Top startups nowadays are using their customer service teams as a growth and product driver. How might you ask? By collecting valuable data and feedback through every customer conversation. Below are some tips on collecting that data and how to turn your customer support into a product management and growth tool.
1) Turn every email, phone call and live chat into data
Customer service specific software has become a staple of every support team. It allows companies to provide awesome customer experiences and scale quickly. The biggest benefit of support software is the ability to get crucial insights into the product.
Modern day customer service platforms make collecting data easy. My favorite platform is Desk.com and they have an awesome feature called “labels”. This feature allows customer service agents to tag conversations with labels based on features or products within their platform. Here is just a basic example of a labeling structure I came up with for Pinterest (their actual categories would be much more in depth):
Creating labels based on your product should be specific to your application. When you create labels for every feature of your product, customer service agents can then tag every conversation. For example, Peter is having a problem setting his banner image on his profile and contacts Pinterest support. The customer service agent responds in a friendly manner and then tags the conversation with “User Profile — Banner image”. By tagging with a label, the convo is then stored in Desk.com’s reporting. With data analysis, you can spot trends in specific features, products and more. This is the type of data product managers love.
On top of that, Desk.com also allows you to connect 3rd party services like Olark and Grasshopper. I name these two specifically because they both address other forms of customer communication (live chat & phone support respectively). By integrating these services into Desk.com, you can track every single conversation that is taking place between support and your customers.
2) Collect feedback from GOOD customers
Often times, customer service agents are the only ones within an organization that speak to the customer. This provides a great chance form them to gather feedback from good customers. By good customers, I mean those that are aligned with your product-market fit. These are the customers that love you and use your product on a daily basis. Ask them questions like:
Get Luke Duncan’s stories in your inbox
- Why did you sign up for the product originally?
- What is the primary benefit you receive from the product?
- Why is that benefit important to you?
- How do you describe the product when you're recommending it to friends?
How do you ask these questions in the middle of a customer service conversation? You don’t. The best way to ask these questions are through follow-up emails. Using apps such as Qualaroo and Survey Monkey make this easy. Have customer service agents follow up with the customers they have been talking to, typically a day or so after their issue has been resolved. Use this feedback to help your marketing and growth teams with messaging and increase conversions.
Be careful about receiving feedback from what I call BAD customers. These types of customers are not aligned with your company’s vison. E.g. “I’d use you more if you had xyz feature”. While it is always beneficial to listen, don’t always implement. Decide which customers are the most important to listen too.
3) Embed analytics and comments into your help center
Connecting Google Analytics to your Help Center should be standard. The help center is a great way to track data and collect feedback. Analyzing traffic on your help articles can indicate where people are having difficulties with your product. This can help product teams dig into potential problems customers may be having. It also allows you to see what features are being used the most. Analytics can also be used to tailor marketing materials around product strengths.
Letting customers also have the ability to comment on help center articles makes it easy to get feedback. Instead of directing customers from a help article to another page to send an email, make it easy for questions to get answered. Connect Desk.com to Disqus using Zapier and your all set. Check out the connection here.
The main goal of customer support should always be to provide an exceptional experience to the customer. With a combination of modern day customer service software and strategic processes, you can turn your customer support into a product and growth machine while still providing an awesome experience. Focus your support team around collecting actionable feedback and data and use this to build on your product.
If you have any other ideas or ways of turning your customer service team into a product machine, or just want to chat, I’d love to talk.
Shoot me an email: luke@ticketbud.com
Follow me: @luke__duncan or add me on Linkedin here
