Align Support and Research Teams

Many companies employ a customer support line, or some type of customer support center, in order to assist customers with their needs. Customer support plays a key role in your company's ability to improve customer satisfaction. Customers call in (or walk in, depending on the system you have in place) and get the help they need in from someone trained to provide outstanding customer service.

That's why it's strange that so many research teams – particularly those that perform customer satisfaction research and product quality research – don't regularly converse with the customer support teams. The two not only have a great deal in common – the support team may also have insight that helps improve the quality of your business.

Customer support teams know better than anyone what the customers need and where a product is lacking. They deal with these issues every day, and not just in product bugs – they also often hear feature requests or have insight into ways to better serve the customers. Even when a customer returns a product for reasons that have nothing to do with product quality, they may voice their thoughts on what they need to be more satisfied with the product or what they need in general.

Researchers are trying to find this information every day when they send out surveys. But the customer support team may have some of this insight already. Not all of your customer satisfaction research needs to come from your customers directly.

It can also come from the thoughts and experiences of those that have to work with the customers your business is trying to serve.

There's something to be said about the likelihood that employees of your company know something about what it takes to serve the customers well. Many experts recommend that you include questions about product quality and enhancement in your employee research for this very reason.

But you may also want to pay close attention to what your customer support team says as well, because of all the employees your company hires, they are the ones that are most likely to hear about customer needs and have insight into how to fix them. Run a focus group or send a survey to your customer support staff to find out what they know or what they think. Then, when you have a set of answers available, use the tools at SurveyMethods to continue that research by sending a survey out to your customers and ensuring that the ideas your support staff provided are useful steps for your company's product development.