Archives for July 2012

The support email mashup left me with one phrase that kept appearing over and over in all the emails I got.

“I apologize for the inconvenience.”

It’s such a horrible phrase that I’ve broken down how to fix it into to articles.  Let’s focus on the apologize phrase to begin.

Apologies don’t count

Honestly, can you think of a single time that someone said “I apologize” and you were okay with it?  The phrase itself has been swallowed up by the corporate world.  Anytime something goes wrong, I guarantee you’ll hear the phrase “I apologize for…”

I just don’t believe a person when they say it.  And your customers won’t either.  If it has the word apology in it, it doesn’t count.

The better option

Instead, go with the simple “I’m sorry.”  It’s short and direct.  Very rarely do we hear that phrase so we haven’t tuned it out yet.  It’s still believable.

A human says their sorry.  A robot goes with an apology.

That’s a real support “button” I found for this article.  

The app itself had nothing to do with airmail or aviation in any form or fashion.

In getting ready for UserConf, I’ve been watching every other speaker I can get of a video of lately. With support, there’s not many in our field but hey, that’s what UserConf is for.

Sidenote: Did I mention I’m at UserConf and you should get tickets? Use the code “chaselikesyou” to get a discount when you buy yours here.

Back to the videos – our friend Sarah has a great one from LessConf where she present an intriguing idea. In short, she emailed lots of online support teams about their apps and then merged those emails into one that summarized all of the replies. Check out her talk to see more.

I figured I’d try the same thing to see if I got a similar result. Over the past week, I’ve emailed both big and small support teams to see what type of answer I’d get. In each case, I send in a ticket asking if they had a certain tool, which I tailored to each one so that tool was missing. Basically, it was a feature request email.

The Numbers and Stats

Before we get to my mashup of them, here’s the numbers that I tracked just to give us an idea of how other teams are doing.

• Longest wait time – 4 days.
• Shortest wait time – 17 hours.
• Average email length – 80 words
• Emails from an actual person – 2 (17%)
• Emails from an auto-responder – 10 (83%)

The Email Mashup

Warning: What follows below is the culmination of a dozen email support requests to different online apps and tools. Names of those said apps have been removed because… well, they were just that bad at writing an email.

Hello,

Thanks for your feedback. Our app does not include that tool at this time. I apologize for that inconvenience.

We get lots of requests each day so we’re not able to respond to each one. But do know that we read each and every one of them.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments. We appreciate you using our app.

Have a great day.

Sincerely,

John Doe

The App Team

Seriously?

What an absolutely horrible email.  You have to be taught in the ways of bad writing and communication to create this kind of email.  It requires real effort to write something that’s this much of a mess.

The saddest part is that the mashup itself was easy. Every single email was this basic email with the words just re-arranged, often in a more confusing manner.

Fixing It

For the next few articles, I’m going to break down this email to show you how to fix it. At the end, we’ll have a feature request email that we’re proud of – one that your customers will love.

Here’s what I’ll cover.

1. A few beginning tips.
2. Feedback is from a microphone.
3. Apologies don’t count.
4. Know when to use the word inconvenience – never.
5. You don’t really read request emails.
6. I don’t think you know what appreciate means.
7. Be more sincere with your closing.
8. A better email.

This will be the first ever Support Ops series, which I’m excited about!  If you spot any other tweaks you’d make to the email, let me know and I’ll work them in.  

From Twitter:

We are sorry. Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20am and 9:00am PT, users around the world got zilch from us. By about 10:25am PT, people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected: Twitter.

From Google:

“Google has recently confirmed that it still has in its possession a small portion of … data collected by our Street View vehicles in the UK… Google apologises for this error.”

Two wildly different approaches here.

Twitter goes down for a good chunk of time.  Millions of people scream bloody murder because they can’t tweet about Twitter being down.  But it’s only for a short time.  Twitter comes back up pretty quick and the team is working to make sure it doesn’t ever happen again. It was pure bad luck with both parallel systems going down.

On the flip side, Google’s Street View cars collected personal data (like emails) while mapping out Britain and other countries way back in 2010.  Years later, it still has that data.  Way bigger screwup than Twitter’s short downtime.

And when it comes to a response, you get two radically different approaches. Obviously, Twitter has won in this little head-to-head support match.  But here’s why they won.

1) Say sorry first.

Right off the bat, they lead with “we are sorry”.  It’s much more personable than “Google apologizes for this error” that we get from the lawyer.  Saying the word “sorry” makes it seem like you really are.

2) Don’t let the lawyer write it.

They’ll say something dumb like Google’s lawyer with his apologies. The best part of Twitter’s response is that it’s readable and written by the VP from the Engineering team.  I know he knows what he’s talking about because he leads the team.  And I know he’s going to fix it to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

3) Fix it.

