Today the world is knee-deep into smartness / smart technology & it's just a matter of time before we'd be neck-deep.
Here's a thread🧵 exploring what it'd take for customer support / championing to scale smartness levels?
#productmanagement #smart #technology #insight
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A quick reminder.
This thread 🧵 takes off my recent article "Customer Championing" that tries to highlight the differentiation in approaches over teams taking to support, success & championing over a case study.
Here's the link:
mgmtinc.substack.com/p/customer-championing
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Time for some stats now:
- industry-wide losses mounted to US $ 75 billion as reported by Forbes in the year 2018
- recently that figure supposedly touched US $ 1.7 trillion
in retrospect, it shows how small & big startups / MNCs have started to invest more in support
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If you happen to be a product person / cofounder of an org., you'd know the gravity of the situation & understand the need to have a support team in order, streamlined with all necessary protocols, methodologies, instructions in getting all of it sorted over the workflow.
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But hark back & you'd know how support being so elementary a function to have, could also be a reactive approach at the same time, as in you're waiting for your users to face problems & then report them to provide workarounds & very rarely though, re-engineer & re-release.
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Which would obviously come back to bite you over your C-SAT & NPS.
Yes, the strategy could change without affecting support teams & retaining them all as you'd still need reps. to face users & at times offer to hear out their problems which does work in the initial cases.
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But, here are a few alternatives / changes in strategy one could think of in this scenario.
1. Build great product teams
No doubt, building great product teams does require proper hiring process focusing on vetting the candidate on the best product practices & culture .
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But, it could also be just as important to test out other skills like:
- a visionary possessing big picture thinking
- an understanding of guardrails to align all teams
- a customer-first mentality
- a high degree customer obsession
- ability to introspect, learn & improve
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2. Stay invested in Customer Championing Teams
It ought to be pretty clear how customer championing could fit in to a given org. over my recent article.
But, here are some qualities quintessential to members & teams over getting them to champion customer needs (refer image).
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The beauty of championing & these qualities is they might have be gained over any job that a person has been in, over his past.
It's important that one assesses these qualities during team building & then have processes garnering team members to continuously improve them.
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3. Define a Culture
I've seen this tendency at a few startups over my recent stint. Teams largely working over their silos get more worried over their quantum of work & eventually miss out on how that circles back to adding value to the user over a period of time.
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The one primary reason why that happens is perhaps in the way teams are forced to think & adhere more towards a "deadline culture" as opposed to a "value addition culture" where all internal teams have a clear understanding of the higher purpose propagating top-down.
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4. Automate (as needed)
At some orgs. the queries one could get over product support are just so diverse that it may be quite a task to build an automated bot in order to solve for & offload some ToFu support activity.
If that isn't the case, do think of automation.
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You won't need to build a bot from scratch with some tools like:
- haptik.ai
- verloop.io
available in the market.
Also as described in the article, Tech advancements & libraries are available using which one could build one's own workflow easily.
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5. Predict Last-mile problems
Over the product's usage & adoption it makes sense for you as a product team to chart out the details of the last-mile journey i.e., post raising that sales invoice & before the customer gets to use your product. Do brainstorm well over that.
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And, in case you find a few pain points (which may be usual over third-parties / key partnerships with an external entities) like for instance, distribution, delivery et. al., make sure:
- you set the ground rules
- define high standards
- provide training (if need be)
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That's it folks!
If you enjoyed reading this, then please do this:
1. Retweet the first tweet at the top 🔝 marked "1/"
2. Drop me a follow @bgpinv
3. Subscribe, like & share my newsletter - mgmtinc.substack.com/
That'd inspire me to do more.
Thanks for reading 🙏
SUMMARY:
Some strategic changes worthy of consideration over getting your internal teams to think like customer champions are: -
1. Build great product teams
2. Stay invested in Customer Championing Teams
3. Define a Culture
4. Automate (as needed)
5. Predict Last-mile Problems
Guru Prasad “TPW - The Product Web 🕸”
@BgpInv
Product Management (Fintech, B2B B2C SaaS PaaS); Leadership; Coined Solution State Model (SSM)-2014, Elevated Trapdoor-2014; Mentor & Advisor @ TPW;