Intercom on Customer Support

Henry Ford famously said, “If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.

Keep in mind the ultimate goal of your support team. Sure their job is to answer customer queries in as timely, helpful and efficient a manner as possible. But on a strategic level the goal is to reduce the need for support

The best customer support teams are extremely efficient in everything they do but particularly so with their use of customer feedback. Wasteful teams will just solve the customer’s problem, and not consider how that issue can help solve the product problem.

The quickest way to accelerate through it is either for the product owner to sit in on some user testing, or start reading and answering support requests. Amazon solved it by automatically BCCing owners on every single customer issue until they started solving them. As with any internal problem, when all else fails, go for the jugular: the inbox.

Customer support cannot control, or be accountable for, how often customers contact them. They have no leverage there. The majority of contacts for a software product are due to confusion or error. Customers don’t understand how to do something, or they can’t see why something happened, so they contact support.

It’s essential for support to send feedback to the product team.

The biggest impact self-service can have on your support operation is enabling your team to focus on the most valuable conversations with customers

Problems don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen in a workflow of other tasks.

the principle of “Show, don’t tell”.

Link text. Writing link text that says "click here" or "find out more" is a wasted opportunity. When linking to related articles, include keywords customers are likely to search for. Here’s a good example: “Check out this guide to collaborating on projects”.