Is your marketing team working with the customer support team?

If not, you could be making a huge mistake.

No team in your firm should stay isolated from customer support. Answer support calls if you need to, but be involved in customer support if you want to improve your product, marketing, operations. Literally anything. (image credit)

First things first. I am a huge believer in the customer support team being at the front of everything you do. It doesn’t matter whether you are having a product roadmap discussion or planning your next big marketing campaign, it needs to start with inputs from the customer service/support team. If you don’t do that, you are just preparing yourself for a sub-optimal product, a less-effective marketing campaign, and a lot of rework. A lot!

PRODUCT TEAMS DO INCORPORATE THIS

On some level, at least.

It isn’t uncommon for businesses to decide priorities in product roadmap based on the feedback they are receiving from customers, and based on the countless A/B tests they run. Of course, there will always be scope for improvements, but on some level, product roadmaps are influenced (if not dictated) by customer feedback and interaction.

Look at two simple examples.

At one point of time, Skyscanner would list down the flight options for you with details like departure time, arrival time and a gamut of other information. The one information that simply wasn’t there was the duration of the flight. It was always assumed that the…