The Product Management Interface — Customer Support and Escalation Engineering
The fourth team the PM team interacts with is the customer support and escalation engineering team. These teams are post-sales engineering. Like interaction modalities with the pre-sales teams, the post-sales teams pose unique interaction challenges. As a PM, one must consider some of these factors to be effective in the game.
The support team has its hierarchies.
Not everyone in the support team needs to address the customer issues the same way. If you work for a large corporation, Tier-1 support manages the queue, logs the customer ticket, provides the customer with brief pointers about the product documentation, and passes it on to the geographical or timezone support team to process the customer issue. They are typically service desk executives who operate on standard scripts and need not know anything about the product. Ensure you provide them with talking points aligned with the organization support template. It should be simple and self-explanatory for them to execute. For a large corporation, a Tier-1 support executive receives service requests for almost hundreds or even thousands of customer product SKUs. It’s practically impossible for her to know the names of the products. Please do not make her life miserable by providing a script heavy on the details working of the products. Tier-2 support typically carries out configuration-related support for products. Tier-3 support executives provide customer issue troubleshooting and pass on the issues to escalation engineering or core product engineering, depending on the organization.
Management of Support Team
Support teams are generally kept separate from the engineering organization. Support teams can be business unit (BU) specific, But there are places they belong to 2–3 product lines. So the best support goes to the product that is easier to understand and has the best product quality. Support is cheapest when it gets resolved at the lowest tier and holds the least time in the support queue. A Tier-1 support executive addressing the customer issues on the first call is ideal for the organization; this is a first-call resolution. Like most cost optimization possibilities, organizations worldwide have been trying to reduce the cost of support. And looking forward to ways that ensure support teams are maintained as frugally as possible. Some of the approaches:
- Relocating support teams to the cheapest labour locations
- Consolidating multi-product support teams
- Moving to standardized support processes from high touch point contact centres
Whether you like it or not, your product support will be in the hands of some such support team sooner than later. Thus, every PM needs to look at developing products with no significant hand-holding from support teams to be effective. It is not difficult to design products in this manner; the products that do not have easy installation, configuration or documentation support will lose a competitive battle earlier than later. Some enterprise products keep a part of the process engagement with support teams with customers for the initial setup. With trimmed-down support infrastructures, that may not be a luxury that most product teams can afford. Some products move such offers to professional services; customers want the professional services costs to be made part of the product license offerings, thus removing the source of revenue altogether. The solution lies in improving the product, at least the most common use cases, with ease of deployment or no deployment overheads.
Support Teams are the First Genuine Customers
Support teams see the product over a long period. They see the deployments of multiple versions at various life cycles of deployments. And get to address issues that come from customers at the same time. By genuinely looking at support escalations, one can notice a progression or regression of a product over releases. Some organizations go a step further. They ensure support teams maintain a first-customer environment. A good product release is accompanied by setting up and operating on the first-customer deployment, support team approval or sign-off to a valid product release. I feel this is a requirement for the sustainability of an enterprise product that PMs should be aware of and avoid all shortcuts that bypass the first customer environment. Secondly, support should have training on every release before a product is released. Many organizations believe that training support team is an overhead to engineering time. The better the support teams are trained, the lesser engineering teams spend time addressing customer issues. It is always better to provide tools than a long list of checks and tests. In one of the products, a large percentage of support requests were around installation and configuration checks. Providing an automated script/tool to the support teams reduced those escalations. The resolutions happened in hours than weeks. Moreover, logs were handy tools for engineering verification.
Support Teams can be Lead Generators.
No enterprise product works in isolation. Typically, product managers love developing multi-tier product lines. Bronze, Gold, and Platinum product suites. Add-ons to the product etc. Once a customer has a wedge product, the vendor always looks for a constant revenue stream to expand. One can think of subscription as a revenue stream, yet having add-on sales always look more lucrative. The question is when is the right time to sell the add-on. Most sales teams will engage in that conversation during the next renewal. When they go for the discussion on add-ons, the buyers are not aware of the technical requirements and technical influencers are not involved in straight renewals unless your product support has been substantially poor or the product has failed consistently on quality metrics. A knowledgeable support personnel can identify the need for an add-on during a support engagement, initiate a lead generation when the customer needs a particular feature and engage the sales team. Of course, a technical influencer may not be the buyer, but he can initiate the needs well ahead and influence the buyers. Some organizations maintain a separate client management team within a support management hierarchy that coordinates with the sales account management team to address these needs.
Support as a Customer Advocate
The support team represents the customer. Sometimes customers purchase higher-order support licenses like dedicated support management programs. PM needs to understand that personnel are clearly in the roles of customer advocates. They would defend the customer cause more than the product organization. So in every discussion where the client manager is present, she should be treated as a customer being present than an organization colleague discussing the issue. Depending on the severity, PMs have excused themselves from attending senior executive meetings in favour of attending customer escalations.
Product Training
Engineering conducts product training for the support teams. One of the reasons cited, support teams need to take a deep dive into the product to understand the nitty-gritty details of the product. In addressing the nitty-gritty details of the product, the big picture is left out. The product vision and big picture are significant aspects that the support teams should know. In most cases, PMs provide those aspects. Hence, PMs must engage with the support teams to provide an overview and conceptual understanding of the product and its design intent. Very similar to customers, explaining why the product was conceived and what exact problems it addresses for them. Also, general guidelines of the customer profiles help support understanding the customer requirements better.
Conclusion
Customer support plays a significant role in customer success and provides an ongoing communication channel. An effective PM should use this channel to enhance the product and communicate with existing customers. PMs cannot reach out to every customer and address the issues raised by each of them. But, with product features, product enhancements, changing pricing structures and effectively communicating through the support channels, PMs ensure the customers know the product teams are listening to the customer needs effectively. Thus, support makes one of the most important interfaces for a PM.
