How Does Product-Led Growth Impact Customer Support?

Palak Dalal Bhatia is CEO and founder of IrisAgent where she built predictive customer support and machine learning solutions.

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business approach in which the product drives customer acquisition, expansion and conversion. According to a VentureBeat report, “58% of SaaS-based subscription businesses already have a PLG strategy.” Further, 91% plan to increase their PLG investment, and 47% plan to double their investment. In B2B, an average of 14% to 25% of “freemium” users convert to paid subscribers.

While it may not be economically viable to provide freemium users with live 24/7 support, offering scalable support via mail, chat and community forums can be a very effective strategy. In the PLG model, your support teams thus become the de facto face of the company, sometimes even replacing frontline sales.

The support provided to “freemium” users not only tips the odds of conversion in the company’s favor but also influences the relationship companies hope to build with customers after subscribing. Therefore, PLG-based organizations must empower support teams with data and insights from product adoption, monitoring, operational alerting and support systems. Connecting these systems will deliver insights to product and support teams that empower them to deliver outstanding CX and support.

Understanding how customers use your product—even those not yet paying to use it—can reveal many product insights, including what feature(s) are most important, where users get blocked (beyond not having access to premium features) and common ambiguities that can inform future product development. In fact, in the absence of an active sales presence, customer support teams are uniquely positioned to assess how customers use the product and where it is falling short of expectations. In-app data can shed light on exactly how customers feel when they’re inside a product, reveal the scale and volume of issues that impact paying customers as well and expose the issues that dissuade customers from moving to the next tier.

Don’t treat your lower-tier users as “tire kickers” or “freeloaders.” Regardless of the revenue they may or may not provide your company, correlating as much information as possible about their engagement with your product can be invaluable. Grab as much data as you can from analytics tools. Below are some common ways customer support and experience teams can start powering product-led growth.

Help support and product teams understand how customers your products.

Discover how customers were using the product right before they filed a support request as well as how engaged they were with the product to identify upsell and training opportunities.

Uncover the root causes of issues caused by operations failures.

Consider AI-based correlations to instantly identify the root cause of customer issues and operational failures, such as which bug, feature or product release is raising concern and why. Know when an outage is impacting customers and resulting in support tickets, then escalate accordingly.

Prioritize based on business impact.

Prioritize your support and engineering backlog. Know when a customer who is up for renewal opens a high severity ticket and notify the account owners.

Cross-functional automated workflows that connect these siloed systems in real-time put a 360° view of each customer’s circumstance—paid or not—at agents’ fingertips and enable organizations to listen and engage with prospects, which can also be a catalyst for conversions to paid subscriptions.

The need of the hour for product-led growth organizations is to break internal data siloes and drive growth by fully understanding and empathizing with customers.

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