How Mo McKibben Built One Big Team In Service Of Customers

The end customer shouldn’t know which team is handling what or why. When you align on what you’re trying to deliver to customers, you have an opportunity to work way more effectively and efficiently to make customers successful as a team.

I asked Head of Customer Support and Success at Moxion, Mo McKibben, how she ensures her team collaborates effectively with product and closes the loop to delight their customers.

Mo was kind enough to walk me through all the loops and integrations in detail:

Step 1 - Log every feature request in your customer support tool

Using the JIRA <> Help Scout integration, Mo’s team (both high touch and high velocity “success”) logs any incoming features or bugs in Help Scout, which automatically connects the ticket to the JIRA.

Step 2 - How you log is as important as that you log

For product developments it’s important to segment feature requests vs. workflow gaps.

Feature requests: Very simple “yes/no” type stuff like “Do you support HLG HDR” - there’s no “more than one way to pet a cat” on a feature request.

Workflow gaps: Are “problem areas” where the product is not able to fulfill a critical part of a workflow, or it’s a heavy friction area - often customers articulate it as a feature request, but it’s really looking back and saying “as an admin, I want to be able to accomplish X”, and there’s no way to do this in the product. Often with workflow gaps there may actually be MORE than one way to solve a problem.

To help align the team on “product gaps” Mo’s team runs a monthly VOC meeting where they collect all the trending product gaps and brainstorm tangible solutions with Design, Product, and Engineering that can be turned into JIRA cards connected to the customer who surfaced them.

Step 3 - Surface product progress in success tools

Since everything is logged in JIRA which connects to Help Scout, for basic feature requests and bugs, the success team can actually see the status of a request in the Help Scout sidebar.

Step 4 - Success owns release notes and internal communication

This means for new features there is a round of testing and then documentation of what’s coming soon for others. This (and any documentation or other process things) are shared in a Slack channel called #cteam-changelog, which internally keeps the team aware of internal and external documentation, new processes - and also releases.

Step 5 - Close the loop with customers

When engineering actually deploys and closes the JIRA ticket for a feature request or workflow gap, Help Scout reactivates the conversation which makes it super duper easy to close the loop with all the customers linked.

Because Mo and her team are driving a lot of the feedback to product, design, and engineering, they’re well connected to the release from it’s inception.

And customers take notice!

As Mo was so generous to share, making customers successful is a full team activity. The more internal functions align, the happier customers will be.