Only some customers ask for help. Many love the product, find it intuitive, and go about their merry way while others are so lost they give up and never bother to get in touch. No matter how busy the ticket queue gets, it doesn’t represent all customers.
This makes any support-driven definition of customer sentiment only one (important!) piece of a larger puzzle. Without a reference point it’s difficult to make meaningful.
If you lead a team, you want them to understand their work in context. The most important thing from support’s perspective may be minor in the overall customer experience. Alternately, what can feel like a flood in the queue may indicate a deep fault line that needs repair. The key is to provide balance, and there are three steps you can take.
Track the percentage of customers who contact support
The size of a queue or a given week’s volume isn’t inherently useful. A backed up queue could be the sign of a growing business. Hundreds of complaints could be a tiny portion of customers. It helps to compare support interactions with the wider customer base. This provides a reference point for understanding the nuance of support load.
To start, track the percentage of new customers who contact support 1, 7, 14, 21, and 28 days after signing up. A multi-stage timeline indicates how often new customers have immediate questions and how those build over time.
As one example, maybe 10% of customers contact support but 90% of those contacts come within the first 24 hours of signing up. That’s a good indicator you need better onboarding and new user help. Alternately, perhaps only 3% of customers contact support but the company has a real issue with churn. That suggests a need to connect with more customers and, at the very least, figure out what’s lacking about the product.
As a nice side effect, this can act as a planning framework. Not only will you understand the current balance of customers who need help, but you’ll be better able to plan for future changes in the business. This kind of data shows roughly how many new customers lead to how many new support interactions, which helps you anticipate hiring needs and more.
Invite the product team to highlight all that new features can do
Support teams can focus on bugs and lose sight of what’s improved. After all, the queue is not usually full of customers who just want to say they liked a change. Over time this focus on all that’s broken can drain morale.
It helps to give product leadership a space to showcase the positives, especially when that comes prior to launch. A town hall or demo session creates a balanced relationship and focuses the team’s energy on progress rather than problems. It’s also an opportunity to ask questions ahead of time, which prepares the team to support things post-launch. Shortly after any launch you want to remember what’s improved, and without a reference point back to the product’s wider progress it’s easy to get stuck thinking nothing ever changes.
Celebrate what customers accomplish
Some customers who need help nonetheless make stellar use of a product. Often that success comes after they contact support, which makes it hard to see the connection between their support interactions and later accomplishments. But it’s that connection which reaffirms the value of each interaction; any one email may be the key that helps a customer reach their goal.
When possible, highlight these customers for the support team and wider company and focus on what each achieved through the product. What’s valuable is less about how they used certain features and more about the overall aims they accomplished. These are a good reminder of why the support team’s help matters and the type of impact it has on people. Even when a queue is full, good things arise through solving those problems.
A reminder
At any point, some portion of customers will need help as a result of poor design, engineering bugs, or marketing confusion. The ability to resolve those questions with grace is both the job description and job security of a great support team.
It’s all too easy for a team to overly focus on those problems and lose sight of accomplishments. It helps to add perspective, showcase the positives, and find the success stories. These strategies restore balance to the daily work of support which makes the work sustainable. That balance is a reminder that there’s more to how customers use the product than just what comes into the queue.