Rebuilding support around what customers need

The question

A consumer technology company was adding new ways for customers to get help, and wanted its support designed from the customer’s side before it settled the mix.

Every contact put the company’s standing with a customer at stake. Its team wanted to know what people need when they get in touch, the channels they expect, the tone they want and how they want a problem put right, in markets that differ widely.

Our approach

We drew people from the company’s own support records, so we heard from those who had recently asked for help and those who hadn’t, across every kind of issue.

Managers from the company were invited into the groups and interviews in each market, with a shared space to post what they heard, so colleagues who couldn’t attend could follow the fieldwork as it happened.

What the team came away with

Support leaders had one description of what customers need when they ask for help, to check changes to the service against.

We wrote the needs framework for the teams who would act on it, so support, product and customer experience teams could all work from the same account, beside the operational data the company already held, in a shared language for what good support feels like to a customer.

A debrief set out the full account, with what differed by market, and a film, with actors playing customers drawn from the research, was made to take it to teams across the business. People far from the fieldwork could see what the framework describes in situations they would recognize.