How to get your customer support team heard

Your customer support reps have great insights. Chances are, they’re not heard.

2 years ago, the customer support team at Vinted was fighting fires they knew could’ve been prevented by what seemed like a simple process improvement: better communication among teams that were creating the product, and supporting it.

Every manager knows exchange of information is essential, yet when companies like ours grow in size and reach over 200 people, it becomes difficult to ensure everyone’s in the loop.

Internal communication tools - emails, intranet systems, and all heads’ meetings - simply didn’t cut it for us. The customer support teams got information too late, or not at all. This caused users’ frustration and a feeling of helplessness among the team members. So much so that our internal survey showed a mere 38% satisfaction with how the communication process was handled.

This was also starting to cost Vinted its community’s trust, and the reviews of our product and the customer support team were becoming worse.

Responsible for scalable and unified CS processes at the time, I saw this communication gap as one of the major obstacles in ensuring a single-quality approach to our entire community. After all, 70% of purchase experiences are formed by the perception of how a customer feels she’s being treated, which made our situation not just an internal CS problem, but a threat to our product experience.

We needed to think outside of the usual company practices to keep up with the fast pace at which our product is evolving. It took us a few months to come up with a well-working solution, but eventually it got down to 2 simple things: involvement and feedback.

What helped us improve, was this:

• Our product owners always share their upcoming projects on our internal communication tool , inviting the customer support teams to share their insights. They’re taken into account to reduce the necessity for rework later.
• Once the feature is produced, our product and customer support teams get together for a demo session. The user experience is presented at this point. Another feedback round helps ensure a flawless user experience. What’s always interesting is that both teams have different insights about what our community wants and expects. Putting them together raises awareness and contributes to building better features every time.
• We keep the communication flowing after releasing a feature to the users. We share fresh feedback from the users and seek help for any issues as soon as possible — our customer support agents constantly update everyone with how the users are taking the changes and what their feedback is.

To make sure everyone in the company has a clearer understanding of our users, we also have an “Everyone does customer support” program, where anyone in the company can handle our members’ inquiries, with help from a support agent. This is especially useful for our product owners, who see how members experience features and gain insights that aren’t available in analytical reports.

This new approach has been in place for over a year now. The results are obvious — teams co-work on a regular basis, and the communication now satisfies 54% of our team. Simultaneously, our user satisfaction has increased by 10% due to significant improvements in our customer service response times and quality.

As a team manager, I also see this go beyond simply preventing user dissatisfaction. It’s great motivation for the team, and an opportunity for everyone to contribute to building our product.

Now, my team feels a lot more confident in delivering the right feedback at the right moment. This is a win-win situation that every company can have. At Vinted, we believe everyone should make a contribution, and building the right communication structures for your team can unlock the potential you didn’t even realise you had.

Go ahead and innovate!