Rediscovering the Power of Direct User Support

In the fast-paced environment of early startup life, direct user support is a familiar task for product teams. But as your product matures and your team expands, those direct interactions with users often diminish. However, as I recently experienced at Picter, maintaining this connection can be incredibly beneficial.

Our Scenario

At Picter, we're a relatively small team, managing products that have been around for approximately seven years. We have a capable, though tiny, support team that maintains steady contact with our product team. So, it was easy to assume we wouldn't learn much from handling support ourselves. But two weeks ago, due to a combination of a long-planned vacation and an upcoming parental leave, my product team had to step in and take over support duties.

The Rewarding Experience

This hands-on experience turned out to be highly rewarding in ways we hadn't anticipated:

Gaining Urgency Through First-Hand Experience

Although we were aware of several common issues beforehand, directly interacting with users gave these problems new urgency and context. Hearing their frustrations and seeing the challenges they faced first-hand made it clear how these issues impacted their experience. This direct interaction provided us with a deeper understanding and a stronger motivation to address these problems promptly. We know the "What You See Is All There Is" (WYSIATI) concept and recognize that only a tiny fraction of our users need support. So being driven by support requests only in your decision process is probably not a sustainable approach. However, the combination of increased user satisfaction and the potential to significantly reduce support tickets can be a useful decision driver.

Building and Testing Features

We developed a rough version of a new feature and tested it with a specific user under a feature flag. This two-hour experiment resulted in a happy user and valuable feedback for the next iteration. The immediate interaction between the person with the problem and the one addressing it directly in the product, within such a short time frame, proved to be highly effective.

Improving Support Tools

We identified several areas in our support tooling that could be enhanced to make the support job more effective. These improvements were relatively easy to implement on the product side. Using these tools with fresh eyes and an engineering perspective, we uncovered several low-hanging fruits—simple yet impactful changes that significantly boosted the efficiency of our support processes.

Recruiting for User Research

We identified multiple users who are ideal candidates for future user research interviews. Normally, we recruit users through surveys sent via our newsletter, which is time-consuming and generates a lot of noise, as we send out several thousand emails just to get a dozen users with the right profile for an interview. Recruiting users directly from support interactions, where we get to know their profiles and issues during a conversation and can dig deeper immediately in the chat, proved to be a much more effective method for building a database of contacts for user interviews.

Appreciating Our Community

We just have the nicest people in our community ♥️ It’s incredibly rewarding to read messages of gratitude from users multiple times a day, simply because we took them seriously and were able to quickly help them in potentially frustrating situations. The key lesson here is to genuinely take users' concerns seriously. It’s easy to blame the user for seemingly being unable to execute the simplest tasks in your product, but you’ll be surprised at the insights you gain into product flaws that only appear under specific conditions and with different perspectives.

Positive Impact

Early this week, we handed support duties back to our support team. I initially feared that this extra responsibility could negatively impact our product work. But to the contrary, it had a very positive effect on our products and workflows.

Based on this experience, we've decided to implement a regular schedule for product support takeovers. I highly recommend other teams do the same. A one-week takeover every couple of weeks can create a good balance of continuous learning, while still having fresh eyes and ears on the process and the gathered insights.

Maintaining a connection with users through direct support, even as your team and product grow, can provide invaluable insights and foster a more user-centric approach to product development.