| This is a subject that's very near and dear to my heart. At its core, it's the alignment between customer experience and product. Support as the customer facing representatives need to be empowered to convey the shortcomings of the product as it impacts customer experience. The product team in turn should then digest that information and relay it to the people building the product, the engineers in this case. Good alignment/synergy etc. between those teams leads to good customer experience. My support team calls it "support deflection" (in terms of how it impacts support). "Upstream solution" (from the article) is roughly equivalent, from a different perspective. The challenge that we face as support professionals becomes existential, once we've mastered deflection. As the article points out, it is very hard to measure that type of success. The less reliance customers have on support, the less important support is to the company's success. The less important support is to the company's success, the less support is valued. If fewer support requests come in for an extended period, then the support team will be downsized. If a company is around long enough, surely undervaluing support services will likely catch up with them as new features and eventually new products are rolled out, and support professionals can only hope that executives are far-sighted enough to recognize that. The problem that I've been stuck on for a while is how to align company interests with the support team's best interests, long term. Solving customer problems "upstream" is essentially fighting against ourselves. |