Product Support - Why is it important?

Although product teams and developers are responsible for creating the best user experience possible, there are bound to be problems and complaints from frustrated users. Product support is imperative to preventing churn and keeping your customers productive. 

But how does the product support process actually work and what should you track to ensure that your team is providing the best possible customer service and patching up any potential issues? Here are the main steps in that process and why they are crucial to monitor.

Bug Count

Although you spend hundreds of thousands creating a new product and conducting a rigorous testing process, chances are there will be bugs that impact your product's user experience. Even the most successful and widespread software offerings like iOS suffer from bugs, but how can you mitigate the problems and continue delivering the best product possible?

It is important to keep track of consumer complaints, including feedback on company forums and social media platforms, as well as direct communications between the consumer and the company. Understanding what the problems are and when they happen allows your company to contact developers and update your product as quickly as possible. 

Counting Support Tickets

A support ticket is defined as an interaction between a customer and a business in the event of a problem or confusion from the customer. Support ticket systems like ZenDesk are helpful for displaying how many support tickets have been opened and can be filtered for keywords or by category. 

Your customer service team can relay an abnormal amount of support tickets to the product team to resolve a widespread issue before customers leave for the competition.

Importance of Created Support Tickets

If you work at or own a web-based company, chances are you have a customer support system. Commonly, users are encouraged by companies to file product complaints, which are also known as support tickets. 

Support tickets can help you glean important insights about your product and any negative feedback from your customers is an invaluable asset. Think about it this way: how can you fix a car if you don't know what's wrong with it?

Monitoring support tickets and segmenting them by category allows product teams to contact relevant departments about pressing problems and decrease the time it takes to reimburse or satisfy a discouraged customer. 

Why is Product Support Important? 

Although your product may be revolutionary and have a positive impact on your industry, bugs will creep in one way or another, whether it's on your website, or directly within your product. Because bugs are so plentiful and common, having product support systems in place will encourage customers to continue using your product. Implementing an automated support ticket system that allows your customer support team to understand where the problems lie can save a company both money and time.

Knowing that there are bugs and more support tickets than usual is great, but why are they there? Monitoring the topic and number of support tickets through dashboards can provide instant insights to terminate your product bugs and keep customers happy.