Mining Gold from Your Support Cases
by Francoise Tourniaire

I recently read an interesting book chronicling the story of Intuit, the maker of Quicken and TurboTax (Inside Intuit by Suzanne Taylor and Kathy Schroeder). The authors credit the success of the company to its focus on customers. They describe how executives read the comments on registration cards and how everyone in the company was required to spend several hours each month in the support center.

Coincidentally, I also got a note from a colleague bemoaning the fact that he had called a very large software vendor’s hotline with several questions that turned out to be what we euphemistically call “feature requests,” and he got the distinct impression that no one in marketing would ever know about them. How could it be, he asked, that the vendor wouldn’t take advantage of what he saw as free market research?

Every day, customers call and email support organizations with all kinds of questions and these very questions are like gold mines. Is installing the product too difficult? Spend an hour in support and you’ll likely know. What do customers wish the product would do? Sift through a week’s worth of requests and you’ll find out. How common is a particular request? If support links requests with the cases of customers interested in it, you can tell in a flash. Yet few organizations are successful at using support information to make marketing decisions.

A broken leg on Support’s three-legged stool

Quick, what are the three main goals of any support organization? Customer satisfaction? Right, that’s one. Cutting costs? Right again, although those of us who charge for support prefer to point to increasing profits rather than cutting costs. What else? Avoid bothering engineering too much? Nope. The third goal is customer feedback – the gathering and organizing of feedback to serve as the voice of the customer within the company.

Many support organizations are so focused on the customer satisfaction and cost-cutting goals that they forget the third leg completely. Don’t be one of them.

The silos strike again

Marketing is responsible for determining the product strategy. Support is focused on customer satisfaction and costs. Since support and marketing typically have little in common, it’s really not surprising that they don’t often work together on the issue of customer feedback.
To be fair, data coming from support has its weaknesses. It comes from existing customers and marketers need to worry about prospects as well. Existing customers typically suggest good incremental improvements but aren’t usually inspired when it comes to radical changes. Still, unless you’re going into a completely new market, your installed base typically provides both a ready set of buyers for the next products and referrals. Therefore, listening to what they want is a wonderful investment.

A well-founded criticism against support data is that it’s unfriendly for non-support users. Who wants to page through hundreds of cases and thousands of notes to unearth what customers want? Some analysis and packaging is required.

A get-well plan

Here are six steps you can take now to improve Support’s effectiveness as the voice of the customer.

Track enhancement requests -- Many support centers track enhancement requests alongside product defects, realizing that at least some of the time there will be movement back and forth between the two categories. Indeed, the type of data that must be recorded for enhancement requests is quite similar to what’s required for defects, so tracking them in the same system makes sense. If you must use two systems, that’s fine too, as long as you track those requests.

Record trends -- Trends are much more useful than discrete data points. Set up the tracking system so that it’s easy to capture repeat requests, much as you probably do for defects. Define meaningful categories so it’s easier to analyze the data.

Package the information -- There may come a day when the marketing team will consider each customer request that comes through support. Until then, start with a manageable list, perhaps the top 10 or the top 20 issues. Have a senior support rep compile the list, taking into account clusters of requests. Customers often have slightly different views on similar issues, which should be recorded as such, but when you package and report the data, present the forests, not the trees – and certainly not the leaves on the trees.

Cultivate the right forum -- If your voice of the customer information is packaged properly, you’ll find that it’s much easier to get it heard. That said, it doesn’t hurt to schedule regular reviews with the marketing group, perhaps even the executive team.

Work with the users’ group -- While the support team can and should do much of the heavy lifting around enhancement requests, it’s also a good idea to work with the users’ group to ask them to rank enhancement requests, using the same reports you use internally. Although only a few customers bother to log enhancement requests, many are interested enough to vote on which ones would matter most – and the marketing team will recognize the input of the users’ group.

Have modest ambitions -- Don’t focus on being able to give each customer who makes an enhancement request a disposition on a request within a set timeframe, as you would for a defect. Be content with getting a regular audience for your top 10 list. If you start with a basic approach, you’re more likely to find success and generate goodwill within the company. You can raise requirements from there but be aware that very high requirements may well clash with the goodwill you worked so hard to create. Be aware of your corporate culture which probably changes slowly.

Following these six steps, you can find marketing research gold in your support data.

About the author
Francoise Tourniaire is the founder and principal of FT Works, a consulting firm that helps technology companies create and grow their support operations. She is the author of “The Art of Software Support”, a practical guide to creating and delivering training for support centers. For more information, visit www.ftworks.com or call 650 559 9826.

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