Only Tag What Matters

Tagging support tickets is a common way to organize them and have the ability to do some reporting. Tagging is a balance act though. It’s important to find the balance between the effort put into tagging and the actual impact of the data created. If no one does anything with the information created by tagging, then it is a waste of effort. Nice-to-have information is a waste of time that could have been spent on need-to-have information. One way to focus the offort put into tagging is to limit what is tagged to a specific topic and a specific time period. And let it be driven by what is needed for decision making right now.

If your product team is currently working on fixing billing issues and will be doing that for the next two sprints, then that is your time window and topic for providing useful information. Get a tag in place and get your team on board with what you’re trying to help the product team do.

Next, getting the information out of your helpdesk and to your product team. One approach is to simply copy a few (~3) examples into an email with a summary of what you think is important for the product team to consider..

“The emails this week look a little more angry than last week. Here are some examples:

Email 1: […]
Email 2: […]
Email 3: […]

In addition to fixing the issue we should keep the explanation in place and update it with references to the new functionality.”

So the steps you need to take are these:

1. Go talk to your product team.
2. Find out what they are working on right now.
3. Pick an area where information from support tickets can be helpful.
4. Create a tag for this tickets if you don’t have it yet.
5. Tag those tickets for two weeks and share with the product team.

Only Tag What Matters

User Research and Support: Do you really know your users?












User Research and Support: Do you really know your users?

Make Your Insights Impactful

A critical component in making support conversations useful to other teams and finding the right format to deliver the information in. Get this wrong, and all the other work will be wasted despite all good intentions. We will want to find a way to communicate that is both efficient and effective. Efficient, so it requires the least amount of work on your part. And effective, so it has the maximum impact for the receiving team. Once again we have to step out of our own situation and into the mindset of the person who we are trying to get to understand and internalize the information we’re sharing with them.

Be Boring

When sharing information with your colleagues you ideally want to be brief but comprehensive, which is not simple to do. In fact, it’s really hard. One way to help yourself in the beginning is to be as simple as straightforward as possible. In other words, be boring. Don’t worry about the aesthetics of what you’re trying to do for your colleagues here. You’re literally just trying to find the smallest piece of information that will be useful to them.

So find that information and then find the easiest way for you to repeatedly produce it and deliver it to them. A simple email may be the way to go. Or adding an agenda item to an already existing meeting. The point is that it’s something you need to figure out. That’s where the context of your team comes in. If you’re talking to a product team, they’ll often have a stand up. Maybe that’s the right place to deliver the information, so you would just go and tell them in a couple of sentences, whatever it is they need to know.

For your sales team, they may have one weekly session where they iterate on their pitches, and it may just be 30 minutes. It may be very helpful for them to have an email with a couple of sentences that they can copy paste directly into their pitch and test the next week. By matching your insight and delivery to where you’re hoping your insights will have an impact, you increase the odds of that actually happening hugely.


Interested in what support can do for the rest of your company?
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Make Your Insights Impactful

Find Out What Your Colleagues Really Need

What we’re interested in here is to take support conversations and make them useful for other teams. To do that effectively we need tools we can use when we go talk to those other teams. The first thing we will look at is empathy. If you work in a support team empathy probably comes fairly natural for you. And empathy and the ability to listen without judgement are the most important skills for you when talking to the other teams in your company about how support conversations can help them. Since we’re trying to figure out how support conversations can help these other teams we need to truly understand their goals and the reality they operate in.

That also means that you need to forget about tickets for a while. Because as we’re talking to other teams we need to let go of what we’re trying to achieve. At least for a while. We’ll get back to it, but for now, you’re not trying to convince anyone of anything. You’re only trying to learn. So before you go talk to anyone it’s a good idea to do a quick mental check of anything you need to put aside for a while. Like that one billing bug that keeps sending you into the red zone because the product team never seem to understand that it obviously needs to be fixed. That bug is not important right now. What’s important is to have a genuinely open conversation with the people you work with.

And that conversation starts with a simple question: “what is your biggest challenge right now?” That question works very well, whether you’re talking to customers or colleagues. It works so well because you’re trying to understand what’s most important to your colleagues and the most important thing or the thing that’s top of mind is most often the biggest challenge, the thing that keeps people awake at night. And that’s also what people love to talk about.

You may think of a better version of that question. You may want to get more specific, but you can pretty much walk up to anyone in your company right now, ask them this question, and in five minutes you will have some very valuable information to help figure out how you can help.


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Find Out What Your Colleagues Really Need

What Types of Data can you get From Support Conversations?

Support conversations are a unique source of information about your customers. Information that is both rich in detail and messy in structure. And information that the support team is uniquely positioned to access and understand.