Twitter states up front what happened and how they’re going to fix it. Google’s response? Well, they said they’d fix it back in 2012 but I’m not holding my breath from that.

Winner: Twitter

Again, Twitter obviously wins on this one. I’m still impressed by Twitter’s response and even found myself going back over it several times just to learn from it.

So what did you think of Twitter’s outage post?

This is part of the Lessons from the Classroom series. Read more articles in the series.

My college degree’s in education so grading is just part of it. You might roll your eyes with thoughts of past exams flashing through your mind.  But I think it’s an important part of getting better not only for you but for your team.

We use so many words for it:

• Rating
• Grading
• Evaluating
• Feedback
• Commentary

Whatever term you want to use, feel free (well, within reason). Just make sure you’re checking yo self out.

What do I mean by that?

Every time you interact with a customer, you should know how you did. Here at 37signals, we have Smiley for that. Each person I talk with can select from three choices – “It was great”, “It was ok”, or “It wasn’t good”. We include the link at the end of every email so you have a chance to see how things are going each time. After you click on the rating, there’s also a chance to describe how things are going more in-depth.

While there’s a huge upside to your own version of Smiley, here’s the big two:

1) The customer knows you’re listening.

Time after time, my customers tell me that they’re glad I listened to them. I wasn’t some automated robot or a soul-less person just going through the motions. I helped solve the problem and then asked to know how they feel now. It’s a way for them to express exactly what they’re thinking without any anxiety or huge survey to fill out.

2) You know how each and every customer feels.

With Smiley, I can see the trends in how customers are reacting to me. Sometimes, it’s a heavy feature request day and I see a row of frowns. That means my wording’s off and I need a better way to express what I’m trying to say about their ideas. Other times, everything’s jiving, the customer feels the support love and wants us to know about it. Seeing those rows of green Smiley’s proves to be an awesome boost and lets you know you’re doing a great job.

Start One

If you don’t have some sort of feedback loop in place, start one right now. And keep it as simple as possible. Three choices (rather than a billion like most surveys) and a simple text box in case they want to let you know why they picked that choice. Your customers will love being able to talk about their experience and you’ll love seeing how your customers think you’re doing.

Are you using any type of system to grade yourself?  Tell me about it in the comments!

We do a lot of tracking with support at 37signals and one of the numbers we look at is wait time.  If a customer puts in a ticket right now, what’s the average wait time look like?

It’s not a particularly new idea.  You see estimated wait times for amusement park rides, heavy highways, and even emergency rooms now.  In the support field, it’s not something most people offer up though, probably because the wait time is atrocious.

We put the average wait time right on the Smiley page so you know exactly what to expect.  You can see what our average score is like and how long the wait is.  If you’re a customer, these two simple pieces of data go a long way in helping relieve that anxiety feeling people get when contacting support.

How good is the team? Well, the last 92 people out of the last 100 that we talked to said great.

How long will I have to wait?  Only about 9 minutes right now.

It’s a short and simple addition to the support page that goes a long way with customers.

What’s the average wait time been for your support team?

I’ve touched on the power of words before briefly. Since our word choice is vitally important, I wanted to give you another example that I didn’t even think of before listening to Sarah Hatter’s Founder’s Talk interview.

Feedback. The word pops up all over the place.

“We truly value your feedback.”

“We’d love to know your thoughts and feedback.”

“Can I get your feedback on this one?”

Add “feedback” to our never, ever, ever use list. As Sarah puts it, feedback comes from a microphone in a very… unpleasant manner. On top of that, it’s on every corporate lingo/buzzword bingo board you’ll ever find. When you talk about a person’s ideas, don’t call it feedback.

If you’re writing a support email, the common place this appears is when responding to a feature request email.

Ticket:

Hi Team,

I’m really loving your app so far. One question – have you thought about adding in a camera component to it?”

– Bob

 

Bad:

Hello,

Thanks for your feedback! We’re not working on that at the moment. I’ll make sure to pitch your idea to the team and see if it’s something we can get in the next update.

– You

 

Good:

 Hi Bob!

Thanks for sharing how you’re using our app! We’re not working on that at the moment. I’ll make sure to pitch your idea to the team and see if it’s something we can get in the next update.

– You

I only switched the first sentence but see how much better that works and sounds? The good email stands out from every other feature request email they’ll get. And it shows that you’re actually listening to your customers and how they’re using your app.

Feedback is from a microphone so kill it off in favor of a better word.

What other words and phrases should we add to our list to never, ever use?

Ever wonder about the yellow, happy face guy that floats around Support Ops?  He’s the latest in a long lineage of smiley emojis, emoticons, buttons, posters, and who knows what else.  There’s actually a pretty cool story behind the creation of the iconic smiley face.

Get to know Smiley here.