Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Stephen Ng, who leads global support, sales engineering, and technical account management at Splashtop, a remote access software company. Stephen's insights into building a customer-centric support organization and leveraging customer feedback to drive product improvements offer valuable lessons for support and product leaders across industries. Here's what we discussed:
Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Stephen Ng, who leads global support, sales engineering, and technical account management at Splashtop, a remote access software company. Stephen's insights into building a customer-centric support organization and leveraging customer feedback to drive product improvements offer valuable lessons for support and product leaders across industries. Here's what we discussed:
"I wear multiple hats at Splashtop. I run the global support team worldwide. I also oversee our sales engineers and technical account managers, helping with customer onboarding and overall customer experience. Additionally, I handle critical accounts, stepping in when customers face issues or have challenges during onboarding.
Splashtop is a software company specializing in IT solutions that support remote and hybrid work, including remote desktop access and remote support software. We enable IT organizations to connect to machines remotely for support and system administration. Our solutions became particularly crucial during the pandemic when everyone suddenly had to work from home."
"We're quite unique in how directly we listen to our customers. Even our CTO, who's one of the co-founders, sits in on customer feedback calls. We have a structured process where, after the initial 90-day onboarding period, we conduct feedback calls with customers to understand their experience, what worked well, what could be improved, and what features they're looking for.
We're often able to implement feature requests within a couple of sprint cycles, which our customers really appreciate. Of course, we prioritize based on what serves multiple customers and aligns with our overall product roadmap.
Beyond these direct feedback sessions, we also conduct surveys and analyze support tickets to identify common issues or requests. We look at the potential impact of addressing these issues in our roadmap prioritization."
"It's always a challenge to balance resources, especially when it comes to prioritizing feature requests or improvements. We have to consider the revenue impact of satisfying a large customer versus addressing the needs of many smaller customers. However, we don't make decisions solely based on revenue.
We look at the overall impact. If 50 smaller customers are asking for a feature, we recognize that they likely represent a much larger group of users who want the same thing. Sometimes we have to push back on larger customers if their unique requests don't serve our general user base. With millions of users on our platform, we have to prioritize improvements that benefit the majority."
"Like many companies, we're on a journey to better leverage our customer data. We're still in the process of figuring out the right data points to capture and how to effectively analyze and act on this information. We're getting data from various channels - chat, social media, IT forums, support tickets, phone calls - and we're working on how to react to each type of input appropriately.
We're in the process of collecting all this data into a central repository or data warehouse. We use various systems like Salesforce and Zendesk, and we're developing ways to parse this data and present it in a meaningful way to our teams. It's an ongoing process of discovery and learning."
"We pride ourselves on our culture, which is truly customer-centric. This culture starts from the top - our CTO and co-founder is in our support chat daily, jumping in to answer questions and provide insights. When your team sees leadership in the trenches with them, it fosters a sense of unity and purpose.
While the industry average tenure for support roles is about 24 months, most of our support team members have been here for three-plus years. We've created a culture where support team members can grow and move into other roles, like product or engineering, bringing their customer insights with them. This not only provides career growth opportunities but also ensures that the voice of the customer is represented across different teams."
So what did we learn?
Stephen's insights highlight several key principles for building a customer-centric support organization:
By applying these principles, companies can create a more responsive, customer-centric approach to support and product development. As Stephen put it, "We pride ourselves on our CSAT, our NPS score. So the culture part of it is we're all one team." This focus on creating a unified, customer-focused culture across the organization is key to delivering exceptional support and driving product improvements based on real customer needs.
Check out splashtop here: splashtop.com