Support teams have a special relationship with customers stemming from the simple fact that the support team’s role in this world is to be helpful. Even when a question doesn’t have a clear answer or the answer isn’t what a customer was hoping for they should still walk away having had a positive experience. If that is not the case, then you have other issues for your support team to work on. Assuming you have a high functioning support team, let’s take a look at some examples of the type of information the support teams can produce.

The real strength of having a close relationship with customers is the type of qualitative data we get access to. We get an understanding of their experience as we talk to them. An understanding of the reality they live in, which in turn helps us interpret in a much broader way the questions they ask us. And it also gives us knowledge of different facets of them and of what they do. Knowledge we can put to use in giving them a better help or in finding more customers like them.


Understanding what tools customers use can tell us quite a bit about what their day-to-day looks like and what their priorities are. Here we are looking for things like areas where they used very expensive tools and areas where they seem to use no or only free tools. Getting an understanding of how they allocate their budget is relevant for us in terms of product strategy. Is our product moving in the direction where customers have a history of making new investments? If so, are we prepared to convince them to start making those investments?

It can also help give us ideas for where to look for other businesses similar to our current customers who might be interested in what we have to offer.


What do they spend most of their time worrying about? And not just in relation to the tool we are providing them with, but in terms of their business in general. Knowing this is helpful to us in a few different ways. We are interested in knowing because we are empathetic people, and actually care about what is important to the people we interact with. It is also relevant from a business perspective. How does the problem our tool helps them solve relate to their main challenge right now? And is there anything we can do from a product or service perspective to help address those challenges? This is information that is highly relevant to both a product team and a sales team in terms of conversations they are having with potential customers right now and initiatives they will start in the future.

Wow moments

As the flip side to their main challenges, we are also interested in what there positive experiences have been with our product. What did we help them do that was awesome? Hopefully there is something.
Wow moments are gold for sales teams. They can use these examples when talking to potential new customers, to help paint a picture of what we have helped other, similar businesses to achieve.

So some of the questions we want to ask are:

  • What other tools have you been using today?
  • What are your biggest challenges right now?
  • What would you like us to help you do more of?


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What Types of Data can you get From Support Conversations?

What Can Support do for Your Product Team?

Let’s look at what information is useful to product teams and how to best deliver it to them. It is important to understand both the goals and the reality of the other teams in your company. For product teams that is often a reality that’s shaped by backlogs and code. The same way a support team’s world is often shaped by tickets or phone calls. They also worm in a reality of constant time and resource constraints, which leads to them having to make trade-offs.

Support teams can help product teams with things like identifying bugs that need to be fixed, channeling feature requests from customers, and other explicit feedback users have. But the real value comes in understanding the users’ context and reality and bringing that richer information, those stories about the everyday challenges of a customer, to the product team. Because that’s helpful when they’re trying to figure out what to prioritize next. They’ll probably be looking at feature usage and things like that, but giving them that richer understanding of what a feature actually means to a user can be very impactful.

So the first objective is going to be to get an understanding of how we can really help the product team:

  1. Go to them and ask for their roadmap
  2. Ask what their biggest challenge is right now


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What Can Support do for Your Product Team?

Working With Small B2B Customers

There are many differences between working in B2B and consumer software but a few interesting things stand out from having the smallest of businesses as customers. B2B typically deals with a lower volume of customers and have a closer relationship with them. Which is related to the fact that the acquisition channels tend to be different and the sales cycles often much longer for B2B. Use of products are often more casual and ad-hoc for consumer versus more structured, goal-driven, and often 40 hours per week for B2B. Or at least that what is tends to look like at the ends of the spectrum. So pure consumer entertainment software versus enterprise level deeply integrated software. I have mostly been working with small and medium-sized businesses, in some cases even tiny businesses. And they sit somewhere in the middle of the scale on many of those dimensions. Which makes for an interesting set of challenges and opportunities borrowing from both consumer and enterprise-level B2B software.

Some of the challenges in working with very small businesses come from the consumer side of the scale. An owner or employee at a very small business will most likely cover multiple roles and responsibilities. Which means that their time and attention is split across multiple priorities. Which again means that whatever tool or service you are offering them most likely only related to one of their priorities. In a enterprise setting it is more likely that the person who will be using the tool is fully focused on one area of expertise, which means your tool or service helps them with the one thing that is most important to them. So when approaching small businesses about a service, understand that they have many things to do. On the flip side, in a small business you are more likely to be talking to the person who can make the purchase decision. You won’t usually need to wait for the supervisor meeting and budget reviews for someone to OK a purchase.

