Customer Support and Product Development

I have been working in Customer Support departments for over 11 years. One important point of attention in these roles is how technical support and engineering teams can interact to build a successful design with excellent operational characteristics.

Customer Support experts deal with design-derived issues — such as availability, reliability and costs. They have experience of dealing with clients requests and operational matters. They also understand customer requirements. How valuable is this experience when designing a new product?

In this article, let’s review Customer Support expert skills and responsibilities, and how they participate in successful development. CS will be used as an acronym for Customer Support.

Skills

What comes to mind when you think of CS?

Indeed.com brings a list of CS professionals correlated skills. This list includes:

• Relationship skills: CS professionals talk to people. They converse with customers, suppliers, vendors and contractors. They also interact with program management, design teams and their own leaders. Active listening skills, empathy and conflict resolution are critical to address customer’s questions and to be the “voice of the customer” inside the company. It relates to knowing what needs attention according to the customers.
• Technical knowledge and problem solving skills: CS experts listen to the customer and understand their queries. Product and technical knowledge, problem solving and growth mindset contribute to grasp — and solve — customer’s queries. Also, many questions may be resolved by the CS professional knowledge, or documentation they have access to (manuals, internal reports).
• Communication skills: not only being an effective presence and understanding the pressing matters, CS professionals need to communicate effectively — and push their solutions forward. Assertiveness, presentation skills and negotiation will enable CS professionals to address queries, solve them and communicate the results to the customers.

These skills are correlated. Technical knowledge is required to talk to technical people and understand their pains. Also, effective communication includes actual knowledge of the message being communicated.

How CS professionals Empower Development

With this skillset and understanding of market requirements, CS professionals can and should contribute to successful development.

According to SX000i Issue 2.0, International specification for Integrated Product Support (IPS), CS professionals can (and must) support development at:

• Supportability: providing design team with requirements to build a operationally successful product. These requirements originate in the customers and from the CS organization as well.
• Selection of equipment and suppliers: CS professionals have experience observing the performance of engineering solutions once they reach the market. This experience leads to understanding operational impacts caused by proposed solutions. In innovative supplier solutions, they can also check characteristics concerning operability, maintainability, etc. This ensures the right solution — and the right supplier — are being considered.
• Modeling availability: CS professionals must develop models to support predicted levels of availability, reliability and maintainability. They must also have goals for these metrics and act if their models point to problems.
• Participation in design reviews: different solutions are operated and maintained differently. CS professionals must contribute with designers to ensure technical solutions will also work in-service.
• Participation in testing: test procedures will drive customer’s operational and maintenance procedures. A complex test procedure that requires special equipment may impair operability and maintainability. CS professionals should discuss solutions with designers and help find the optimum one.

Can’t the designers do it all?

We saw many interfaces between CS professionals and product engineers. But shouldn’t the design team assume all tasks concerning development — and leave the customer questions only to CS?

As discussed, many customer issues are design issues. There has to be professionals that facilitate the communication between the customers and the designers. Then designers can focus on product development and requirements compliance. And customers can communicate with professionals specialized in understanding their queries and addressing them.

Summary

So, how can CS professionals empower early designs? Since successful design considers customer’s use cases, CS professionals can contribute by:

• helping drive development and optimize design solutions, considering customer requirements,
• clarify customer’s queries with answers based on design decisions to help them get the most value from the product, and
• participate directly in design change requirements when there is more value to be extracted from the product, according to market requirements and customer output.

And help the designers build high-maturity solutions right after they enter into service.

Have you experienced this collaboration between Customer Support and Design teams? How it was addressed by you and by your company?