Product Manager’s pulse on customer support
There might be a team tracking the inbound calls from users or if you are an early adopter of automated bot calls, you might find yourself tracking the same. Why do you need to do the same?
Real bugs
Some of them may be true bugs, impairing the user workflows and so you might want to prioritize them sooner than later. Knowing the call volume will help with the same.
Source of future opportunities
Many times in all the industries, I have seen few items reported as bugs but in reality, they were new opportunities - Either new products or features we could add to existing ones. In a recent case, I realized that my developers were manually running scripts for consolidating patients and when it was one of our biggest call volume drivers. Not just that, it took some time for the requests to be executed because these developers were doing this work on the side. Thereby, the users had a bad experience until the developers had run a batch job. I then looked at this as an opportunity for building an app that our customer support team could use without the help of our developers. This has helped over several million patients receive timely care.
Is it time to rearchitect your application?
Sometimes your software application might have turned into a monolith over the years. Especially over the last few decades, user needs are evolving. Interoperability is turning out to be an important need. In the last year or so, I realized that there were many enhancements requested by users., as reported by our customer support team. If we would have executed it in the same application then it was possible that it would be hard to release frequently. So, we are taking the time to review the code and determine what parts can be rearchitected.
Final Thoughts
Listen to your customer support team or chatbot (which might be receiving questions). You get a pulse of WHAT exactly is important for the user/customer. If you ask a blunt question to the user about what is important to them then they may give you an answer, which may truly NOT reflect what they want. But, they might truly NOT know what they want. It is somewhat like “You dont know something was valuable to you until you lost it”.