I work for a major outdoor goods company that focuses on river sports and leisure activities. We design, build, and support products like insulated coolers, fishing rods, cupholders, and the occasional electronic gadgets.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about supportability of our products. That is, whether we’ll provide support for a product when it’s used in a certain way.
We have a manufacturing team that designs, develops, and manufactures our products.
We have a sales team who is responsible for showing off new products to prospective customers and vendors as well as negotiating large purchase deals from big box stores.
We have a services team who can be enlisted to perform installations, provide on-site consulting, or do custom work -- all for an additional fee. They frequently interact face to face with our customers and get to see our products in-action.
We have a customer service department to support our products. They take calls and emails from our customers, exchange photos of our products in action, troubleshoot problems, and are generally the most under-appreciation folks around (p.s. we love you!). These hardworking souls try endlessly to help our customers with their problems and in many cases their findings go back into improving our products.
All of our products include some form of instructions.
Some products are simple and don't require much in the way of instructions. A cooler, for example, you fill it with ice to keep your drinks or fish cold, but we'll provide care and handling instructions all the same. Our cupholders are simple enough to use, but we provide instructions and pictorials that explain how to mount them permanently to a boat. A Bluetooth-enabled speed controller for an outboard engine, however, is a little more complicated and has a few more instructions that come in a pretty booklet -- and we probably outsourced that whole effort.
We like to think that our instructions are clearly written. We take a lot of time to write them based on the knowledge of our designers, manufacturers, consultants, customer service reps, copy editors, and our own experiences in the great outdoors. The instructions don't cover every possible scenario; with so many products that could be used together, there's no way we could, plus part of the experience is getting comfortable and experimenting a little to see what works for you.
We don't build boats, but we have partnerships with various manufacturers who do. These partners build a wide variety of different vessels: kayaks, canoes, jon boats, all the way up to large ocean-ready fishing trawlers.
Some of our partners include our products in a pre-packaged way, like an option package when you buy a car. For example, when you buy a particular jon boat two of our cup holders come pre-installed. We receive a portion of the proceeds from the sale, but otherwise don't have much interaction with the end user. If the end user has a problem with the cupholder, they're going to call the boat manufacturer -- just like you'd call the car dealership about the problems you're having with the radio, not the original manufacturer AC Delco. The partner might call us if there's a problem that they can't figure out or if they're seeing lots of customers with the same problem.
For some of the bigger partners, we publish guidelines on how to integrate our products with theirs. We have charts that show where best to to load and lash our coolers so that they're centered in the boat. We have some step-by-step instructions on how to attach our fishing pole mounts to some of the more popular boat models. These guides are written with a broad audience in mind, so there's certainly some specific uses that we don't cover.
We don't just want our customers to buy our products, we want them to enjoy them, have a good time, succeed in their endeavors, buy more (hopefully), and hopefully share their stories of success with their friends. Some of our products are expensive, so we field a lot of questions from prospective customers who want to make sure they're doing something that won't void the warranty -- part of why they buy from us is because they know our customer service teams will be ready to support them if/when things go wrong.
We get a lot of questions that aren't really in our wheelhouse.
We get asked for help patching boat hulls, fixing rudders, and navigation lights. These aren't our products. We want to make our customers happy, so often we'll do what we have to do to support them, even if that means researching a product that isn't ours. Sometimes we just have to say no; it's not that we don't care, but we know that it's not something we can fix.
We get asked if we can do the installs for them. Our customer service team won’t do this, but our services team can. We refer these cases to the services team, who will draw up a contract about the work to be done and affix a price; once the contract is signed, we’ll assign a consultant and schedule the work to be performed.
We get a lot of questions that we can't answer.
