The Product Management Interface - Customer Support and Escalation Engineering
The fourth important team the PM team interacts is the customer support and escalation engineering team. In some sense, these can be called as the post-sales engineering as well. Just like there are certain interaction modalities with the pre-sales teams, the post-sales teams pose their unique interaction challenges. As a PM one need to be aware of some of these factors to be effective in the game.
Support Team has Hierarchies
Support team typically are built around process hierarchies. Not everyone in the support team need to address the customer problem the very same way. For example, if you work for a large corporation, Tier-1 support tends to manage queue, log the customer ticket, provides the customer some brief pointers about the product documentation and passes on the ticket to the right geographical or timezone support team to to actually process the customer issue. These are typically service desk executives, who operate on standard scripts and need not know anything about the product as such. Ensure you provide them a script that is aligned to the organization support template. And, 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 even know names of the products. Please do not make her life miserable by providing a script that is heavy on details of working of the products. Tier-2 support typically carries out the configuration related support for products. Tier-3 support executives provide customer issue troubleshooting subsequently passing 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. There may be business unit (BU) specific support teams but they are many times shared across 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 of support and holds the least amount of time in the support queue. Best is of course first call resolution, where it gets resolved on the first customer call by the Tier-1 support executive. 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 cheapest labor locations
- Consolidating multi-product support teams
- Moving to standardized support processes from high touch point contact centers
Whether you like or not, your product support will be in hands of some such support team sooner than later. Thus, every PM definitely needs to look at developing products that needs no significant hand-holding from support teams to be effective. It's not difficult to design products in this manner but products that do not have easy installation, configuration or documentation support will lose a competitive battle earlier than later. Many a times enterprise products are designed keeping a part of the process engagement with support teams so that customers and part of the initial setup can be addressed. With trimmed down support infrastructures that may not be a luxury that most product teams can carry out. Some products move such offers to professional services, but customers generally want the professional services cost be made part of the product license offerings thus removing the source of revenue altogether. Solution only lies improving the product at least for the most common use cases be handled with the easiest deployment or no deployment overheads.
Support Teams are the First Genuine Customers
Support teams essentially see the product over a long period of time. They see the deployments of multiple versions at various life cycles of deployments. And get to address issues that comes from various different customers the same time. Just by genuinely looking at support escalations one can clearly notice a progression or regression of a product over releases. In fact some organizations go a step further and ensure support teams maintain a first customer environment and ensure that a product release is completely attributed to setting up and operating on a good first customer deployment before the actual product is released. A kind of support team's approval or sign off to a valid product release. Personally, I feel this is a serious and significant requirement for a sustainability of an enterprise product that PMs should cognizance of and avoid all short cuts that avoid bypassing of the first customer environment. Secondly, support should have training on every release of the product before a product is actually released. Many organizations believe that training support team is an overhead to engineering time. But, the better the support teams are trained, the lesser will it be for engineering teams to spend their time in addressing customer issues. Thirdly, it's always better to provide tools than long list of checks and tests. In one product, it was observed a large percentage of support requests were around installation and configuration checks. Providing an automated script / tool to the support teams reduced those escalations be addressed in hours than weeks that used to be taken earlier. And, a well implemented tool can be easily run by any of the support executives than you would do with a checklist verification. Moreover, logs created by the tools are standardized for engineering verification.
Support Teams can be Lead Generators
No enterprise product is sold in isolation. Typically, product managers love developing multi-tier product lines. Bronze, Gold, Platinum product suites. Add-ons to the product etc. Once the wedge product is sold to a customer, the vendor always looks for a constant revenue stream to expand. While one can think of subscription as a revenue stream, having add-on sales always look more lucrative. The question is when is the right time to sell the add-on. Most sales team will engage in that conversation during the next renewal of license or renewal of contract. When they go for the discussion on add-ons the buyers are generally not aware of the technical requirements and technical influencers are not involved on straight renewals unless your product support has been substantially poor or product has failed consistently on quality metrics. A knowledgeable support personnel can identify a customers need for an add-on during a support engagement and 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 with support management hierarchy that essentially coordinate with the sales account management team to address these needs.
Support as a Customer Advocate
Support team represents the customer. In fact sometimes customers purchase higher order support licenses like dedicated support management programs. PM needs to understand that those personnel are clearly on the roles as customer advocates. They would definitely defend the customer cause more that the product organization. And that should be how their cause must be addressed. So in every discussion where the client manager is present, she should be treated as a customer being present than organization colleague discussing the issue. Depending on severity of issues, many a times PMs have excused themselves from attending senior executive meetings in favor of attending customer escalations.
Product Training
Many a times support training is provided by engineering. One of the major reasons being support teams need to take a deep dive into the product to understand the nitty-gritty details of the product. However, in handling the specific details the big picture is often forgotten. The product vision and big picture is a significant aspect that should be provided to the support teams. In most cases, that is provided by the PMs. Hence, it's important that PMs engage with the support teams to provide them an overview and conceptual understanding of the product and its intent. Very similar to aspects of the product that essentially is provided to the customers to understand why the product is conceived and what exact problems it's addressing for the customers. Also, a general guidelines of the customer profiles help support understand the customer requirements better.
Conclusion
Customer support plays a significant role in a customer success and also provides an ongoing communication channel with the customers. As a PM it's crucial the channels is used effectively to enhance the product and communicate effectively with existing customers on an ongoing basis. PMs cannot reach out to every customer and address the issues raised by each of them. But, 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 interface for a PM.
