50 small things you can do to improve customer service. Solid slide deck from Greg Meyer about improving customer service.
Tag: support
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.
A happy cup of coffee
More often than not my customer service experiences with other companies leave me disappointed. Here’s a story about a company that not only hit the mark for good service but absolutely obliterated it and became the standard from which I now define good service.
A couple weeks ago I picked up a pound of Happy Cup coffee beans. I hadn’t seen the brand before but they were a Portland-based company that does neat stuff with the proceeds so I figured I’d give it a shot.
The coffee was great. Then, halfway through the bag, disaster struck. I was grinding beans in the morning when my grinder made a terrible noise. The kind of noise that makes you immediately think, “That wasn’t good.”
I disassembled the grinder but couldn’t see anything too out of place. Then I brushed some of the grounds away. Staring back at me, wedged between the blades, was a little rock. Looked like maybe a bit of quartz.
The bane of my broken grinder. Notice the white-colored rock stuck toward the bottom-right of the blade.
That bummed me out but it wasn’t a huge deal. Honestly, I figured it was my fault for not noticing that before sending the beans through. Figuring Happy Cup would like to know the blend info to maybe track any other reports I gave them a call and left a message saying I’d found a rock in the Sip-a-ragua blend packaged at the end of December.
Adam from Happy Cup called me back within the hour. He apologized profusely and offered 3 free bags of coffee. That totally made my day. Not only was it a quick response but they were more than willing to fix things up. I told him that’d be great and that I really liked the blend.
Handily I had an old grinder laying around so I wasn’t completely out of luck for that morning. I mentioned to Adam that the only way I knew there was a rock was that my grinder “found” it. Without hesitating Adam asked if my grinder was broken too. I told him that it was. He immediately said, “Well we’ll replace your grinder as well. If you can get me the details of make and model we’ll order it today.”
Happy Cup delivers.
Yesterday a Happy Cup employee delivered the 3 bags of coffee and a brand new grinder to my door. Absolutely blew me away with the level of care they put in to their customer service. All I had bought was one bag of coffee and yet they still treated it like the most important thing in the world to them. Now they have a loyal customer for a long, long time.
Notes from UserConf
Last Friday I was in San Francisco for the first ever UserConf. It was a fantastic day filled with great speakers and fun conversations. Like I mentioned on Twitter, it was the best conference I’ve been to in a long time.
The wifi was sketchy during the day so I just kept my notebook, the paper kind, handy for jotting down ideas from the talks.
Richard White, co-founder and CEO of UserVoice, opened the day by talking about the current state of customer service and what motivated UserVoice and CoSupport to put on UserConf. He characterized businesses as defined by two types of support: the traditional model and the web-native model.
The traditional model of support is that which grew up with older businesses. It’s massive call centers, phone trees, and a world where only 29% of companies reply within a day and only 20% reply across multiple mediums. It’s a world defined by ITIL and other arcane acronyms.
The new, web-native mode of support is what grew up alongside the internet. It’s fast-paced, multi-medium, and focused on opportunities. 83% of companies reply in under a day, 89% reply across multiple channels, and 87% reply on Twitter. This model of support is one that gets back to business basics and is an integral feature of your product.
Richard also set down the guide for the rest of the day’s talks. As he put it, no one goes to school for customer service but everyone at UserConf knows it’s vital to their businesses. For that reason the day was going to focus on the how of support, not the why. It wasn’t going to be a day about arguing why you should reply to customers over Twitter. Instead it would focus on how you can craft kick-ass experiences for all of your customers, every day. If you can keep your customers happy you can keep your customers.
Jessica Semaan, from Airbnb, was the next to speak. She talked about how Airbnb was able to scale its customer support team from 3 to more than 200 people. Jessica described it all through a metaphor relating customer service to a love relationship.
At Airbnb they started with all support running through the founder’s cell phone. That didn’t scale so well. As they grew the team they wanted to find a way to help more people more quickly while still having the high level of service and trust.
