The customer service and support team is on the front lines, directly speaking with customers, discovering their issues, unearthing new solutions. The product team, on the other hand, can feel worlds away, creating products with market research and product marketing team. The missed opportunities for collaboration between these two groups create missed opportunities for more effective products, higher customer retention rates and higher revenue. When support leaders and product managers can work more closely together, the results (and customer satisfaction) multiply. 

And now, with Coveo In-Product Experience Intelligence, that self-service experience can also be a part of the product experience.  For subscription-based companies, the first interaction between the end user and the business is often through support. Coveo reduces friction and increases the likelihood of success using the product, while allowing enterprises to support customers far more affordably than with alternatives such as contact centers. Check out TSIA’s report on embedding support into applications.

3 Unexpected Benefits of Collaboration

#1 The product team’s next big idea could stem from your self-service experience – and vice versa.

Self-service analytics are a gold mine of information, providing a window into what questions your customers have, how they talk about your product and the struggles they have. Product managers need this information as they build out new features for their roadmap.

In addition, no one knows your customers like your support team. Speaking to potentially thousands of customers every month is an incredibly rich pool of data that product managers cannot ignore.

Conversely, understanding what features are coming and how your products will evolve can help support leaders build out your self-service content strategy. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to join up these two teams.

#2 Self-service is a great way to connect the dots between product managers and their support counterparts.

Support is the ultimate training ground for product managers.

The fundamental responsibility of a product manager is to be the company’s leading expert on the customer, not just the product.

As a company grows, customer empathy and understanding can suffer. Product managers become involved in more and more decisions: design, architecture, go-to-market, pricing, etc. And it becomes increasingly difficult to stay close to the customer.

Spending a little bit of time looking at the the support queue, triaging tickets, answering real customer inquiries, and gaining insight into how customers use the product can be invaluable – upon onboarding and even periodically as a check-in over time.

#3 Scale your support organization by building self-service directly into the product. 

Software is growing increasingly complex. Landing Apollo 11 on the moon took less than 145,000 lines of code. A modern car runs on close to 100,000,000 lines of code and the Google infrastructure is estimated to run on 2,000,000,000 lines of code. Even the sheer number of applications per customer has grow to 88 applications. With how complex our software has become, support is a critical part of retaining customers. And it scales as your customer base grows.

With a contextual help solution, we can simplify the user experience by providing support right within the app, breathe new life into static help links and increase the likelihood that users find success with a product – and all with a single line of code. 

Find out more about how to approach your support strategy by joining us at our next webinar.

March 26 webinar
Get Your Customers to Self-Serve with In-Product Experiences