Collaboration Post with Help Scout

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Following my presentation at SupConf I had the opportunity to chat with some folks from Help Scout, a popular support software startup. They were great! They sponsored the photo booth, which is always a treat.

Since the event, I’ve had the chance to work with Emily, one of the members of the writing staff at Help Scout, and they’ve been kind enough to help me translate my presentation and following blog posts into a single friendly bite-sized bit of content. Plus – check out that illustration!

You can check it out here – Create Value With the Support Data You Already Have

Huge thanks to Emily and the whole crew at Help Scout – it was a treat to work with you all!

Support Folks: Don’t Confuse Your Problems For Your Customers’ Problems

I was talking with my lead, Andrew, about how software companies provide customer support – a standard topic for our conversations.

We ended up on a topic I hadn’t considered much, but it has resonated with me since.

The topic is the important distinction between your customer’s problems and your support team’s problems. 

Or, put another way: the difference between a hard product to use and a hard product to support. 

It’s very easy to ask a member of your support team: “What’s your biggest problem right now?”

They’ll likely reply with some combination of particular features of the product, maybe something to do with billing or receipts, and possibly something about internal communication (which virtually every support team has a 100% legitimate problem with, since virtually no tech companies communicate value well from the support team to the rest of the company).

Especially when we’re leveraging support teams to build more value into the product, the problem is: it’s easy to confuse support’s problem with the customer’s problem.

At the end of the day, the result should be the same: more value for the customer, right? If you solve a problem and it results in better support for your customers or a better product for your customers, well, everybody wins!

The bigger issue is that these two categories of problem have to be solved in different ways.

Consider this: if you’re running a web host, and you ask your support folks to list the biggest problem areas they encounter day to day. The number one reply across the board is “Domains.” 

You might be tempted to direct some UX or Product folks to run through the domain purchase flow, to check on accessibility or mobile friendliness of that particular part of your product – but the right move would be to ask more questions. Specifically:

“Are domains the biggest problem for our customers, or are they the biggest problem for our support team?”

You can see why it is so important to hash out the difference here, yeah?

If customers are struggling to purchase domains, or are struggling to use them correctly, that will take a particular approach – build some better flows, test them, deploy them, circle back to see if things improve.

If support folks are struggling to support domain customers, then you have a whole different job on your hands. Now you need to get into the thick of it – OK, what part of that support process is challenging? Where do you need more information but don’t have it? What tools can we build to make this process easier, faster, more user friendly?

These are questions that good support organizations need to ask themselves, too.

Too frequently we fall into the easy answer, to blame the edge cases, to throw our hands in the air as though our customers are mysterious beings with whom we have nothing in common.

What if the problem isn’t on the customer’s end? What if you struggle to support some part of your product because your tools aren’t good enough? The problem is not always with the customer, it’s not always with the product. Sometimes our own processes and approaches are what’s causing friction.

Next time you say to yourself, “Ugh, classic problem x with customers/our product” – take a minute, step back, and ask yourself: what’s the real problem here?

SaaS Companies: Stop Putting Support in a Silo

I get it – you’re busy. I’m busy. We’re all busy. We can all spend too much time praying at the altar of hustle. 

Here’s a quick tip from me to you: take ten minutes, stop reading the top stories on Hacker News or Growth Hackers. Stop scrolling through Quora questions. They’re all going to tell you the same thing:

Listen to your customers.

This message might come in different shapes and flavors:

“Find product market fit.”

“Conduct customer interviews.”

“Get out of the office.”

It all boils down to one simple necessity for any software company – but especially for recurring revenue Saas companies.  That necessity is this: gaining and maintaining a deep understanding of your customers, their problems in the world, and their problems with your product.

Don’t hire a consultant to do this for you.

You already have this understanding in your company, and it is entirely likely that you’re sitting on a gold mine of potential information. What’s blocking you from that information, that almost-guaranteed revenue boost, is not financial or technological.

It’s cultural.