Build the tool with a casual gaming mindset. It is unlikely that your user will be spending all day every day in your tool, so it needs to be very simple to jump in and get work done whenever some time frees up. Whether that is once per week or every other week. Consider when your users will most need help from you. Any tool that is not the top 3 most used by a small business, are likely to find usage on evenings and weekends when other priorities have been taken care of. So consider whether you need to be available on the phone outside of business hours, or if you need to build really good self-help content that can cover during those times.

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Working With Small B2B Customers

How Can Support Conversations Help Sales Teams?

Sales teams constantly need to update their knowledge about customers to do their job better. And that is knowledge that support teams often have through their daily conversations with customers. But sales teams live in a busy world of sales targets and goals that they have to hit right now.
Because of that they don’t have time to go look for information that’s useful to them in other teams. That is where support teams have an opportunity to proactively help their sales colleagues by getting that information to them.

“Getting insight into what users use or like the most, and where they see the highest value for the product. There is always a WOW moment with a happy customer: ‘Wow that’s gonna save or make me so much time or money’. If you are able to identify those moments and give that to the sales and marketing teams to shape the sales message… it will really help!”

Jorge Bestard, Growth Manager, Olapic

One of the most common questions a sales person will get when talking to customers about a tool or service is “how do other businesses like mine use it?” Support can help answer that question because they have those conversations every day.

Stories about what other customers have found valuable once they geo up and running with the product are extremely useful to both a sales person and the potential customer they’re talking to. Those stories can help move the conversation from a discussion of features to using the real world examples to talking about what business results the new customer can reasonably expect. So if you hear about a wow moment from a customer two or three months in, that is something you want to pass on to your sales team.

Another thing to consider is whether any of the onboarding material that is used after a customer signs on could be used as part of the sales process. This can play out in a few different ways. If your onboarding material helps customers get their business in better shape so they can get the most benefit from your tool, then getting that process started before a sale is closed is to everyone’s benefit. The customer improves their business, the sales rep has actual value to offer even before a contract is signed, and the support teams gets customer that are more likely to be successful with the product who have already completed part of their onboarding.

Some sales teams are aware of these things and some aren’t. In either case they often don’t have the time to go find it. They typically operate in a hectic environment and rarely have time to look beyond the targets they have to hit today. Even if there’s information sitting in the next team over that could help them hit their quotas for the month or the quarter. So much time is spent putting out fires and managing urgency that they are rarely able to put in the time to go talk to support teams about things that could help them close deals. And that is an opportunity for other teams in a company.

So go talk to your sales team today and figure out what types of customers they are talking to. Look for places where insights from conversations with current customers can be helpful to them. And then start passing that information on to make your support conversations helpful to your sales team!

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How Can Support Conversations Help Sales Teams?

What Can Support Do for the Rest of Your Company?


Support teams sit on a goldmine of information that can help other teams. Information coming straight from users with all the rich and messy context that brings. But colleagues in other teams are not necessarily aware and will need to be shown how support conversations and support teams can help them achieve their goals.

There are a few different ways in which support conversations are unique compared to other types of data about customers. They all add up to offer a set of information about customers that is hard to get to in any other way.

They Want to Talk to You

An important characteristic of support conversations is that people want to talk to the support team. They may want to talk to you because something is broken or difficult to use, and those aren’t necessarily the happiest conversations. But even those conversations, when handled well, help people solve their problems and make a positive difference. In other cases the conversations may be more customer success or account management like and more consultative in nature. So helping a customer figure out how to get more value out of the tool that we’re providing them with. In all these cases, these are conversations that their customers are interested in having. And should walk away from happier than they came in.

You Get Rich Information

Through these conversations a support team has access to a very rich set of information from and about the customer. Approaching these conversations like a user researcher would can be very helpful. User research is all about understanding an audience, and it’s built on the ethnographic approach where you go out and spend time with a particular group of people to see how they live, what they do, and study their culture. That may be a little extreme for what we’re talking about here, but the same principles apply. Through the conversations you have with customers, you actually have an opportunity to get a much broader understanding of what’s going on in their business and what they need the tools you’re supplying to do for them. You have an opportunity to get an understanding of the goals and motivations of your users. And that’s the main main point in terms of thinking like a user researcher, to develop this sort of peripheral vision, where regardless of what sort of interaction you’re having with your customers you’ll occasionally get nuggets of information about what else is going on on their end.

You Develop a Relationship

There is no better way to build a relationship than to help someone. By just doing their job well a support team builds a unique relationship with customers. A relationship that makes future conversations easier and makes it possible to have the kinds of conversations that provide information about a customer that not survey will ever unearth.

Have you talked to your colleagues in sales and marketing about how support conversations can help them achieve their goals? What information is most useful to them?

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What Can Support Do for the Rest of Your Company?