#414 Teamwork & Customer Success
Friday Ship #414 | September 27th, 2024
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This week I kept an eye on the customer support inbox.
At Parabol, building relationships with our customers and understanding their needs is key to delivering a great product. One way we do this is by rotating our customer support role. Roughly half our company takes a turn at customer support for the week, while the other half rotates helping out with technical support.
This experience brings us closer to the people using our product, whether we’re in leadership, sales, design, or development. By stepping into support roles, we gain valuable insight into both our customers and our product.
Here are some reasons why rotating through customer support is a great idea:
- Direct Customer Interaction: Our customers appreciate working directly with team members, rather than an outsourced support service. This builds trust and allows us to provide more personalized help.
- Quick Problem Resolution: When issues arise, we can address them quickly, preventing other customers from encountering the same challenges. It‘s a proactive approach to improving the customer experience.
- Comprehensive Product Understanding: We often focus on our specific roles, but support rotations require us to understand the product as a whole—how it functions, where it excels, and where improvements are needed. This helps us identify opportunities for innovation.
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Customer support encourages collaboration across teams. We work together to understand UX, sales strategies, and technical details, strengthening our knowledge and cooperation across the business.
- Valuable Feedback: Customers often share what they love about our product as well as where they struggle, or what’s missing. This feedback is invaluable, helping us refine our offering and identify areas for improvement or future research.
Even though we’re fully remote, rotating through customer support allows us to “get out of the building” and connect with the people using our product every day.
While this approach might not fit every company, we highly recommend experimenting with ways to get your team closer to customers. Whether it’s through direct support rotations, sales feedback, or design-led user research, understanding your customers’ needs will help you build better products and stronger relationships.
Metrics
We had a good week of sign-ups and meetings. Meanwhile our active usage count is back up from the summer but remains a number one goal—we want to broaden our product offering so that Parabol is more useful across an organization, not just for the likely engineering team.
This week we…
…shipped a first version of usage reports. This will allow us to better serve our public sector and private instance customers with accurate, up-to-date information about their accounts.
…researched team health use cases. We’re looking at ideas on how to enhance our team health offering to better serve teams and companies improve their culture across the organization.
…continued our conversations about partnering with GitLab. In the public sector we’ve been keen on partnering with software, like GitLab and Mattermost, through marketing and bundling as many teams use our softwares side by side.
…continued our customer success research efforts. Our sales team has been gathering feedback on our most popular and latest features by enabling trials with qualifying companies.
Next week we’ll…
…continue to focus on our current Shape Up cycle. We’re two weeks away from wrapping up this cycle. We’re making progress toward our first version of Team Insights and a first batch of new Mattermost integration enhancements. We look forward to sharing more!
Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Please write to us.