To get started they set trust as their defining goal. As part of that they hired people from within the community, those who were already hosts or had frequently stayed with hosts. They spent 6 months consolidating data from Zendesk, Contactual, and other services they were using. As Jessica phrased it, they need information not data. They want to be able to track contacts per transaction, top issues with each product and team, and cost per support interaction.
Jessica also talked a lot about what phone support is like at Airbnb. Multilingual phone support costs six times what offering multilingual email support does. Once you offer phone support you then need to offer it in many timezones. Each of those timezones need someone for each language you support. Suddenly your 2 person support team becomes 12.
Later in the day Kevin Hale, co-founder of Wufoo, who talked about how they designed software that people loved using. He opened by describing Wufoo as “Microsoft Access as designed by Fisher Price.” Pretty awesome.
From Kevin’s talk, everything about Wufoo seems extremely well-crafted and focused on providing a stellar experience. They keep response times to around 12 minutes, which is phenomenal. The “Help” tab within the interface goes directly to the relevant documentation.
One of the best tips Kevin mentioned was how they include an “Emotional state” choice in the support contact form. 76% percent of their users filled it out versus the 78% who filled out what browser version they were using. Customers also didn’t game the system by always marking “frustrated” or “angry.” On the whole they used it honestly.
Later in the day Kevin posted the full slides from his talk over on Speaker Deck. Check them out, there’s some great stuff in there.
Chase Clemons also talked about support at 37signals. His talk was filled with lots of tips, tricks, and words of advice. One of the first things he mentioned is that every product on the web should have domain.com/help redirect to support docs. 1
He also talked about how 37signals, while not providing phone support on a regular basis, still uses it for certain cases. Chase’s guideline is that if something takes more than 3 replies with the customer he’ll work out a time to chat with them over video and/or screenshare. meetings.io was mentioned as a tool for doing this. It lets you spin up on-demand video meetings.
37signals has also started experimenting with live, online classes. They do two, 30-minute classes a week; one is about becoming a Basecamp pro and the other is a general Q&A. Over the last 8 months they’ve helped more than 10,000 people this way. Pretty amazing when you think about it.
They also did the first ever Basecamp Delivered event last month in Austin. That was an all-day, in-person help session for anyone in Austin who had questions they needed answered with Basecamp. They had two rooms with 30-minute time slots in each where people could come by themselves or with their entire team and learn more about Basecamp. I love that idea.
Most of the speakers at UserConf were from relatively small web companies. Doug Turnure was not. He’s a Visual Studio Program Manager at Microsoft where his team has 100 million users. At that scale, as he said, support becomes all about having the right conversations with the right people at the right time. One of the things they’ve done with Visual Studio is to add in-app recording and annotating so that bug reports come in with more detail. Doug’s talk was fascinating. Learning how a 4,000 person product team develops and supports something as big as Visual Studio is mind-blowing.
There’s also a recap post up on the CoSupport blog with more notes and links to everyone’s slides.
Overall, UserConf was fantastic. The best conference I’ve been to in a long, long while. They’re planning on holding another one in the Spring of 2013. If you’ve made it all the way to the bottom of this post then you should be at the next one.
Notes:
- I’m happy to say WordPress.com does this. 🙂 ↩
Thomas Brand, writing about the importance of setting the right expectations:
The most valuable part of setting expectations is telling the truth, even if the truth means you don’t know, but are willing to find out. I am much more likely to remain a customer of companies that treat me with respect by setting expectations, and sticking to their word.
So true. Trying to set a false expectation or trying to cover up that you don’t actually know the answer may have short-term benefits, but in the end the customer will find out the truth. If you’re up front and honest with them from the start things work out much better.
