Interview with Rob Siefker of Zappos. Great 4-part interview with Rob Siefker from Zappos’ Customer Loyalty Team.
Tag: customer service
Social Media: A Trailing Indicator of Customer Experience:
Social media is an important trailing indicator of your customer experience…Organizations that get this, empower their employees with the latitude to deliver excellent customer interactions, and to engage with their customers on social media.
Brent Simmons writing about the Vesper support guidelines Dave Wiskus published:
Support has to be as well-designed and good as the app you’re supporting.
My co-worker, Alx Block, writing about his experience at UserConf:
The only way that your start-up will set itself ahead of the pack is by providing the best customer experience. Loyalty drives us, and without support, we are nothing…I’m passionate about helping WordPress.com users be the best that they can be. I’m proud to be a Happiness Engineer. I’m proud to call myself support.
Distributed Happiness
Last Friday I spoke at UserConf about how we run distributed support teams at Automattic. The talk was about 30 minutes and I’ve written it up, with slides included, as a blog post below. You can also download the full slide deck. The video is now online, too.
If you want to show your customers that you care, it starts with your support team.
Passionately Angry People
Working in support you’ll find no shortage of frustrated people. Less common, but not uncommon, are the people who are frustrated and passionately angry.
The people who express passionate anger are frequently the same ones who spend unbelievable amounts of time with your product. Your best customers can be your most vocal critics.
For these people, your product is central to their ability to complete a certain task. Compromise their ability to effectively do that and you’ll see frustration boil over.
The thing is, these people love your product. Many use it for hours every day. Your product’s bugs and unwelcome changes tarnish that love with unmet expectations. They make these people want to scream at you.
If you work in support, this also means a passionately angry person is rarely angry with you, personally. It’s the product that is frustrating them. You’re just the closest thing they have to that. Welcome to the front lines. Time to grow some thicker skin.
The upside to all of this is that if you can find the task someone is trying to accomplish you can solve their frustration. Find the task they want to do. Eliminate the roadblocks to getting it done. Make everything about it faster. Walk away with a happy, and no longer frustrated, customer.
The next time someone writes to you in all caps calling you unspeakable things, take a moment to step back. Do more than just answer the question they’re asking. Think of the task they’re trying to finish and help with that. Nothing solves anger quite like getting things done.
50 small things you can do to improve customer service. Solid slide deck from Greg Meyer about improving customer service.
It’s from 2007 but Seven steps to remarkable customer service is a fantastic post from Joel Spolsky. Through a link in the post I also found this great post about dealing with abusive customers. Good advice throughout.
When empathy becomes insulting:
A natural, caring organization designed to create passionate customers stretches and bends. A rigid business bureaucracy looks to nail every T on policies, procedures, and practices—customers be damned.