Customer Support is often a way to measure the value of design
Why reducing customer complaints is something businesses pay attention to
“Customer Service is part of the User Experience.” A Head of UX told me while giving an anecdote about mentoring Junior Designers.
It wasn’t apparent to many Junior Designers, and you might not have realized it either.
However, talking with Customer support not only gives a snapshot into what users are most concerned about. It also provides us with a measurement that designers often look for when discussing the value of design: the “ROI of UX.”
Here’s how.
Design KPIs, or metrics that matter to designers
Believe it or not, designers have metrics they care about and quantify at times.
These Design KPIs were created because the negative long-term effects of specific actions were not well represented.
For example, imagine that you use a dark pattern on your website to trick users into buying a $200 cutting board.
Business metrics couldn’t be better: revenue goes up, and many people accidentally click the button, which means our “click rate” is high. But what about the long-term effects?
What about users who call the complaint line about a subject?
What about the high cost of returns from these angry users?
What about the long-term effects of these actions on user trust?
This is what Design KPIs try to capture. In this case, the particular KPI we’re tackling is reducing the number of complaints.
Why? Well, for a business, every complaint costs them money, from having a phone line (or chat) to call to hiring people to staff it to wasting time with simple issues instead of technical ones.
So, if you can’t say that “User signups went up by 20% with my design”, saying “I reduced customer complaints by 15% with my re-design” is something that businesses will pay attention to.
So with that said, how does the UX of a product affect customer support teams? By combining it with content.
UX + content = Customer Support Documentation
A lot of the customer support teams are people who follow a script. You've probably heard the script if you’ve ever called tech support.
Depending on your organization, content writers or documentation teams often build these scripts primarily based on your UX design.
So, if there are issues with the UI, then content teams often have to give additional instructions both in the manual and in the scripts that Customer Support is working with.
For example, imagine there’s a bad design for the onboarding process, and you noticed some feedback during testing that suggests that “users get stuck on the 2nd page of the onboarding screen.”
A portion of those users are likely calling Customer Support or filing a Customer Service ticket to have them walk through the process with them.
However, what if you fix the 2nd page of onboarding to be much simpler? The content team might need to write less about how to work with the UI, and Customer Support might get fewer complaints about the subject.
This translates to a way to talk about the monetary value of UX. If you can say, “We went from 150 customer calls around onboarding a month” to “50 customer calls”, and each call costs the organization around $250, then you’ve just saved the organization $25,000.
So, how exactly do you work with Customer Support as a UX Designer? By narrowing down your focus.
Have a limited focus on Customer Support
Customer Support teams are often judged based on efficiency, which means they might not have time to sit down and chat with you.
In addition, customer support is a biased data source. Users aren’t calling in to say, “Your interface is pretty good,” or “I have no problems.”
They only call in if they have a problem, so you cannot use this as a replacement for User Research.
However, checking in with them about the overall sentiment regarding a particular project or feature is often most helpful. For example, if you’re being asked to re-design onboarding, you might want to ask them the following questions:
Do a lot of customers complain about onboarding?
What are their most common complaints/issues?
Where do they most often get stuck?
What helps them resolve this issue?
Asking these sorts of questions helps you understand the business side of things and what live users are currently doing with the project.
While this may often be enough to get started, you may also want to follow up with the content team for further clarification.
Talk with the content team to understand troubleshooting
Most likely, whether it’s a script to walk through or a user manual, the content team will likely have more insights.
If the 2nd onboarding screen is where a lot of people get stuck, one of the things that you might want to dig into is not just the design but also the content of that page.
Are users getting tripped up by concepts on the page?
Where do these terms come from?
Why is the troubleshooting workflow set up the way that it is?
etc.
Doing this helps you understand where users might be getting stuck and some of the rationale behind why the current design is the way it is.
That way, your re-design process becomes much more efficient when avoiding the same pitfalls that previous designers might have encountered.
Follow-up once the design changes go live
The other reason to establish these relationships early on is so that you can easily follow up a couple of months after the design changes go live.
Ideally, this might be a 5–10 minute conversation to ask about complaints, and see if anything changed with your design changes.
If there’s a significant dip in the customer support calls we’re getting about a specific design, then it is something valuable you probably want to discuss.
This is a crucial aspect of why customer service is a part of UX that we can’t ignore.
Customer service is a data source of immeasurable value
As a result, many designers suffer from tight budgets and a lot of extra pressure to justify their jobs.
Talking with customer support can be a data source that helps you do that. By reducing the number of complaints an organization gets, you can point to monetary value easily by saying how much the organization saved.
Your designs also save users from the extra friction of calling a support line, waiting on hold for hours, and more.
It’s a quantifiable benefit that causes everyone to win. So if you’re looking for ways to talk about the value of UX, talk with your customer support team.
You might be surprised at the impact of what you do.
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Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. He teaches a course, Data-Informed Design, on becoming a more effective designer using the power of Data.