Breaking Support and Engineering Barriers With Team Collaboration

In today’s dynamic digital landscape, where operations are ever-growing and teams are getting more diverse, collaboration is key to achieving business success. As per a McKinsey report, innovative business collaboration techniques can improve your company’s productivity by 20-30%. 

However, as your business scales, teams begin to drift apart from one another, leading to miscommunication and organizational silos. This results in employee burnout and contributes significantly to disjointed customer experiences. 

To tackle this, businesses are using advanced tools to boost internal productivity and better communicate with clients and prospects. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the role of cross-functional collaboration and how to achieve it between your support and engineering teams to drive efficiency and organizational success.  

Collaboration Between Support and Engineering Teams 

While the support team is dedicated to advocating for the needs of customers, the engineering team works tirelessly to ensure smooth operations, product releases, and bug fixing. 

Here are some ways these two mutually benefit from each other when integrated:

Issue Resolution

The support team is the first point of contact for customers encountering technical issues. Armed with frontline insights, the support team uses knowledge articles and other resources developed by the engineering team to troubleshoot customers’ issues. If the issue persists, they redirect it to the engineering team for effective resolution. 

Bug Reporting and Tracking

The support team receives bug reports from customers and conveys them to the engineering team for investigation. This enables engineers to refine their code and make required product improvements. In addition, the prioritization of issues and progress tracking by the support team further ensure efficient bug management.  

Customer Feedback

The support team acts as conduits for valuable insights by distilling the nuanced sentiments and preferences of customers. The feedback is then shared with the engineering team to align their efforts with the evolving needs of customers and optimize the product's future roadmaps with Agile development cycles. 

Knowledge Sharing

Beyond issue-specific collaboration, the support and engineering teams alliance also serves as a knowledge-sharing hub. The continuous exchange of insights helps both ways — your support team stays up-to-date to provide the latest information to customers, and your engineering team effectively communicates updates via the support team.

Proactive Issue Prevention

The support team, with an understanding of recurring customer pain points, enables the engineering team to implement preventive measures. This collaborative foresight helps in reducing the occurrence of issues, resulting in a more seamless and reliable product experience for users.

Support Team’s Role in Product Development

Inform Product Strategy

The support team fosters a two-way dialogue between customers and the development team. Using customer insights, they inform product strategy and guide roadmap development to meet genuine customer needs.

Prioritize Customer Issues

Direct exposure to customers provides the support team with a unique perspective to identify the areas of improvement. By maintaining a feedback loop, they can help prioritize bug fixes, new feature development, and optimization of existing functionalities. 

Build Relationships for Success

The support team cultivates trust and brand loyalty among customers by providing prompt and efficient assistance. This helps create a customer-centric culture within the organization, where the end user’s voice is heard and valued.

Engineering Team’s Role in Enhancing Customer Experience Through Support

Provide Training

The engineering team equips the support team with comprehensive product knowledge. They can provide training, including technical intricacies, common customer challenges, and effective troubleshooting techniques to promptly address customer queries. 

Create Self-Service Solutions

By developing intuitive self-service tools like knowledge bases, help centers, and intelligent chatbots, engineers enable customers to independently find answers to their questions. This empowers customers and reduces the support team workload, thus creating a win-win situation.

Customer Focus and Ownership 

Engineering teams are often too far away from the end users of the product, which creates a disconnect. Bringing them closer helps create a sense of ownership among engineers to build products with a customer-centric focus. 

Faster Time to Resolution

Getting the engineering team involved in support processes helps in faster case resolution. With their comprehensive product understanding, they can diagnose issues faster and develop a solution to promptly solve customer problems. This, in turn, increases customer satisfaction.

Collaboration Challenges Between Support and Engineering Teams 

Attaining and maintaining collaboration is difficult when your teams have varying objectives. For instance, the job of the support team is to meet customer needs and resolve issues quickly. However, the engineering team is focused on building long-term solutions that address the root cause of the problem.  

Moreover, engineers usually communicate in technical terms that could be difficult to understand. The support team has to interpret and translate their responses for the customers. This approach often has its own fair share of ‘lost in translation’ moments that result in mistakes in resolving customer problems.   

To address these collaboration challenges, teams need to establish regular communication channels that foster a cooperative environment. 

Effective Ways To Establish Collaboration

Synchronous Processes

Synchronous processes, such as phone calls, presentations, and meetings (online and offline), can bring together your support and engineering team one-on-one. This helps break down communication barriers to easily understand and resolve customer concerns.

Asynchronous Processes

While cross-departmental meetings are viable, they are probably not an efficient solution in the long term. Any time your support and engineering team spend in a meeting is the time their tickets pile up and disrupt their flow of work. As an effective alternative, you must look for tools that help your teams work and communicate asynchronously. This will ensure collaboration doesn’t come at the expense of productivity.  

How Integration of Tools Can Improve Cross-Team Collaboration Between Support and Engineering Teams?

Each team usually has its own stack of tools to perform their jobs. According to a BetterCloud report, an organization uses 130 SaaS apps on average. 

However, many of these tools hardly have anything in common. They are seldom designed to integrate out of the box, which leads to isolated workflows and limited visibility into everyone’s activities. 

For instance, if your support team uses Salesforce and wants to escalate a ticket to the engineering team, they usually have to go to a different ticketing tool like Jira, which is used by engineering teams. This contributes to communication clutter and is not an ideal solution. 

So, what’s the alternative here? 

Enter — platform integration!

Integrating tools like Salesforce and Jira with a secure connector can help you build a bridge between your support and engineering teams. By ensuring a bi-directional data sync in real-time, it streamlines workflows and helps address issues as they arise. Additionally, it enables you to:

• Complete data transparency with improved visibility
• Decrease in process turnaround time and increased efficiency
• Faster case resolution resulting in enhanced customer experiences
• Reduction in manual data entry and associated errors and costs
• Improvement in data privacy and security measures

Maximizing Teams’ Synergy for Organizational Success

The collaboration between your support and engineering teams is a symbiotic relationship where each learns from the other. By fostering a culture of open communication and the use of collaborative tools, you cannot only boost customer experiences but also gain a competitive edge.