What is Product Service Management? Guide, Examples & Tips

For most SaaS companies, the offer revolves around a product they're selling. But if you take a step back, SaaS stands for Software as a Service, which means you provide services too.

In other words, besides having a grade-A product, you also need to meet and exceed customer expectations, follow market trends, and delight your customers on an ongoing basis.

This is the task of product service management. So, what is it, why is it confused with product management, and what should you do to be good at it? Let's explain them one by one. 👇

Tl;DR - a short summary:

• Product service management is the process of managing services associated with the product
• Product service management vs. product management differ in focus, scope, key responsibilities, and end goals.
• A product service manager oversees service delivery, manages customer support teams, and even handles escalations and conflicts.
• To become a product service manager, you'll need various skills: communication skills, conflict resolution, problem-solving, customer relationship management and more.
• Product service management leads to a range of benefits for your business, from increased customer satisfaction to optimized resource allocation and increased revenue.

✨ Featurebase helps product service managers by helping collect customer feedback, measure their satisfaction with different surveys, and even build a beautiful help center. Check us out!

But now, to the real stuff! 👇

What is product service management?

Product service management is the process of managing services associated with the product, to make sure that customers get the maximum value from it.

It encompasses a wide range of processes, from providing customer support, collecting customer feedback, doing customer onboarding and trading, communicating with the dev team during each product development phase, doing post-sales services, and much more.

Product service management ensures that a product doesn't just work well, but also has a strong service framework that enhances the customer experience.

Product service management vs. product management

While the two terms seem similar, there are some distinct differences. Let's explore them in detail.

Focus

• Product service management focuses on developing and managing services around the product.
• Product management primarily focuses on developing and managing the product.

Scope

• The scope of product service management is everything around the customer interactions with the product, such as: optimizing customer support, improving product implementation, and all of the ongoing services that make up the pieces of the larger customer satisfaction puzzle.
• On the other hand, the scope of product management involves managing the product lifecycle. It covers all of the stages, from ideation, development, launch, and growth, all the way to the product sunset.

Responsibilities

• A product service manager is responsible for developing service-level agreements and ensuring that customers receive spotless onboarding and support. They manage post-sales services such as ongoing customer support, training, and consulting. Most importantly, they ensure that the service offerings of a business reflect market demands and customer expectations.
• The responsibilities of a product manager are to define the product vision and strategy. They collaborate with customers on the one end and developers on the other to translate feedback into new product features. They analyze market trends and the competition and create product roadmaps based on feature requests and product plans.

Goal

• The end goal of product service management is to make sure that customers use and get value from the product through strong service support.
• The goal of product management is to deliver a product that meets the needs of the market and helps achieve larger business goals.

Product service manager's responsibilities

Product Service Managers are responsible for overseeing a product and its related services, such as customer support and maintenance. They ensure that both the product and its services work together smoothly to meet customer needs and align with business goals.

Here are some of the key responsibilities of a product service manager:

• Overseeing service delivery
• Managing the customer support team
• Developing and managing service level agreements (SLAs)
• Customer training and onboarding
• Engaging with customers proactively
• Improving product and service offerings
• Managing and optimizing service resources
• Handling escalations in cases of customer complaints
• Aligning services with customer needs
• Collaborating across teams

A product service manager is a jack of all trades, a person who needs to know the product, the customers, and the market trends to be great at their job.

Top skills required for product service managers

Just like product managers and owners, product service managers don't need technical skills to be successful at their jobs. However, there are many other skills you need to excel in this role:

