September 26, 2023
September 26, 2023
It wasn’t until I started working at a B2B company that I realized just how integral account management and customer service are in keeping users satisfied.
These two teams have a deep understanding of users and their pain points because of how much interaction they have with them. They know what customers frequently ask during onboarding, they guide them through various obstacles, and ultimately have a good sense of what they're looking for with the product/service.
When I first start at an organization, account management and customer support are typically the first two teams I meet with. Within an hour, I learn so much about current users and begin to plan which users to approach first when starting user research at a company.
Meeting with these colleagues regularly can help supplement your research and give you a distinct indication of users to speak to.
This article is part of our collaboration playbook series:
One thing to know before entering the world of UX: collaboration is crucial. To ensure successful collaboration, it’s important to understand what each of our colleagues do.
By having an understanding of the goals and the daily responsibilities each team faces, we can empathize with them and create an environment that makes their job easier. This, in turn, makes it much more straightforward to incorporate user research into their day-to-day work.
After working with and speaking to many account managers, I have a basic understanding of a few of their major KPIs:
Customer support KPIs can vary depending on the organization and product, so it's essential to speak with the team to understand their goals. Here are some examples of common customer support KPIs I’ve encountered:
Interestingly, customer support and account managers have similar goals to user researchers, such as customer satisfaction, customer lifetime value, and increasing retention and acquisition, which is why it is critical to align with these colleagues.
Regardless of the team, it's essential to understand their previous experience with user research or any biases they hold. The best way to learn this knowledge is by asking a lot of questions.
After I get to know the person's role, I set up a separate meeting to discuss user research. In this meeting, I will go over the following questions:
Through this question, you will understand any knowledge gaps or biases the person may have about user research. With this information, you can help inform or educate your colleagues.
By understanding how they have worked with user researchers in the past, you can uncover how you can best work together in the future.
This question can help you better understand their fears or anxieties surrounding user research, allowing you to brainstorm ways to counteract them.
By hearing about a previous project, you can gather colleagues' expectations, pain points, and needs when conducting a project.
With this information, you tie it all together and plant the seed for working together. The answer to this question can give you specific action items to get started on facilitating your relationship.
So how do we work together with these teams? Here are some studies that work best with account managers and customer support:
The best approach I have taken to sharing findings with account management and customer support teams is integrating them into the product team meetings. We can make their jobs easier by keeping them in the loop, especially with the product roadmap.
These meetings consist of the most common complaints, tickets, and pain points that have come up for customers. I ask teams to bring some evidence of the problem and some reasoning behind it.
Everyone presents the top issues they encountered and the product team discusses how to address the next steps. The following steps could be doing additional research to validate and better understand the problem. The product team can quickly fix a bug or low-hanging fruit issue without much solution brainstorming.
Usually, I will update account management and customer support once a month on the research recently completed. If there was a project of particular importance to either of these teams, I would update them before the general sharing meeting.
As soon as I do any customer journey, service blueprint, or persona work, I sit down with these teams for a workshop. They share everything they know about the user during these meetings and I use it to build a prototype of these deliverables that we can later validate.
I meet bi-weekly with both teams to gather information from their sides such as top complaints and recurring tickets. During this time, I also update them on any relevant changes to the product or progress on particular projects.
Since account managers have great working relationships with customers, I will ask them to reach out to clients for user research interviews. I keep a running list of clients to ensure we don't overwhelm the same participants too often. Leveraging account managers' relationships is also a great place to start with creating a participant panel.
When working with customer support and account management, you grow the organization's holistic knowledge of users. Teaming up with these departments solidifies your practice and ensures that you focus on the right customers and prioritize the most critical problems.
Since account managers, customer support, and user researchers have overlapping goals, it can be an excellent partnership. Here are some ways I have experienced the reciprocal relationship with these teams.
There are a few ways I like to help account managers in their day-to-day:
The main pain point I encounter with account managers is misalignment with their feature requests and the product roadmap. With this in mind, I act as a facilitator between the product and account management teams, setting up a structure to ensure their common complaints get prioritized for the product roadmap.
This facilitation can be as simple as setting up a backlog and voting system discussed bi-weekly between the teams. As a result, the feature requests coming up the most across clients get prioritized and put into the product roadmap.
Creating personas and presenting them to the account management team can help them structure conversations with clients. If account managers know a particular pain point is recurring, we can work to create a playbook for them to manage it more easily.
Keeping the account management team in the loop with the product roadmap can help them respond to complaints and feature requests.
Teaching the team how to dig deeper for reasons behind feature requests to understand the "why" and better prioritize future features.
Customer support and user researchers both deeply care about customers and satisfaction. So here are some ways I like to help out the customer support team:
Monitoring the most common complaints to bring to the product roadmap and prioritize solutions.
Conducting user research on help documentation or FAQ pages to ensure it is the best experience.
Helping to reduce customer support emails/calls by dealing with bugs and bad user experience as quickly as possible.
As I mentioned, always check with both teams as there may be organization-specific ways user research can help teams at your company.
As I've mentioned, account managers and customer support talk to clients every day, making them experts on users' needs and pain points. Here are some ways these teams have helped me in the past:
Understanding the pain points of the users through the most common complaints and tickets.
Helping to prioritize the product roadmap through data on customer's needs and issues.
Creating proto-personas of users we want to speak to next, giving a baseline of what to expect from the users.
Prioritizing the different groups of customers we should start speaking with—especially helpful when you are just starting at a company.
Giving insights via calls, emails or chats, that help you cross-validate trends from qualitative sessions.
Cultivating a general understanding of the types of customers we have, as well as their goals, needs, and pain points.
Inside the guide you'll find tips for...
Nikki Anderson-Stanier is the founder of User Research Academy and a qualitative researcher with 9 years in the field. She loves solving human problems and petting all the dogs.
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