Presented by DevRev

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How do you detect problems, solve them and notify customers before they become aware?

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2022 will probably be remembered as the year when customer support got universally worse across industries due to the shortage of workers and the effects of the great resignation. Long wait and hold times became a norm rather than an exception across the board.

Yet, some product-led companies like Tesla, Uber, Lyft and others moved on to a new kind of support methodology that is leading the way for others to follow. It is called product-led support.

Both Lyft and Tesla, for example, have in-app support. Within the app, both companies detect issues within the product, push out a solution and then notify the customers proactively sometimes even before the user is aware. In Lyft, for example, if a driver is taking too long to get to the rider, the app finds a driver closer to the rider to meet the SLA and reroutes them, and then notifies the customer about this change.

Now imagine if the riders had to detect the issue on their own, call up the support line, and/or opened a support ticket to get it resolved. Not only would the cost skyrocket for the company, this “pull” version of customer support eventually leads to poor customer experience and consequently lead to churn.

There are a few key steps for establishing product-led support:

1. Customer support is provided in-app and is mostly event- or even sometimes crisis-driven.
2. The product within the app is aware of the user’s identity and the solution provided is personalized to the user’s behavior.
3. The work related to customers in the back office is connected to the product features and prioritized based on customer attributes.
4. Most of the actions are code-driven with smart automation.
5. When urgent and needed, customers have the ability to have real-time conversations with product experts in an omnichannel way that includes rich audio and video.

This kind of support leads to a more customer-centric culture with lower costs and better customer satisfaction and consequently better economics for the company.

We spoke to about 300 companies on how they are trying to be more customer-centric by implementing product-led support and 90% of the companies told us they are today handcrafting the solution by stitching a conversation widget like Intercom (sometimes Drift) with a support ticketing system like Zendesk or Freshdesk and sometimes a backend developer work management tool like Jira or Linear.

Yet, there is something conspicuously missing from these handcrafted solutions — the notion and connection to the actual product and features where all the developers are working. This leads to a mismatch between the work done by developers in the back office and what the customers are asking for in the front office, often leading to disastrous consequences like missing Product Market Fit (PMF).

This is why DevRev recently launched our Support CRM. Dubbed the world’s first DevCRM platform, the support app connects customer conversations to developer work (tickets and issues) that in turn are happening at the actual product level (parts).

Here is a quick demo of the entire converged workflow.

For a new breed of companies that are looking to adopt new product-led support, here are core features that come as part of the DevRev platform:

1. In-app live chat support across multiple channels. This helps companies engage with their users where they are at any given point in time and provide help where they need it the most — within the product. This leads to more personalized help and consequently better customer sat.
2. Convergence of front and back office — Customer conversations are connected to tickets and issues which are connected to product parts. All of this is in one tool so organizations get the most efficiency and significantly lower cost by not buying and connecting Intercom and Zendesk. This enables a tighter, faster and more efficient collaboration between the front and back office teams.
3. Smart Automation — Within DevRev, search is driven by AI/ML so companies don’t have to struggle with deduplication, wrong work assignments, and faster response and resolution times. In addition, DevRev also has a workflow tool that allows teams to customize the work management across the org based on business needs.
4. Built for SaaS (not pawn shops) — DevRev PLuG has been built with SaaS use cases in mind. Every team’s product parts (capabilities and features) are connected to APIs, microservices and deployments in the code repository so that stakeholders can see events from Github, for example, auto-update Issues and the information flows all the way to tickets. They even auto-update the status of Issues as the code moves from the dev environment to prod.
5. Developer centric — All DevRev features have a corresponding API and a marketplace for integrations with other tools like Jira so if companies prefer to integrate their own apps with DevRev, they can hook into the APIs and webhooks or take advantage of existing integrations like Jira and Github.

Summary

The world is moving to a new kind of customer support methodology that is proactive, push-driven and far more customer-centric yet more cost-efficient for companies. This enables companies to support their customers as one and with a lot less. This methodology heavily relies on in-app, automated converged workflows between the front and back offices.

In order to implement this, companies typically have to stitch multiple systems together that are expensive and yet lack the notion of a product. DevRev Support CRM is the first product-led support platform that connects customer conversations to back office work where work is happening in real-time — at the product parts level. The DevRev platform is built specifically for SaaS companies and is immensely developer-focused.

Users can sign up for a free account at https://devrev.ai

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Madhukar Kumar is Head of Growth at DevRev.

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