making actionable recommendations, driving solutions where we own the experience, and collaborating with teams across Amazon to implement changes in products, processes, systems and policies.
There it was: We want Customer Advocates. Not traditional support reps. And most importantly, Customer Advocates should be embedded in our product development teams so they truly understand the customer needs. In his book HYPERGROWTH, David introduces the three-person team:
So we had these three-person engineering teams. And the core thing for each engineering team was that the engineers had to own a complete, customer-facing product — from the presentation of that product, down to the operation of that product, to the support of that product.
The three-person engineering teams are rounded out by a Product Manager and a Designer, and now a Customer Advocate. The Customer Advocate will be the front line for any customer or internal stakeholder request for the product. A Drift Customer Advocate would be much different than your traditional support rep:
We’re confident that the new Customer Advocates will provide ongoing value and help us to scale. As the team ramps and we evolve the role, we’ll be sharing the tools that we use, our process, and our lessons learned.
If you’re interested in following along with our journey, post a comment below and subscribe for more updates. Stay tuned!
