The Customer Success role has long had a problem – the group tends to sit on its data. This syndrome is even more true of Customer Support groups, as I have observed in doing so many operational reviews of such departments over the years. The attitude seems to be “Well, if anybody wants to know what we know, they can ask.” It doesn’t work that way in real organizational life. You have to actively market those data and knowledge resources to other departments of the company if they are to be of value. Or, at least, you did. Will the AI craze solve this problem? Is using AI to reveal hidden data the solution?
Tapping the Data Resource
There should be no question about the value of the data lurking the the Support case database and in the heads of the CSMs and Support reps. Years ago, at Aldus PageMaker, a savvy Support VP set up a regular weekly meeting between Support and Engineering under the heading of “What We’re Hearing.” It was a recurring opportunity for Support reps to share the fruits of their conversations with the customers directly with the members of the coding team (who otherwise never heard the voices of the customers in any way!) on product usage, feature requests, etc. Both groups took it seriously, and it worked very well. Unfortunately, few other software companies at the time took the hint.
In a conversation with Eric Harrington at TeamSupport the other day, I found that they, like so many other companies are doing these days, have baked ai into their support case management and now Onboarding solution — and in the process, have provided a potential solution to the hidden data problem. A conversational query about a customer, for example, can turn up a growing at-risk scenario for an otherwise appearing solid green account. By invoking an ai query to analyze all of the Support tickets and other conversational records for meaningful phrases, the traditional necessity for Support reps to actively reach out to Sales or Engineering/Product Dev people is removed. Anyone in the company can engage the conversational ai anything, and get fast answers. Will that ai resource solve the problem?
Danger: Assumptions!
Not so fast. Fast access to a wide range of disparate data sources indeed offers enormous potential — but the operative word is “potential.” People still have to have the wisdom/expertise to know how to form the questions, and then to actually ask them. This is where the domain expertise built up over time in customer interactions is vital. It takes people to ask the final question: what does this mean?
