This article was originally published in Top-Tier Support, Front’s Head of Support Kenji Hayward’s LinkedIn newsletter for customer service leaders. For more frontline advice and actionable insights, subscribe today to get them delivered to your inbox every other week.
My team roughly receives 1,200 customer inquiries a week across our emails and chats.
That’s about 62,400 messages a year, meaning there are 62,400 opportunities for us to get an overall sense of what our customers need help with. My team set out to categorize the messages by topic and/or customer sentiment, sharing the idea with engineering to see what feature we could build that used AI to help do the heavy lifting.
As my team pressure tested the feature, we passed along our feedback to engineering and product teams. We kept iterating until we felt good about how AI automatically tagged messages and improved our workflows. Over time as AI learned, we were able to uncover sales opportunities that were routed to our sales team for faster follow up.
AI helped us understand our customers better, but more importantly, we couldn’t have done it without collaborating with teams outside of support.
It goes to show that the customer experience does get better when it’s all hands on deck, whether you’re in support, engineering, sales, finance, product, design, customer success, or marketing.
Big wins of connecting support with the wider org
Some of the struggles I hear from my peers is the disconnect from the ticket to the internal communication platforms. Or, the cross-team input for a case is spread across systems and support leaders grapple with consolidating it all together. If companies truly want to be customer-first, they’ve got to bridge these gaps.
I touched on this in the last edition, but when your whole company rallies behind the customer experience, it makes the cross-functional collaboration more genuine and in a team spirit — because we’re all trying to make things easier for our customers, launch better products, and create delightful experiences.
Here are some cross collaboration and feedback loops we’ve experimented with and the awesome outcomes that came of it:
We manage product feedback at quarterly FIX (Front Improvement Xperience) meetings with support, engineers, and product managers, sharing trends seen with our customers and within our own support team to stack rank bugs and feature requests. Feature requests are logged in our Aha! roadmap to monitor progress with the product team whereas bugs are tracked through Atlassian Jira with engineering. Our support operations analyst, Lemuel Chan , pitched a feature request that would deflect ~100 conversations per month, save tens of thousands of support costs annually, and improve the customer experience by enabling self-service. Product turned this request into a reality, and saw an 85% increase in its use within the first quarter!
We closely partnered with engineering to develop our incident management process. Incidents are reported in Slack , alerting a tiger team of engineers and/or support through PagerDuty. If the incident is severe enough, then support coordinates with legal, PR, and/or security to ensure our customers get a timely notification on the actions we took to resolve and prevent the issue in the future.
Support and marketing set up joint projects in Asana so that whenever my team thinks of a cool content idea or they want to recycle a great presentation, they can share with marketing for any relevant campaigns. Our input has been integrated into email campaigns, social media posts, gated resources, blog posts, and web content!
I know I’m biased, but Front does make it easier that my teammates are just an @mention away and can hop into customer conversations at any given time.
If you’re in support and eager to “reach across the aisle” and drive cross-functional impact for your business, here’s a list of places where I think your support insights hold unique value:
Engineering: Bugs, incidents, product roadmap, workflow automation, integrations
Product: Feature launches, product roadmap
Design: UX/UI
Customer success: Onboarding, account/relationship management
Finance: Billing/account services
Product education and community: Training, onboarding, self-service
Marketing: Communications, campaigns
Sales: Feature launches, account/relationship management
Want more on this topic? I spoke with leaders who have shaped support at Stripe, Loom, and Wistia on the panel, “Breaking the support silo: CX as a company-wide objective." Watch on-demand here.
More tools for your support team
Neal Travis 🌱 has a great Growth Support podcast episode with Steve Tondé on building relationships within your team, with your C-suite, across the org, and throughout the support community. Highly recommend you give it a listen!
Written by Kenji Hayward
Originally Published: 1 October 2024