By Grant Stanis, CEO of TeamSupport
As a new CEO, your first 90 days are a whirlwind of meetings, data, and competing perspectives. You need to quickly cut through the noise to understand your customers, product, and team. While CRM reports and strategy decks are valuable, your ultimate source of truth is found in a place with no agenda: the support ticket queue.
Support tickets are the unfiltered voice of your customer base. They provide a direct, unvarnished look into the business, helping you to form accurate opinions and make informed decisions.
1. Learn About Your Customers
By diving into support tickets, you can quickly reverse-engineer your customer landscape.
- Customer Engagement & Health: The sheer volume and nature of tickets reveal which customers are actively engaged and which are not. You can cross-reference customer distress scores with your team’s “at-risk” list to spot discrepancies and identify accounts that are truly struggling.
- Customer Segmentation: Even with poor CRM data, you can segment your customers by looking at what products they’re submitting tickets for. This helps you understand who is buying what and how they are using it.
2. Learn About Your Product
Support tickets are a live feedback loop for your product team.
- The Real Roadmap: Analyze ticket themes to see which products customers love and which they hate. This data reveals the true priorities for your engineering team, highlighting where the most common pain points and feature requests lie.
- Tech Debt & Bugs: A high number of bug-related tickets is a direct indicator of tech debt. This is no longer a theoretical problem; it’s a measurable drain on resources and customer satisfaction.
- Competitive Intelligence: Pay attention to how often customers mention competitors and why. This gives you invaluable insight into your market position and what features or experiences you might be lacking.
3. Learn About Your Team
The support system’s structure and performance are a reflection of your internal processes and team dynamics.
- Support & Customer Success Gaps: If customers are bypassing the support team and only submitting tickets to their Customer Success Manager (CSM), it suggests a breakdown in your support process or a lack of trust in the support team.
- Product Team Alignment: Your product roadmap should align with the most frequent support ticket categories. If it doesn’t, it’s a red flag that your product team may be out of touch with what your customers actually need.
- Onboarding Efficiency: A surge of “how-to” tickets from new customers indicates that your onboarding process or documentation is failing to set them up for success.
Key Takeaways
Look past the filtered presentations and get straight to the source. Support tickets offer an unbiased and comprehensive view of your business that no single leader can provide. Make reviewing the support queue a critical part of your onboarding strategy. It’s the fastest way to understand the reality of your company, and it will give you the confidence to make the right decisions from day one.
