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Over the years, I have found that the more confident I get in "knowing" the product for which I design, the more I put people in a box using my product, and the deeper the design process or the longer I've been in a project, the less boxes I put people in. This implies that even though I develop new features and add complexity to a product, I can unconsciously narrow the audience that I am designing for. There’s nothing wrong in using personae and focusing on defined goals for very specific people. But people change, our actions, goals, and the way we use products nowadays change quicker than we think. And as designers, we need to keep our eyes wide open to detect the important changes that influence experiences and values.

In previous jobs when I was designing for medium and big companies, my memories are that as part of a product team (product managers, designers, developers…) we’ve been far away physically and in mindset from our customer support teams. Via some sort of internal contact, some of these businesses we used to keep up with customer support, customer service will usually communicate insights to the rest of the company every month, often more frequently. And we'd read the reports as a product team or see the data already prepared and filtered as much as we could.

I don't remember more than once or twice from my 14+ years in these businesses sitting down with the real customer service team and talking about the interactions with our products or services. The most likely scenario would be that certain individuals from the product team, especially product managers, would take the time to read customer service team reports and take notes to create new requirements, prioritise bug reports, etc.

Starting with location, product and consumer tend to be distant from each other. In many industries, hiring whole customer support teams in places such as India or the Philippines is easier, and their tasks are to specifically "fix" issues with non-expert users where they can. If they can't, they generally monitor it as a bug report or product team feature request that can be prioritized without being prioritized. A team that has daily direct contact with the people using our products is so rich in knowledge for the product team, that it is a huge waste to let these teams live far away from each other and limit their real interaction.

I realise even clearer only after taking a bit over that role myself how important it is for User Experience Designers to interact directly and very often with Customer Service.

The relevance of customer support as part of the experience of a product has been nicely raised in the past 10 years, and studies about how a good customer service experience can influence revenue have been published more often during the last couple of years. Therefore the trendy term “Customer Experience” or CX that in many modern organisations is replacing Customer Service or Customer Support. The value of giving a personalised, high-quality service to people using your product is also part of the overall User Experience, and it must be considered a first class citizen in every organisation.

Having a motivated Customer Experience team that does a great job in keeping people happy with our product is a great start. But as Product / UX Designers we are responsible to avoid our two teams to break into silos. Perhaps more than they need us, we need them. The stories that come from CX are special, and through the best contextual investigations, user interviews, user testing, focus groups or all the other analysis we do as designers, we will always not have that strong insight into our product. It is information that most possibly already exists in your organization and it just requires the organization to invite a CXer for a weekly coffee chat.

Being in a midlevel company, like I said, helped me to be in constant touch with the people who matter to us, giving me invaluable insights into the good and bad of our designs, and helping me get a more accurate view of a variety of user stories and use cases. It's something I can't appreciate enough from working in a mid-tie company to take several positions while maintaining my UX key tasks and vision, but I think you can all do it no matter the size of your workplace. And I would not only recommend the Customer Service role, but in my view, as a UX Designer, it needs to be something to experience at least once.

We now have an outstanding Customer Support individual behind our product, so my contact with our service members has been reduced, but we retain weekly engagement on Slack so that I am kept updated about specific insights and we are also starting a biweekly, more structured talk about our service's learning and the people on the other side of it.

Listening to stories and following them as they change through our service is a big help to make design decisions with more confidence, but it is also a big motivation to keep improving our service and making sure every effort I make as a designer is truly changes lives for the better.

At Encoding Enhancers, we ensure better customer service by keeping s sense of belonging, listening to what our customers are saying. Reading between the lines. By following Customer Centric Leadership.

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