Contact Center Trends

Understand the Product to Improve Customer Service

By Gavin Gustafson

April 19, 2018

0 min read

As a customer service professional, one of the most critical lessons you can learn is to understand the product to improve customer service. As a manager, your team will often be the front line shielding customer calls about your company’s newest product release. In the chaotic environment of customer service, it’s easy to focus on the fire drills at hand and forget to think ahead. However, being informed about new or upcoming product changes, especially when they are complex, is an easy way for your team to improve customer service and impress company leadership.

To improve customer service you’ll need to do a bit of proactive management planning. That requires reaching out to the product team regularly to understand the product roadmap and training your agents to be one step ahead of the updates. The great news is, as soon as your product updates and you start receiving support inquiries, your team will be prepared to problem solve at the drop of a hat. You’ll get the most inquiries about a feature the first month or so that it is available, so your team needs to be 100% knowledgeable on day one.

Luckily, these product updates are likely part of a larger plan and aren’t coming out of nowhere. Once your support and product teams are in a cadence of communicating regularly, it will be second nature to answer questions about new and upcoming releases.

It’s good to know how the product works, but it’s even better to understand the logic behind the new updates so you can provide a more complete picture of your offering when speaking with customers. Better yet, establishing communication lines between support and product teams is a great way to make sure the customer’s voice is heard in roadmap planning sessions. The support team can learn the product on time and the product team can use feedback from the support team to build a more customer-friendly product; it’s a win-win.

Understand the Product to Improve Customer Service is part of our ebook, 8 Habits Support Professionals Need to Develop, by Dominic Sandoval, Technical Support Team Lead at Talkdesk. Talkdesk’s world-class support team has an average CSAT rating of 98%. For more tips on how to leverage customer support skills to build relationships, download the ebook.