Customer Service Org - a Key Stakeholder

... for a product manager and a product marketer. More often than not though, we, as product managers or marketers do not take a proactive approach in our interactions with this important stakeholder.

As a product manager, you spend quite a bit of time on customer escalations coming through the support channel. With Q/A and support folks, you "triage" customer reported bugs to be put on the list for next hotfix. When it's time to plan for a release you are sure to check on the enhancement request queue that has been piling up.

As a Product Marketing Manager, you do "remember" the support folks at least every six months when its time for industry analyst review or consulting. The support guys will provide you with the list of customers who are "good" to be put on the list for the analysts to call about how great your product is!

With the right kind and timing of interactions, however, you can get more out of the resources from your customer service organization. The human resources and information maintained by a well run customer service organization can be very helpful to a Product Manager and Marketer throughout the life-cycle of the product. For example, if your product is in the market for some time, customer service organization is likely to have a trove of information that you can leverage to your advantage:

• Which and how many customers are using your product in "production" environment?
• Which are a select few customers who are really pushing the envelope in terms of scalability and performance?
• What are the most common use cases for your product usage (overall, by industry segment)?

Another often overlooked resource from your customer organization is the "product specialist" - a person, who over the years, has become an expert in a product and is very knowledgeable about customer environments and product usage. Input from these folks can be very useful during the requirements review and prioritization for a release.

Questions to ask about your interactions with your customer service organization:

• Do you proactively seek out information about the product usage from your customer service organization?
• Do you include product specialists from your customer service organization in your product strategy and requirements review sessions?
• Do you include product specialists as reviewers for your sales enablement materials for a new releases?
• Do you proactively work with your customer service organization to identify potential reference customers and success stories for your product?
• Do you proactively work with your customer service organization to address the issues with customers that have low satisfaction scores with your product?
• ..