• Customer relationship management: great product service managers build and maintain positive relationships with customers with ease. They should be able to quickly understand customers' pain points and ensure high customer satisfaction at all times.
• Communication skills: product service managers communicate internally and externally. They should be able to communicate technical information easily, collect feedback, and deliver solutions in a way that is clear and easy to understand.
• Problem-solving abilities: a product service manager should be able to understand customers' issues, troubleshoot problems, and come up with actionable advice on how to fix them on the spot.
• Project management: someone in a product service management role should manage the service delivery process from start to finish, including timelines, resources, and people.
• A technical understanding of the product: to give proper support and meet customer needs, a product service manager should have a technical understanding of how the product works. The more complex the software, the greater the importance of this skill set.
• Leadership and team management: product service managers can often lead teams of customer support managers, agents, trainers or consultants. They should know how to lead, motivate, and manage these teams with ease.
• A customer-centric mindset: product service managers should understand the customer journey, prioritize customer needs, and ensure that the products and services offered are aligned with market trends and customer expectations.
• Strategic thinking: the decisions made by the product service manager should align with the overarching business goals and objectives. These decisions should reflect the current market demands as well as long-term company objectives.
• Negotiation and conflict resolution: product and marketing teams often have to negotiate service-level agreements and potential conflicts with customers. Product service managers should have a basic level of diplomacy and be able to win over customers in difficult situations.
• Data analysis: just like product managers, expert product service managers should be able to interpret customer feedback data and key performance indicators, which include things such as NPS results, product performance data, and more.
• Product management tools: Ideally, knows how to use popular product management tools, such as Trello, Jira, Aha!, Featurebase, etc.

Benefits of product service management

Proper product service management helps you anticipate customer needs, improve product adoption, and reduce churn. But there are some other, more nuanced benefits as well.

• Improved customer satisfaction: once you collect and implement user feedback, refine your onboarding, and provide better product training, customer satisfaction invariably increases.
• Increased customer retention: with higher customer satisfaction comes long-term product value. When you understand customer preferences, the chances of churn are significantly reduced.
• Faster product onboarding and adoption: with proper product service management, customers can get up to speed more quickly and learn how to effectively use your product.
• Proactive problem resolution: product service managers collect customer feedback and spot potential issues early on before they spiral into major challenges for your development team.
• Improved customer relationships: with consistent post-sales services such as consulting and training calls comes an increase in customer loyalty.
• Increased revenue from services: your service offerings can include premium support or consulting for new and existing customers, allowing you to upsell them and generate more revenue.
• Optimized resource allocation: good product service management means that customer support and customer success resources are used effectively, which reduces operational costs.
• Better alignment with customer needs: continuous feedback collection and market research leads to product improvements according to customer expectations instead of blindly building new features based on gut feeling.
• Reduced burden for customer support teams: when customers have all the necessary tools, resources, and training to use your product and service offerings to their full potential, they are less likely to reach out to customer support for help.

How Featurebase helps product service managers

Featurebase (👋 that's us) is a product management tool that helps SaaS companies collect user feedback, announce product updates, measure customer satisfaction, and reduce support loads.

Featurebase is used by thousands of product, marketing, and support teams for:

• Feedback collection & voting: Centralize feedback with in-app widgets, integrations, and a dedicated feedback forum. Let users vote on each other's feature ideas, see their total revenue, and focus on the most impactful features. Plus, all upvoters will automatically be notified when you ship their request.
• Changelogs: Announce product changes and increase feature adoption with neat in-app popups, notification emails, and a standalone changelog page.
• Help Center: Provide self-serve support with a beautiful knowledge base & bring help articles inside your product with a lightweight widget.
• Surveys: Create targeted in-app surveys to ask users anything and measure customer satisfaction (NPS, CSAT, etc.)
• Integrating feedback collection with the rest of your tool stack

In short, Featurebase can improve your customer experience, boost new feature adoption, and help you understand your customers.

You can get started with the free plan, and the onboarding is incredibly quick, so there's no downside to trying it! 👇

✨ Start building products your users love with Featurebase for free →

FAQ

Why is product service management important?

Product service management helps increase customer satisfaction, improve retention, and ensure a smooth product experience. Well-managed services ensure that customers can quickly onboard, troubleshoot issues, and continually use the product effectively.

How does product service management improve customer retention?

By offering proactive support, training, and ensuring customers can effectively use the product, product service management builds stronger relationships and keeps customers engaged, reducing churn and increasing retention.

What are the main services involved in product service management?

The main services involved in product service management include customer support, onboarding, training, consulting, and implementation. These services ensure that customers can easily adopt the product and address any challenges they face while using it.