Tag: customer service

August 24, 2019

How to lose a customer, forever

Typically ease of use is something we think about when it comes to signing up for and beginning to use a service. I increasingly believe it’s the ease of use in leaving a service that has an equal impact on customer loyalty. The worse the experience of leaving is, the more your former customers will tell their friends not to even start.

Ultimately the cancellation experience should surpass, or at the very least meet, the signup experience in ease of use. Invert that relationship at your own risk because the harder it is to leave, the easier it is to decide to leave forever.

To illustrate this, let me recount my experience renting a small private office a few blocks from home. I toured the space on a weekday afternoon in February and decided to rent it on a month-to-month basis. 45 minutes after emailing the office manager I had everything signed and paid for.

On March 7th I was incorrectly billed an extra $15. On April 8th I was billed an extra $30. And again on May 8th I was billed an extra $30. On May 18th I got a refund for $45. But the remaining $30 was never refunded, despite multiple emails and in-person reminders.

Earlier this month I decided to switch back to working from home full-time. I emailed the office manager in the early afternoon on August 3rd, a Saturday. It will be 59 days later, on September 30th, that I will no longer be paying for an office I’ve not used since July.

There’s an asymmetry to the timeline of these transactions. I paid them thousands of dollars. They can’t be bothered to refund me $30. Signing up to pay them took an afternoon. Closing the account will take longer than it took to buy our apartment. And getting a refund is simply a lost cause (as is any inclination I have to ever use their services again).

There are parallels here to some of the more notorious customer experience complaints. I’m thinking of those companies with retention specialists, those that require you to pick up the phone to cancel a service you paid for online, that sort of thing.

We all know these companies. And when we do use them it’s more often due to the sheer lack of alternatives than it is out of loyalty. If you’re in a market where there are alternatives then you better pay attention to the ease with which customers can leave your service. If it’s an order of magnitude easier to signup than it is to leave then it’s only a matter of time before your customers have left for good.

July 8, 2016

A couple weeks ago I did an interview with Helpshift about customer support and how we wrangle a distributed team at Automattic. They wrote everything up into a nice blog post that was published earlier this week.

March 9, 2016

Breaking the Silence

The WordPress support role is one that I inhabit fully, because if there’s anyone who understands what it’s like to have a technical barrier to expression, it’s me. It’s truly wonderful to be able to help others break through their own limitations, and end their silences, using the power of Free and Open Source Software, and the open web.

Breaking the Silence. This essay from my co-worker Mahangu is fantastic. If you help people on the web you should read this.

January 2, 2016

What is a career?

To me, a successful career is one without ceilings, walls, or even a blazed path. It is not a ladder, it is not stairs, it is not a single road with milemarkers along the way to tell you how close you are to your destination.

What is a career? – Andrea Badgley.

October 20, 2015

Functional Chameleons

The best in customer care are functional chameleons, becoming conversant as product managers, marketers and salespeople to bring resolution to customers.

Lessons from the Woman Who Built Squarespace’s Customer Care Team.

August 9, 2015

Stop apologising

When there has been a deliberate change though—one that is important for future development and that almost certainly won’t be changing back—then that sort of apology can be counter productive. If you know that a feature has been removed and is gone for good, it’s unhelpful to offer false hope to a customer of “recording your feedback” and “voting for that to be returned”. It will probably never happen.

Stop apologising to customers and start leading them – Mathew Patterson.

July 2, 2015

Customer success

Last week I tweeted about separating customer success/support/service teams. Today I read this comment:

This highlights something that is really important and that is the separation of Customer Success and Customer Support. In most ways, they are not related, they are opposites. Reactive vs. proactive, case-oriented vs. success-oriented, cost-center vs. revenue-driver, etc. It’s one of the reasons that Customer Success won’t (can’t?) work if it’s part of Customer Support.

Opposites? Fuck that.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. At a certain point, though, enough instances of something becomes a trend. And the trend I’m seeing in conversations about the customer experience is deeply frustrating.

Too many people who lead “Success” teams seek to define all the valuable pieces of the customer relationship as Theirs. They draw a line in the sand and say, “This is my fiefdom. Back off.” In doing that they push all of the labor and time-intensive aspects of the customer experience onto someone else.

Replying to support tickets becomes not about the opportunity to have meaningful conversations with your customers. It pushes support into a box that’s solely a cost-center, case-oriented, and unconcerned with helping customers successfully use your product. As part of this success-advocates elevate their teams as somehow inherently above and better than those mere peons who handle tickets.

That’s crazy! Even the most reactive, labor-intensive ticket represents an opportunity to earn goodwill with your customers. When you nail that experience you can create a ripple effect across revenue, social media, and the broader marketplace. That is customer support. It’s only an opportunity, though, if you choose to seize it. If you chalk support up as just a cost-center, that’s your loss. Good riddance.

This whole trend of customer success is a tired repetition of customer support as an entry-level-dead-end job that people simply seek to move out of. Customer support, when done well, is a career. Every conversation, whether it’s reactive or proactive, is an opportunity to learn from your customers. That is immensely valuable no matter your departmental definition. Every time you try to isolate certain elements into a single department and declare that proactive support won’t, and cannot, work with customer support you do the broader community harm. Every one of us is in this to help people succeed.

June 8, 2015

What is customer service for?

Customer service is difficult, expensive and unpredictable. But it’s a mistake to assume that any particular example is automatically either good or bad. A company might spend almost nothing on customer service but still succeed in reaching its goals.

Customer service succeeds when it accomplishes what the organization sets out to accomplish.

What is customer service for? – Seth Godin.

May 12, 2015

Survey fallacies

Support teams are frequently tasked with figuring out “what the customer wants” with some sort of pre-defined survey. As if a well-constructured set of questions will miraculously fix latent problems in the product.

My two cents: a survey is only worth doing if the product team is willing to devote non-trivial resources to what the survey illustrates as meaningful improvements to make. Without that commitment you’re just wasting everyone’s time.

May 7, 2015

On certainty in support

People turn to customer support for help, expertise, and reassurance. However, in my experience customer support teams too often respond with uncertainty.

I find a core cause of this to be one particular way of phrasing written replies. It stems from how we try to make replies conversational and relatable. We throw around words like “should” or “looks like” without understanding what they convey to someone confused and frustrated with your product.

In certain cases WordPress.com users have to rely on Happiness Engineers to manually transfer their blog to another account. A couple years ago I found we frequently wrote back to those customers to say, “That blog should now be under your other account.” Should. If you are on the receiving end of that sentence your first question could rightly be, “Well is it?!”

It takes one step and one word change to improve that. First, trust that you did things correctly but verify to be sure. Second, rewrite the above example to, “That blog is now under your other account.” Simple, yes, but a much greater sense of certainty.

In support we are frequently the ones making a change behind the scenes. In some cases we manually fix something vexing the user. In others we let someone know we fixed an earlier bug. In all cases we should be certain in our language. Certainty and expertise is what builds trust.

If you write a support reply and find yourself unsure of something, do the work necessary to be sure everything is working properly. The extra time will build trust with the user by removing doubt. Removing doubt and illustrating that someone can trust you as an expert is one surefire way end up with happier users.