Elyse Mankin- Bridging Support and Product Teams for Customer-Centric Success
Meet Elyse Mankin, Director of Product Support at Help Scout, who exudes a contagious enthusiasm for both people and problem-solving. Leading the charge at Help Scout, she dedicates her days to nurturing and expanding the Product Support team. Elyse's unwavering belief in the symbiotic relationship between support and product drives her to leverage data-driven insights, ensuring the development of customer-centric solutions.
Check out this video featuring Elyse Mankin our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo, where she shares insights on strengthening support-product relationships to prioritize customer needs effectively. Get a sneak peek of her compelling ideas before she takes the stage in Las Vegas, NV.
Elyse Mankin:
I think across the support industry as a whole, there's this natural gap between support and product. It can sometimes feel like you're almost screaming into a product prioritization void, or I see things so clearly based on what my customers are saying. And if we could only prioritize these things, like I know there would be. Such a benefit to it. And bridging that gap can be really effective.
Insights that your support team has access to, and understands your customers deeply. It can also just build a wonderful partnership with your product teams. So helping them better understand the problems behind your support trends. Helping your support team better understand your customers. And then you're building that really valuable partnership between the two. The product can really lean on your support team for early research.
Elyse Mankin:
My name is Elyse. I have been a member of the support-driven community since 2016, and I am the director of Product Support at Help Scout. So we are a help desk platform. I've been there just as bad as long as I've been in support-driven.
Deniz Kuran:
Hi Elise. Thank you for coming to our speaker features. My name is Denise. I'm the head of marketing at Idiomatic, who has been a partner of Support Driven for a long time now. Today we're gonna be talking about Lisa's topic, which she'll be talking about in the upcoming expo in Vegas. It is digging into product discovery in the queue, easily actionable ideas for customer experience, and deep dives. So support teams or individual members of any size or level of sophistication can better advocate for their customer's needs. What made you choose this topic?
Deniz Kuran:
Specifically how big are the supporting product teams?
Elyse Mankin:
Our support team is a team of 22, I believe. And that includes our product support analysts. We're a team of seven and we really manage customer feedback. So we work in the queue still a little bit but we're responsible for analyzing our customer feedback and reporting on that to the product.
Deniz Kuran:
And how often do you guys do these deep dives or is there a cadence that you would recommend?
Elyse Mankin:
We're doing them regularly. So the way that we have helped our teams do this regularly is by leaning on saved replies in our support queue. So that with every, major initiative that we're digging into learn a little bit more about, or if there's a specific trend that we just feel a little unclear on or wanna get more information from customers, we just, we spin up a saved reply and it includes research questions so that this is constantly running in, in the background across anything that we're looking to validate at any given time and just makes it really rinse and repeat for the support team. They don't have to worry about, knowing what. Questions we wanna dig in around or anything like that. It's just, it's all set and ready to go in our queue.
Deniz Kuran:
When you're doing these deep dives, what kind of data sources do you look into? Does it support ticket surveys and app reviews?
Elyse Mankin:
All of those. We primarily use our support conversations, especially when we're going like the extra mile of just asking the customer to tell us a little bit more about what they're really running into. But we pull from our NPS surveys as well, we pull from customer surveys that are run. And then we pair that too with our customer data as well, so that not only are we getting like the qualitative, this is the problem that the customer is running into, we're also really reporting on the quantitative measures as well.
Check out this video now featuring Elyse Mankin our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
