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What you could learn from your customer support requests

Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

For the last eleven years as a product marketer, I’ve spent 20 minutes most days checking through whatever help desk system is in use. And I can absolutely say I’ve learnt something new from that practice every day.

From raising priority for things that I already knew, like bugs, or learning new use cases and understanding the language customers use regarding your product, every email is a chance to do something better than before.

The best type of feedback, though, is the one that makes you feel so aggravated you have to go fix it as soon as possible. It’s just so satisfying.

A brief anecdote

So one day, I logged in to our help desk, browsed around, and saw something about payments not being accepted. A few emails had already been exchanged, asking to check the card balance and reattempt: the usual.

But one detail caught my eye. The (potential) customer mentioned they were trying to pay with a debit card. 

A quick search brought back five other conversations from the past year: all having trouble with debit card payments. Tallying up, I counted $5000+ in annual recurring revenue from these customers, who were having to find other payment methods, or just giving up altogether.

I typed super fast into our #BizOps Slack channel: “hey… have we set up our billing system to take debit cards?”

“Nope, we haven’t enabled them.”

“Can we enable them easily? There’s revenue at stake.”

The next day, debit card payments were set up, and that customer paid.

There are three points to takeaway here:

  1. It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees.
  2. If you’re not getting fresh eyes on customer feedback, you could be losing $$$.
  3. Systemize sharing customer feedback with people who can take action.

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