December 2016 Summaries

The author of the text emphasizes the importance of a customer support team knowing more about their product than they do, and how this can be achieved through open communication between the two teams. The outsourcing silo is highlighted as a potential pitfall, where companies may treat customer support as something to be dealt with, rather than a valuable resource for gaining insights into customer needs. The author suggests that by looking at conversations between customers and support teams, companies can gain actionable feedback on product issues, improve their products through tagging and categorization, and ultimately provide better customer experiences.

The key to a successful product team is understanding the differences between working in launch mode versus iterate mode. After launching a new product, teams must shift from focusing on perfection and scope to embracing iteration and continuous improvement. This requires being open-minded, trying many small changes, and making decisions based on customer feedback. In contrast, launch mode involves being ruthless about scope, prioritizing the defined list of features, and taking a risk-averse approach. As the product is now out in the world, the team must release small improvements independently, often with minimal planning or deliberation, to keep up with customer needs and stay ahead of competitors. Ultimately, this mindset shift will define the success of the product over the coming months.

Conversational commerce is an emerging concept that describes the integration of online shopping and customer chat interfaces. It has gained significant traction due to the increasing importance of messaging platforms in facilitating transactions, particularly among younger generations who prefer human-like interactions with businesses. The key types of conversational commerce include pre-sale and post-sale interactions between consumers and businesses, as well as merchant-back-office system conversations, where business owners can message their back-end systems to manage their operations. Additionally, shopping assistants like Operator, Mezi, and Magic are becoming increasingly popular, allowing customers to find products through conversational interactions. The future of conversational commerce is expected to be shaped by the rise of voice-based interactions, platform wars between messaging platforms, and the growth of smart companies investing in this space.

As a UX research team of one, the author reflects on their recent large-scale remote usability test experience. They share lessons learned to help solo researchers navigate the challenges of working alone, including running pilot studies with a teammate, opting for remote studies, and utilizing tools like Usertesting.com to record and analyze user interactions. The author emphasizes the importance of building relationships with team members, investing in research tools, creating templates to streamline workflows, having a single source of truth for research materials, reaching out to communities for support and feedback, finding participants at local coffee shops, and making the most of available resources to stay up-to-date with industry best practices.

Rethinking customer support automation is necessary as businesses often over-automate tasks that humans are better suited for, leading to frustration and resentment from customers. The key to success lies in understanding when customers have common + easy questions or rare + hard questions, and using computers to answer the former while involving humans for the latter. A great support product should understand this distinction, make it fast to resolve common questions, provide a way for customers to give feedback on answers, and allow them to move from helping themselves to talking with human support staff when needed. An AI-powered solution like Articles aims to achieve this by using machine learning to suggest content to both humans and customers, enabling self-service and efficient resolution of common questions while involving humans for rare and hard queries.

The article from Intercom highlights the importance of emojis in business messaging, citing a data report that analyzed over two million conversations between customers and end users. The analysis found that messages containing an emoji were four times more likely to elicit a response than those without one, suggesting that emojis can improve message engagement. However, it also revealed that businesses tend to use fewer facial-related emojis and instead opt for object-based or money-related ones, which may not be as effective in forming genuine connections with customers. The report concludes that businesses should adopt an approach that feels natural and personal, rather than artificial or cheesy, by using emojis that reflect their genuine emotion and avoiding negative ones. Ultimately, the key takeaway is that communicating with consumers will increasingly resemble personal communication, and it's up to businesses to figure out how to make their "work persona" align better with their "real one."

Shipping a product is just the beginning for software development; it's when customers start using the product that you can truly learn what works and what doesn't. This ethos of continuous improvement makes releasing an "imperfect" product acceptable, but it's rare to apply this principle to help content, which is often written with perfectionism in mind and published all at once. To break free from this cycle, you need to know what "done" looks like, as perfection is the enemy of done. Great editorial skills involve being able to pick up on typos and inaccuracies, but even then, a piece of writing is never truly perfect or done. Creating great help content is a design challenge that requires collaboration, early planning, talking to customers, answering one thing at a time, and asking for peer input and reviews. Once you publish your content, it's essential to get real feedback from real people, which can be overwhelming but manageable with the right tools, such as those provided by Educate product, which links articles to real conversations and gives actionable data.

Educate, a new Intercom product, aims to deliver help content to customers whenever and wherever they need it. It focuses on four themes: embedded content that can be shared directly in conversations, suggested articles powered by machine learning, actionable feedback from customers, and no dead ends where customers always have a way to get in touch with a real person. Self-service is more than just a help center, and Educate's approach is system-driven rather than channel-dominated. The product also incorporates conversational AI to surface content intelligently and allow for quick iteration based on customer feedback.

Successful customer onboarding is a continuous process that involves introducing users to the platform, connecting them with relevant features at the right time, and continually showing them how to get the most out of the product. This approach can improve retention by retaining customers over time through effective onboarding. Companies often get it wrong by only focusing on new signups, leaving a massive opportunity for passionate and engaged customers who are already invested in the product. To maximize experience, companies should onboard users in context, use educational content to teach them what success looks like, anticipate the next questions they may have, and gradually expose features over time. By doing so, they can convert today's signups into tomorrow's engaged users and establish a competitive edge in the market.