Morten Lundsby, ex-Googler and founder of user insights tool UserChamp, joined us for a webinar in which he took a look at why customer insight is important. Morten will show you how to get more value out of your customer conversations.
In the webinar, Morten talks us through how to push onboarding materials upstream before a potential customer is a customer. He also tells a surprising story of when he went on a customer visit and how they didn’t even have a computer, and how to deal with obstacles like this.
Remember, collecting customer insights isn’t job title or industry exclusive, so whether your role is customer happiness, customer success, or account manager, this webinar will help you as long as you’re part of a team that communicates directly with customers.
Get comfy and watch our full-length webinar here.
Not ready to watch? Below, you can read on for a sneak peek of the highlights.
Talk is golden – support conversations are a unique source of customer insight
Morten begins by explaining how support conversations are a unique source of information. Support teams are the direct line to your customers – they talk to them every day, and are in the best position to gain insight and feedback from them. Through the conversations with customers, you’ll have a broader understanding of the goals and motivations of your customers – vital information for a business going forward.
Having that information can be the difference between product failure and success. It’s essentially knowing that your product is going to sell before you even design or release it to the market.
Morten shows us how to gather all this information and how it can be useful in each sector of your company, whether you’re a 5 or 5000 person company.
Morten shows how support teams can help these other teams achieve their goals
Morten guides us through how we can help these other teams.
“Start by using an empathic ear, particularly for sales or marketing. Forget about your tickets, to find out what they’re trying to achieve, you need to let go of what you’re trying to achieve.”
Begin your approach with a learning mentality, and ask them:
“What is your biggest problem right now?”
The thing that is at the top of their mind, is also their biggest challenge. Even after five minutes of asking this question, you will have some very valuable information.
Apply your learnings to your product teams
Morten provides specific examples of helping teams.
If you’re approaching your product team, they live in a reality that’s shaped by backlogs and code. They also exist in a reality of constant time and resource constraints.
Some examples of where support teams can help your product team:
- Reporting bugs that need to be fixed
- Channelling feature requests
- Other explicit feedback they have
So these can be helpful when they’re trying to figure out what to prioritise next.
Don’t just uncover your users’ contexts, challenges. Get to know your product & sales teams for better #custfeedback #custconvo #custserv
— Bernadette Forward (@Forward_B) September 17, 2015
Sales and marketing teams are thirsty for the customer insight support teams have
These are insights you can learn from current customers, that can be directly applied to your sales or marketing team. Morten reminds us that when approaching and working with your sales team, it’s all going to be focused on short term results. Put your attention specifically on their target driven goals, and look at what needs to be sold:
- Weekly
- Today
- Before lunch!
So there’s a lot of pressure and focus on right now. For marketing there are different things to focus on.
You can narrow down your approach by using these methods when approaching any team:
- Find the one top priority
- Start with the smallest possible thing, that addresses the top problem
- Then timebox it: Weekly reports and a four week final review.
“What’s the smallest amount of tagging you need to be doing to produce the insights your team needs?” – @mortenlundsby #custconvo — María de Antón (@amalulla) September 17, 2015
Remember to get into the nitty-gritty to see how these teams operate. If you can hit the right pieces of information at the right times, you can get make a whole lot of new friends at work.
Morten shows why these support conversations are interesting look at, how unique they are and how you can use them to shape your business. He shows you the very methods to start getting more value out of your support conversations to get you towards your goals; methods that you can take away and start today or tomorrow.
In the webinar, Morten also shows you:
- Why to beware of the dashboard
- How sales and marketing teams are thirsty for customer insights
- How your CEO is the janitor in your company
- How to get the core problems of any of your teams
- A very precise system to produce amazing results in four weeks time