Spotlight: Danielle Murphy @ Spacelift

What do people get wrong about support?

Support isn’t just about providing an answer to a question. For me, each interaction is a chance to understand the person behind the question and improve their impression of the product and the company. It means considering their past experiences and preferences:
- Have we spoken before? Did they respond well to a more formal or friendly approach?
- Is this an issue they’ve raised before, and it wasn’t fully resolved?
- Do they prefer broken down explanations, step-by-step screenshots or screen
recordings to follow along easily?

Delivering a solution shouldn’t be the end either. Good support goes beyond the “answer”, it aims to ‘teach a man to fish.’ and asks why the user had to reach out in the first place. Was something unclear in the documentation? Was it hard to find? Could the product itself be more intuitive?

Each question is an opportunity to learn and improve, both for the user and the product. Companies that invest in their support teams reap the rewards of these insights. You can feel the difference in a product that’s built with its users in mind. When a product misses the mark, you can often tell that the team behind it isn’t truly attuned to their users' needs.

A dedicated support team bridges that gap, helping to create products users feel heard and understood by. That’s the impact of meaningful support.

How do you see post-sales teams evolving when it comes to AI?

While AI will undoubtedly reshape post-sales teams by handling a substantial number of cases through leveraging knowledge base articles and freeing up team members’ time, I see AI truly transforming these teams as a co-pilot, enabling faster onboarding and more efficient troubleshooting. While support engineers focus on an issue, AI can seamlessly search for relevant documentation, identify similar cases from online forums, and validate responses to ensure they meet the users' precise ask. This not only enhances the quality of support by freeing up time for more in-depth user engagement and allowing support to assist improving the user’s organization goals, not just the day to day use of the product, but also ensures that teams provide timely, accurate assistance.

One impact that I have noticed is the confidence boost AI gives to new joiners, who might otherwise hesitate to ask questions about concepts they feel they 'should' know - it removes that barrier and adds to a culture of continuous learning and productivity from day one.

What's the most rewarding part of your role in support?

For me, the most rewarding part of my
role in support comes from working at a company that genuinely empowers the support team and values the insights we gain from talking to our users. It’s incredibly satisfying to see how our feedback directly influences and shapes the product. And, of course, there’s that feeling of your brain being scratched when you figure out an issue that has been annoying you more than it should have.

Anything to add?

“Good customer service costs less than bad customer service." – Sally Gronow