This post from Marco Arment, about a less-than-stellar experience his grandparents had at an Apple Store, is such an important lesson to learn:
It wouldn’t be the first time a technology expert lacked empathy for a customer, or made bad assumptions about what would be fast and easy for the customer to do on his own — especially when deciding to perform an easy, predictable, cure-all “restore”.
Reminds me of something I wrote earlier this year about asking questions and avoiding assumptions. Spending the time to do something right matters much more than doing it quickly.
The pace of support
A story
A while back my Google Apps email broke. I could still send and receive email through the web interface but all application-specific passwords were not functioning. I spent most of a Monday trying various steps. Nothing worked.
I remembered that Google offers phone support to its Apps for Business users. I only have one user account so this was $5 a month. Five dollars for dedicated phone and email support? I will take that deal every time.
I called Google and after a relatively painless phone tree I got a wonderfully helpful Googler on the line. He immediately spent 55 minutes on the phone with me. It totally blew me away. Phenomenal experience.
A problem
After 55 minutes, though, the Googler could not fix things. I had the luck of running in to an IMAP authentication error that was not supposed to happen. No worries, I told the Googler, some things take time and I will be patient. We ended the call and that evening he sent me a follow-up email with some steps to try. I gave them a shot (no luck) and replied the next morning. Then I waited. For 3 days.
I followed up via email to see what the status was. Shortly after that message my email was back up and running. Despite fixing my original issue, it left me with a bad experience. This showed me that sometimes the pacing of support is the most important aspect.
A lesson
First impressions matter. While that is no secret, I think last impressions are just as crucial. My first interaction with Google was brilliant. Fifty-five minutes of 1-to-1 help. That is unheard of and I was ecstatic.
Then, I waited. Three days. With no word on what was happening. Did someone forget? Did my email get lost? Do I have to contact them again? Will I have to start at square one with a new support engineer? As a company, those are not questions you want your customers asking. They cause thoughts of doubt. They make it harder to believe you care. When your customers wonder where you went it means you have paced your support poorly.
There are benefits to offering support across multiple channels. Phone support and live chat provide immediate gratification. Email allows for the delay in troubleshooting that can be necessary for more complex issues. The trick is in handling people who start in one medium and end in another. A support team must prepare to handle the inevitable follow-up emails from phone calls and live chats quickly. It is not because the questions are any more important. It is because your first contact with those users set certain expectations. Your job is to see things through.
A phone call sets certain expectations for the pacing of support. That call was my first experience with Google. It was great. The Googler was responsive, caring, and quick to help. All of that was lost after we moved to email. I went from feeling like I had that Googler’s full attention to feeling forgotten.
The medium of support is not important. Consistency and follow through are. The standard you set in phone support should follow every user through every interaction with your support team. First experiences set expectations. Proper pacing ensures they are met. Allowing for each mode of support to move at its own pace irrespective of where the user has been before creates a terribly disjointed and unsatisfying experience. Google may have fixed my issue but they left me far from happy.
The speed of support
When we help people in support we want to quickly solve whatever problems they face. There is an urge to get the answer sent as soon as we can. The faster reply is the better reply. But, that is not always the best way to make someone happy. For those people who are frustrated, shy, or unclear in their original description, you may end up solving the problem as you constructed it, not the problem they had.
This problem is exacerbated when you face a backlog of requests. Someone has already been waiting for days so you really, really want to get that answer to them. Now.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is ask a question. Patience and care trump raw speed.
Taking a step back gives you both the opportunity to make sure you are on the same page. You show that you are there to help. You want to do more than send a response and move on. You want to take time, understand things, and then solve them. When you do this you work toward honest help, not just efficiency.
The less we assume the better we will be at making people happy. Good support is about answering the questions someone has. Ensuring that we properly understand those questions is the most important step toward that goal.
Rubber Duck Problem Solving. Jeff Atwood explains why Stack Exchange cares so much about how you ask your question. Their “How to Ask” page is pretty interesting, too. The more effort you put in to your question the better the answer tends to be.