Optimising support for your digital product

Outstanding support for your product, first begins with a great product. The best customer support, is not needing support in the first place. But where support is necessary, we can still create a fantastic experience. In this post I will introduce the cascade of support, which shows the steps most users will follow to solve a problem, and in turn, show how we can solve their problem as early and efficiently as possible.

The cascade of support

1. The higher quality and more usable the product, the smaller the amount of documentation that you need.
2. The higher the quality of the documentation, the smaller the amount of people that will require support.
3. The higher the quality of the product and documentation, the larger the community will be that provides a support network in the form of guides, tutorials, forums, and Q&A.
4. Consequently, the smaller the amount of people that will require support from a staff member/maintainer. This means less staff time spent on providing support, meaning the more time staff will have available to work on improving the product.

I call this the cascade of support.

A great product

The iPhone is an example of a great product, that in most cases, just works. You don’t need a user manual – it teaches you as you go. The interface is so simple, that almost anyone can use it without a user-manual.

This means that more time can be put into developing the product and software, user experience, and features, as opposed to writing and printing user-manuals, and having extensive online support documentation that let’s face it, none of us really want to read. Of course, there will always be issues requriring support from the community and staff, but in the majority of cases, things “just work”.

Great documentation

Some products though, are more complex in nature to use, or require some learning or training to become a proficient user. Working in the tech industry, there is no shortage of these! This is where great documentation truly shines.

Let’s take for example creating a website. You may develop it using a framework, interface with a database, and deploy it on a cloud provider. Each of these things will require some reading, learning, and looking things up.

Great documentation truly makes the experience of using a product far better, and enables for faster development.

Community support

Products that are a great experience to use, and that are accompanied by clear, comprehensive documentation on how to get the best of it, will naturally attract a user base that are enthusiastic about the product. These users will share their experience online through blog posts, tutorials, videos, and discussions on forums. Over time this builds a knowledge base of know-how ranging from basic troubleshooting, to doing exciting, cutting edge things.

A community is hugely beneficial to newcomers consuming the product, being able to tap into all of that knowledge, and to build connections within the community. Additionally, the feedback from the community about the product helps shape the product’s future roadmap – further improving the product. This feedback loop in turn builds a bigger community, allowing the products user-base to snowball!

Customer support

If a user has to resort to requesting help from a real staff member, the previous three parts of the cascade have failed. It means that at least a part of the product has not been easy to use, and that the documentation has either not been sufficient or searchable enough, and that there is perhaps not a significant community of users using the product. This does not paint a great picture.

The best thing that can be done in this situation, in addition to providing great customer support, is to remedy the product and documentation where required. If one user had trouble, it’s likely more users will encounter the same situation. You don’t want to create a scenario where the same questions get asked and are requiring support over and over.

There are two things you could do:

1. Look at the situation that the user needed help with. Could the user interface be clearer about what needs to be done, or how to carry out a task?
2. Is the documentation on the topic not clear or thourough enough for a user to complete the task, or is it missing altogether? If so, come up with a stategy to fill this gap. It may be a reference, a “how-to” guide, or similar, that is easily searchable and discoverable.

The goal here is for a user not to have to have to contact support with the same problem.

Symptoms of a poor support cascade

High repition of work

If users cannot get the information they need from the product, its documentation, or its community network, they will need to engage someone for customer support. This takes time. And if one user has had an issue, its likely another will as well. And if nothing is done – users will repetitively be requesting support for the same issue, and so the team responsible for the product are burning more and more time solving known issues.

Poor user experience

People like to be self-sufficient. It can be frustrating having to ask for help to carry out simple tasks, and having to wait for that help. Creating a great product and provide quality documentation allows users to be more self-sufficient, which will increase their morale when carrying out their work.

Hero culture

Within an organisation, if the cascade of support for a product is failing in the first few stages, this can result in a phenomenon called “hero culture”. This is where a few “heroes” in an organisation are relied on to solve problems, often at the last minute and after users have already been blocked on their work for a period of time. This is bad for a number of reasons:

• Users don’t have access to the information they need to do what needs to be done
• Creates a “reactive” rather than a “proactive” workflow
• Higher risk in times of crises, when only certain few individuals have the required information
• Inefficiency, users waiting on heros to unblock their work
• Burnout of the heroes, who are constantly fighting fires.

Optimising the support cascade

We want our users to be able to use our products easily, with minimal help. To do this, we optimise our cascade of support!

1. Start with the product

Creating a quality product is the best possible way to support your users. Having a great, usable experience, whether it be through a user interface, API, CLI or otherwise, will mean that the users don’t have to refer to the documentation or request support as often.

2. Create quality documentation

Next, make sure you have easy-to-follow, comprehensive documentation for your product. This allows users to be more self-sufficient in finding the information they need, to do what they need to do.

3. Foster a community

If you have a great product, with great documentation, it won’t be long before the great user experience that those provide means that a community of users will be growing. Engage with them, and help give them a platform to connect with each other and share knowledge.

4. Action each customer query

If a user requires customer support – make it your goal that another user who may have the same problem can find what they need to find – either through improvements to the product, documentation, or both. If the problem is significant, engage with the community to show that you have actioned problem. Bit by bit, your product and documenation will improve! And you’ll lower the chances of spending time on the same problem.

Conclusion

I hope this post has made it clear the benefits of optimising the cascade of support, and that there is something you can take away from it! It will enable you to spend more time on your products, and keep your users happier.