We get asked what kind of boat to use for fishing. All the time. Here's the deal, if you're going fishing in the river for the day with a friend, a canoe or jon boat will work. You could do it in a kayak, but you won't have a lot of space for that haul of rockfish. First-timers might consider starting on the end of a pier with an inexpensive rod, just to get the mechanics down. Less experienced folks probably shouldn't start with an ocean-going trawler: it's more complicated to cast in the swells plus the fuel bills will be considerable. You can cast off from any of these, but there's many variables:
Most of these variables are specific to customer's exact situation. It might be worthwhile to hire a fishing guide to work out some of the details. Our services team has been known to provide this kind of help, so we try to refer customers there… but we know that customers might not want to pay more for 1:1 guidance.
We get asked whether customers ought to buy a boat or rent one. Again, that's a decision each customer needs to make for themselves. As long as the boat is seaworthy and can physically accommodate our products, it doesn't matter to us. We probably wouldn't recommend lashing our 75 gallon cooler to your kayak, for example, and you might not be able to install our cup holders on a rental.
We get asked about what kind of bait to use. Depends on the kind of fish -- and it doesn’t really affect the use of our fishing rods or tackle boxes.
We get a lot of requests asking whether it's OK to tape two of our fishing rods together in opposing directions. We don't recommend it. For starters, when your lines get twisted up it becomes more difficult to untangle things. It's also more difficult to keep track of which line is pulling. It's really easy to hook yourself in the face while casting. It's also much harder for our customer services folks to identify where the problem is based, whether it's your tape that's screwing things up or whether our fishing pole is broken. Although we've seen experienced fishers do this in the field a few times, we don't recommend it.
We were once asked if it we support our cooler and fishing rods in the event a customer lashed two boats together and fished from one and kept the cooler in the other. Still a little confused by that one: we weren’t sure why anyone would want to do that, but we don’t see our products being affected, but we couldn’t speculate on whether that customer would be successful.
We get told our coolers aren't keeping things cool. After talking to one customer and receiving some photos, we discovered he had removed the lid from the cooler and left the contents exposed to direct sunlight. These stories make me want to scream, but I know that our customer service rep probably informed him (kindly) that that's expected and that he should re-attach the lid and keep it closed when not in immediately use.
We get a lot of request for information that's already covered in our instructions or guides. We keep a copy of all that online, searchable, so that customers can help themselves. We answer a lot of questions by search our own web site.
Our sales team can help make customers aware of these considerations ahead of us, and combined with the instructions we try to free our customer service folks to handle more issues that we haven’t considered.
We do our best to support our customers and prospective customers and ideally we'd like to help them to learn how to help themselves. Not only does it ease our support load over time, it keeps our customers coming back for more (either for replacements or for other complimentary products).
So how do we determine what’s supported and what isn’t? It’s a large effort that spans many parts of the organization.
Our manufacturing team knows if the product will hold up, and they’re usually the first group to ask whether we should allow a particular use; we don't want anyone to get hurt through misuse. If our cooler will shatter when filled with liquid nitrogen, that's a good boundary to set.
Our sales team knows how much a particular use case might be worth in terms of additional market share or customer base. If we could increase sales by adding wheels to our coolers, that's something we ought to investigate, run it by manufacturing to see if it's possible, run it by customer service to see if that's going to result in increased calls. They also keep in touch with our large vendors to make sure they’re happy with the products we’re shipping, whether their customers are happy, and whether there’s changes we could make to improve their sales.
Our consultants see our products in action. They've observed customers using our products in ways that we hadn't intended, in some cases making slight modifications to our products to effect big changes. In the past that data has been very useful in making improvements, so we include them in supportability discussions. Our consultants also get a lot of direct questions about whether a particular use will be supported, so it's good for them to know what our support boundaries are.
Every call, email, and photo is categorized in our online support system, so our customer service knows how much time they spend on various problems. If they're spending a lot of their time helping customers with a single defect that's easy to fix at a minimal cost, we're likely to task manufacturing to fix it. But if they're spending a lot of time on problems that are tangential to the purpose of the product (e.g. using our cupholders as hammers), it makes sense to say "we're sorry, but we can't support that use" and let our team get on with supporting other customers.
All of these teams need to sign off on changes to supportability. It’s not a quick process, but it’s in everyone’s best interest that we’re all on the same page.
Last Modified: 2017-08-16
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