In this video I'm going to show you how to create a robust, productive interface with your consulting and support teams. An interface that allows you to continually improve that overall user experience, that overall customer journey. So we have our solution, and that includes both our core product as well as everything else that it takes to make that core product work. So that could be third-party products and it includes among other things consulting and support. One thing that we don't want to do is not learn from this and fold it back into the core product. And this is something that good product managers are really skillful at. They have interfaces with their consulting and their support teams that not only allow those folks do their job better, but their continually folding learnings into the core product. None at this stuff was ever not important, but with the admin of SaaS and apps and things that people pay for monthly. The importance of not just acquiring a customer but keeping them engaged is becoming increasingly important, and these are critical vehicles to help you be successful in that. The customer journey is a great place to think about where we are using consulting and support. Are those the right places and how are we learning from that to make the core product better? Let's say certain divs consistently happen, well, maybe if we can predict that. That is a good place to engage a consulting product just meeting some kind of a paid engagement beyond the core product. So for example, with Enterprise software there might be a team that helps you go in and get the software working. With IKEA, it might be somebody that comes to your house and builds the furniture for you. For a site like Shopify that provides eCommerce sites for small businesses, it might be a market place of raided and bedded third parties that can help you get your eCommerce side up. So by consulting I mean just sort of any paid engagement with, probably with your own company, in this case but that doesn't always need to be the case. One thing that you want to avoid is the case that you become kind of captive to the consulting business because it's growing. So this is our consultant let's say, and he or she they love how hard it is to use the product because it's making their business boom. Well, that's not good, we want to make the consulting business work if it's important. But if we are a product company we want to use the core product to improve the user experience foremost. And then we want to use consulting as a way to supplement that and learn. A failure mode that you would want to avoid with support is that support is swamped and they had too many calls. Well, you want to be constantly looking at how to reduce those calls by making the core product better, by making the core experience better and that requires a strong interface with your support team. And if you've ever been on a support call you probably know that customers who call, they usually have a pretty reasonable issue, either something is overtly broken or at least kind of hard to understand. They don't want to call support. If you haven't done a support call, I would encourage you to give it a try. It's really illuminating, especially if you're the product manager of the product in question. If the support people are equipped with the right playbook and the right scripts to help the customer through, and they're confident that they're going to get a good outcome for the customer, and then if they can't, they have the support to get it, then things are going to be good. They're going to help the customer, they're going to have their mojo, they're going to be nice, and they're going to be engage. If they feel like they don't know what to do and the customers are just going to be mad at them, this can really going to a downward spiral. Where support doesn't feel confident and they give to the customer, maybe not on purpose but some kind of run around or they just generally can't help them, things get bad. This is something you should deal with as a product manager in terms of the core product and making sure that the infrastructure is there to help your support team. And you'll have a support manager that will help you with that but ultimately it's going to be a question about the core product in the core user experience. The real trick though is making sure that there is a fourth step here where you're asking why did each of these support calls happen? And what could we have done with the core user experience to make it better? What can we test so that we can get rid of the support calls all together? Because your customers aren't happy when they call support. Support is a call center and you want to make sure that you're continually learning and making the product better. And that's how you get a really robust interface with your consulting and support team. So help these folks do their job better, help them understand the customer journey and where they fit into it. And most of all create an interchange between those two things so that you're constantly learning from your collaborators in these areas and you're making the core user experience better and better.