When was the last time one of your Product folks sat down and asked your support team about their work?

You have an entire team of people who talk with your customers all day, every day.

It doesn’t have to be a formal process. It doesn’t have to be some sort of support veteran embedded in your Product teams  – although I’d recommend that.

Just go talk to them. Go ask them what customers are struggling with. They won’t necessarily be able to solve your problems, but I promise you they’re going to reveal to you points of friction, trouble areas, and parts of your product that aren’t even on your radar as costing you customers.

Because the fact of the matter is, if you have a large enough customer base, and you’re relying on them for recurring revenue, even small problems, small sticking points, semi-irritating workarounds, these are going to cause churn. Maybe not a lot of churn – but some. Imagine eliminating all of those tiny pain points. They add up.

First, you have to find them.

The good news is, someone in your company already has. Go ask them about it.

 

SupConf Talk Rehearsal Recording

If you weren’t able to make the first ever SupConf in San Francisco this week (and today’s the second day!) , here is a previously recorded rehearsal for the talk – not quite the same as being here, but I hope valuable! I am not 100% certain if there will be a recording of the live talk available, but if it is, I’ll share that once it’s in my hands as well.

Use the Data You Have: Presenting and Persuading

You’ve arrived at the third and final Post in this series (Use the Data You Have, following my presentation at SupConf 2016) – if you’re just starting now you may want to check out the previous few Posts, covering the importance of data in being a successful support professional, asking the right questions, and one way to approach answering those questions.

We’re arriving now at the crux of my talk – how to use the answers you’ve found to persuade others within your organization to add value for you, your customers, and your organization’s bottom line.

I could talk a lot about the importance of data visualization in persuasion and digital charisma – and likely there are many Posts in the future on that topic – but for now let’s focus more on the bigger approach, and less on whether to use a histogram or a pie chart.

(Not to belabor the point, but use a histogram.)

Many folks rush to the more sexy idea of visualization before they ask the bigger questions, and building the right foundations. It doesn’t matter how pretty your animated d3.js donut charts are if the underlying data is not something your audience cares about.

At this point in this series, you’ve considered your biggest beliefs as a support professional in your organization, you’ve converted those beliefs into hypotheses, and you’ve confirmed or denied those hypotheses using your company’s existing data, be it through Google Analytics or Mixpanel or whatever.

Now, as a data driven support professional, you’ve arrived at the hard part, at the part that I can only guide you through in a general way, because I lack the tribal or communal understandings of your workplace.

You need to find a way to explain this data to the folks who can enable change in a way that is motivating to them. This means setting your own ego and possibly your own perspective aside in the pursuit of being persuasive – folks in your organization are going to have problems and motivations that may be alien to you, but in presenting an argument, sharing a victory for both of you is far more important than being 100% true to your own perspective.

Sometimes this means going back to the drawing board – sometimes you need to do some more digging to find information that will speak to different parties. This is OK. Better to do more research than not enough – at least in this situation.

(There are times when enough is enough, for now, I’ll trust you all to know when you’re in an unproductive research rabbit hole.)

Ask yourself: what is most important to this decision maker today?

Then, figure out how to show them that the issue you’re championing can have a direct impact on what matters to them.

Are you in a high-growth startup, where moving the Monthly Active Users needle is the very most important thing? If so, you need to see how your issue can impact that needle; what does Active mean? Do Active users tend to experience this problem? If so, how can you reduce it? If not, is this issue the blocker for more Active users?

Are you in a mature company, struggling with turbulent retention rates? Show how this issue is related to or not related to customers retention.

The name of this short series is Use the Data You Have, and the importance of this cannot be understated: if you need to run a test or an experiment to verify that something needs to be solved or addressed, then you’re approaching it the wrong way. Big problems, problems that deeply need solving, are problems because they manifest in some way.

Go into your archives. Dig into your analytics suite. Find that manifestation and use it to enact positive change. Good support teams answer customers. Great support teams solve problems, and in so doing, build value for the customer and for the company.