Siloed information keeps valuable insights from being shared throughout customer support, customer success, and engineering teams. Knocking down these silos improves collaboration between those teams to the benefit of your customers and company. With a proactive approach, silo-free teams can work better together to ensure each customer receives fast and effective support, engineers stay focused on more pressing issues, and customer success managers can prevent churn.
When customer support teams see the full depth and breadth of customer issues, they can respond faster and more accurately. Too often, though, the most current status of product bugs, feature regressions, service disruptions, and new releases is not available to support agents, creating an information vacuum. With a real-time, 360-degree view of bug reports, DevOps monitoring tool alerts, and user behavior, support agents can understand the true source of issues and respond accordingly.
Engineers—with all their skills, experience, and knowledge—are not mind readers. They depend on support and success teams to help them understand where the product is failing customers, whether that's because of bugs, service disruption, or user error. Engineers also lack visibility into the business impact of each escalation. Triaging escalations based only on chronological order or issue severity ignores the potential impact of not including your highest-value customers as a top priority. Again, it's not engineering's fault; without access to CRM data, teams can't always distinguish between customers who are just beginning their journeys with you and your highest annual contract value (ACV) customers.
Customer success teams need insight into how well your product meets your customers' goals and missions. Most of those insights come from two places: anecdotal insights from conversations with customers and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys. Sometimes those insights come too late; the customer has already decided not to renew or resists upsell and cross-sell efforts, often based in part on their history with customer support. Unfortunately, most customer success teams lack access to customers' support histories. Customer success managers often do not have visibility into product-related issues and resulting sentiment. This can adversely affect CSAT and renewals. Providing visibility into product issues and related support tickets can enable them to proactively manage customer expectations and mitigate churn.
Here's what each functional department needs to break these silos:
Cutomer Support:
- Automated workflows and data integration with ticket management, bug tracking, and DevOps monitoring solutions;
- AI-powered issue discovery and root cause identification.
Engineering:
- Automated triaging and correlation of support tickets with DevOps and engineering;
- Automated revenue, customer sentiment, and support impact analysis of engineering issues for better prioritization;
- Proactive discovery of customer issues from anomalies in support, product, and engineering data.
Customer Success:
In the end, the bottom line is that companies need to consolidate silos of information to help customer support, customer success, and engineering teams meet the needs of their customers and company. With a proactive approach, silo-free teams work better together to ensure each customer receives the support needed, engineers can stay focused on more pressing issues, and success managers can prevent churn.
Palak Dalal Bhatia is founder and CEO of IrisAgent.