Utilizing your support team to respond to feedback

Your support team is usually the primary contact point of merchants when they contact you. Tickets and chats are the best tools we have to converse with merchants, understand pain-points about our software, listen to their feedback and analyze their feature requests. Collectively, support teams have a great understanding of the products and how people use them. This information is essential to be transferred over to product and engineering teams.

We recommend that you take the following steps to best utilize your support team:

• Create a strict internal SLA where support team requests are answered by product or engineering teams.
• Ensure you have a way for your support team to effectively report bugs to your product and engineering teams.
• When responding to your support team, avoid super-short answers, and try to explain the answer simply and concisely. This will allow the support agent to copy/paste your answer to the merchant.
• Avoid replying with statements like “no, this is not possible” or “no, this feature will not be implemented” without providing additional context about technical or product limitations.
• Regularly dedicate additional time to implement a short custom code snippets or to provide in-depth technical details about how a custom project would be implemented so that merchants can reach a solution faster if they decide to hire a dedicated WooCommerce developer. A small effort can go a long way to amaze merchants and reveal an opportunity to request a 5 star review.
• Keep support in the loop when they report a bug or request a new feature. When you release a new product version, we always consider the impact it can have on support.
• Work closely with your support team. For example, consider having a feedback hangout call every month where you can discuss product feedback and planned improvements.

With these kinds of practices in place, support teams are more willing to share feedback, issues, concerns, and questions with us. This helps maintain a closer relationship with merchants and identify pain-points early, before they become a reason for them to churn.