The critical connection between support and UX design
How working in customer support made me a better designer
A couple of years ago, I was part of a small startup called Return Magic, a team of Spartans taking on the world of returns in our cozy space in downtown Montreal. My main role was to manage customer support, but, as so often happens in small startups, I also took on a range of tasks outside of that role. Being the bridge between our users and the team, I helped us fix issues and relayed features that were missing from our product. This led me to take on more and more responsibilities that filled the missing UX design role on our team. There, I had my first aha ✨ moment: I realized that the better our app was designed, the less customer support I would have to do.
My first aha ✨ moment: the better our app was designed, the less customer support I would have to do.
Then everything shifted: Return Magic was acquired by Shopify. While I continued growing in my work, I was given the new formal title of UX designer. At first glance, UX design and customer support look like very distinct roles, and I often get asked how this big transition went.
The reality is, customer support and UX design have a lot of overlap. The context I built for users in my customer support role was foundational to my understanding of design and is an integral part of my design approach today. There’s nothing like customer support — being confronted with all the shortcomings of your product every. single. day — to help build empathy for users and become a passionate advocate for them. Imagine having to answer the same question 2, 10, 20+ times a day because a feature was not built to fit your user’s real life. I can guarantee that you’d be itching for a redesign, and you’d know exactly why and how to change things.
The funny thing is, with rich user empathy and deep product knowledge, both roles felt so linked that I didn’t really perceive it as a transition at all.
Same…
Both UX designers and customer support agents have the same overarching goal for their work: solving user problems. To achieve this goal, both have the same starting point: understanding users, their context, and their needs.
… but different?
Support agents spend most of their time answering users’ questions and concerns, so they have a constant line of contact. Designers don’t usually have direct contact with users, so they need to work extra hard by connecting with other disciplines like user research, market research, and data analysis to inform their work and advocate for the best user experience within their teams.
While both care about solving people’s problems, a significant difference in the two roles is how they solve those problems.
Support: solving user problems NOW
Customer support agents solve user pains in an immediate way. Users call or write with a very specific issue that they’re having, and agents like me are expected to solve it then and there. That means I needed to master the platform I was supporting — in my case, Return Magic. I needed to understand how people used its features, the edge cases and their workarounds, what worked well, and what didn’t. All of that information helped put any support request in context, and means I ended up learning a lot about how humans interact with software on top of understanding returns from all angles. I never did customer support for Shopify, but it is a very complex platform. Shopify agents need to be subject matter experts across all the specific needs that touch commerce, including designing an online store, fulfilling and shipping orders, creating effective marketing, and much, much more. Considering these different areas vary tremendously from business to business, the amount of knowledge that Shopify support agents amass over a very short period of time is mind-blowing. They hold critical context around how well our platform is doing in terms of usability and its feature-set.
Designers: anticipating and solving user problems long-term
UX designers, on the other hand, solve long-term user problems. By “long-term” I mean that once a solution or feature is built and released, if it is designed well, it should solve that problem until it shifts enough for features to be added, removed, or tweaked. To build these long-term solutions, designers need to have an in-depth understanding of how users interact with the product they’re building. Higher-level, this means having some understanding of how humans interact with software in general and underlying principles (which my role in support taught me!). More practically, UX designers need a really deep knowledge of the industry they design for and their users’ everyday workflows so that they can create considerate experiences. As I’ve learned at Return Magic, software that does not align with what the user needs to get done in real life will create more issues than it will solve, and will ultimately not be used (yes, we’re building software, but our users are just looking for a solution). As a UX designer, I get to create more long-term solutions to problems, which means I also often have a better idea of where our product is going due to the more strategic nature of my new role.
What that looks like IRL
My area of expertise is returns, with a focus on the online experience. I’ve learned in the past that knowing the different steps of processing a return isn’t enough to really understand what’s happening. For buyers, returns can be time- and energy-consuming (“How do I ask for a return?”, “Do I still have the box it came with?”, “Can someone from the post office come pick this up for me?”, “Do I need to pay for the shipping?”, “When am I getting my money back?”). For merchants, returns are costly and the reverse logistics are complex (“Can I afford to offer free returns?”, “Should I take the risk to refund before receiving the package back?”, “Can I resell these items now that the holiday season has passed?”).
This emotional component of returns is actually a huge piece that both designers and support agents need to understand to create experiences appropriate to their users’ context. As an agent, I made sure to reassure a merchant that the refund was indeed issued on the right credit card, and as a designer, I create a flow with enough notifications built-in so that the buyer feels at ease while waiting for their refund.
The emotional component of returns is actually a huge piece that both designers and support agents need to understand.
Bringing them together
Customer support agents solve immediate issues by educating users about the platform, and, through a virtuous cycle, they amass a deep understanding of current usability. Designers use this vital context to create long-term solutions and use it as one of the inputs of more strategic conversations. Both customer support agents and UX designers need to have a deep understanding of the workflows of their users to come up with solutions that not only get the job done and fit into their day-to-day, but also anticipate and prepare for needs and issues to come. Despite some differences, both roles feed into each other.
My ambition isn’t to create new roles or to merge them. What I do hope is that this will empower customer support agents to act on the mountain of knowledge they have (you go, team!) and empower designers to connect more closely to their context-rich peers. Shopify is already very user-centric — “obsessed” is the word we use. We’re always trying to find new ways to get closer to our base, especially in the UX discipline. Support agents have a lot of that context and empathy for our users, so how can UX leverage that better in our work?
From a personal perspective, where do I go from here? How do I maintain a close relationship with my new, wider range of users now that I don’t do support day-to-day? Shopify already has some great infrastructure in place to facilitate this: a team dedicated to consolidating customer support requests and giving teams overviews of support debt in different areas; sessions to listen in on customer support calls; and “Frontline Fridays” to deep dive into customer support requests. While I also talk to users to test out designs and understand specific areas through research, that doesn’t happen every day, not even every month… So I’m thinking about this a little differently. We know that a lot of our users already get a lot of emails from UX researchers or marketing. With that in mind, how do I make sure I don’t add too much to the noise? I think going through customer support agents (on top of speaking with our users directly of course) might actually be a really great alternative.
Could we involve support agents in brainstorm and exploration sessions? What about design critiques? When, in product development cycles, would they bring the most value? Could designers be paired with support buddies for quick questions and easy access to context?
The bottom line is, we both love our users: we’re all here to create the best experiences possible for them. I’ve found that the close relationship I developed with a lot of Return Magic users made me approach design problems with that much more empathy and visibility on the bigger picture (shoutout to Jeremy, Chong Mi, Jon, and many more!). I do it for all of them, and that’s why I love my job! This human component is absolutely my favourite part of design.
So I’ll open this up to you now — do you think about how to get closer to your users? Have you integrated strategies for this in your work? When was the last time you hugged a support agent? 😉
