Learn to be a customer support pro.
Tim Cook’s letter about Maps in iOS6:
At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.
I don’t know if Cook wrote it himself or had someone else do it, but it’s a pretty great letter to say sorry. Make sure to read the whole letter.
Every so often, I’ll pass on some friendly, easy tips and tricks to make support easier and customers happy. This week, it’s all about the link.
Instead of telling a customer to “Go sign in at your account login page and then click on the Settings page”, just give them the link instead. An email might look like this:
Hi Tom!
It’s easy to change that setting. Just head over to https://supportops.mystagingwebsite.com/account/me to see that settings page. Once you get there, you can bookmark it so you won’t have to hunt around for it again.
If you have any other questions, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help. And have a spectacular Friday!
– Chase
It saves your customers a step of trying figure out where they should click inside their account.
If you want to check out some other quick and easy tips and tricks, head over to the Tips section of Support Ops.
It’s going to happen. A customer’s going to send you one without even realizing that caps lock is an option. You’ve been forewarned.
While I was in Austin last week, I stayed at the W Hotel downtown. The staff has perfected the art of a hotel experience down to the smallest details. Out of all of them, there’s one single act that stood out the most.
Every day, the hotel staff changes the floor mats depending on the time of day. The one above shows “Good Evening” but there’s also a “Good Morning” and “Good Afternoon”. Not only are the mats always clean because of the frequent rotation, the attention to detail here shows me the staff actually cares.
When it comes to your emails, nail the details. Use their name when you open an email. Instead of “Have a good day” go with “Have a great Monday!” so that they know when you replied. Customers always pick up on these same details and they’ll love you for it.
Now go out and have a spectacular Monday!
“As far as customers are concerned you are the company. This is not a burden, but the core of your job. You hold in your hands the power to keep customers coming back – perhaps even to make or break the company.”
I’m in Austin this week on a semi-secret mission. More on that later. But this came up with a friend the other day so I thought I’d share.
He wanted to know a few things to work on that were simple and easy. I thought about it for a bit and came up with five things that he (and you) can do right now to be a better customer support rep.
If you tell a customer that the order will be there by Friday, it better be there by Friday. If you can’t guarantee that, don’t tell it to the customer. It’s better to say it’ll be there by the weekend and then have it show up a few days early.
I get emails all the time about a customer’s Outlook not working or their phone getting Twitter messages as texts. It’s not an app that I provide support for but I still help out. Customers remember the people who help them.
A lagniappe is a small gift throw in with a customers purchase like free shipping or an extra loaf of bread when you order a dozen. When someone pre-pays for 12 months at once, I usually throw in the 13th month free as a surprise. Customers love it.
You’ll have customers that right in emails the length of short stories to complain about something. Answer them – it’s the very least you can do since they’ve spent the time telling you what’s not working for them.
Especially if you provide online customer support, it’s tempting to answer emails at all hours of the day. Sometimes you just need to disconnect from it. Don’t get burnt out answering emails all day because it’ll show up in your interactions with the customer.
When a customer is trying to reach your support team, make it really easy for them. A frustrated customer only gets more frustrated if they have to figure out the right phrase or URL to use to find help.
Two quick and easy tweaks:
Sure, it sounds like a no brainer but people forget to do it anyway. I just ran into it where I actually had to use a search box on a site to find the support contact info. They had it buried under help-me@theirdomain.com.
Go easy on your customer. Make sure the obvious ways to reach you actually do reach you.
Photo from Flickr – Quinn. Some people write better with a cat supervising.
You’ve got a story and we want to hear it!
Working with a team, I’m always learning new techniques to try and different ways of looking at things. Just the other day, I was stumped on how to answer a pretty hostile question we got on Twitter. I asked a co-worker what they thought about it and long story short, we managed to flip that customer from angry to happy. The only way we get better is to learn from each other.
That’s why I’d love for you to consider sharing what you’ve learned with the readers here at Support Ops.
A few things of note:
And that’s it! Email me with a draft or even an idea. I’ll help you along the way before we publish it here.
So let’s see what you’ve got!
Just a quick note. I’m sending out the first newsletter tomorrow so make sure to sign up if you want in. It’s going to have some awesome exclusive content that’ll make it worth it.
You’ve probably figured out by now that most of my interaction with customers happens via email. And if you’ve ever interacted with customers that way, you know that emails can be notoriously tricky to convey tone.
In a typical conversation, we get about half of our cues from tone, inflection, and body language. The same sentence can be said two different ways with two totally different implications. I remember being at a store in the mall once and overhearing two girls shopping. “You’d look great in that!” was said on multiple occasions with two entirely different tones to convey if the girl would look great or if it looked horrible.
With emails, I don’t have that luxury. It’s only the words on the screen that I have to work with.
You have to nail every single word in an email.
The best example of this one is the idea behind “appreciate”. We’re bombarded every day with “customer appreciation”, “we appreciate your business”, “I appreciate you sharing that”, etc. That constant over-use leads many of us to be jaded with the word in any context.
However, I know people who I can genuinely use the word “appreciate” with. Just the other day, I had a friend look over an idea I had. Over a text chat, I said, “I really appreciate you sharing those ideas with me.” I truly did appreciate it and since we talk each day, I could convey that over text and it not sound cheesy or insincere.
But over email with a customer I’ve never talked to before, I could never use that phrase. Believe me, I’ve tried and each time, the customer let me know that it felt cheesy, like it was part of some script or automated reply.
So I dropped it in favor of just saying “thanks for…”. That simple tweak worked a ton better. Gone was the perceived robotic feel. In it’s place, customers pointed out that they felt it was more honest and open.
When you go to reply to an email, remember to choose your words carefully. Look for ways that a customer could read them wrong or interpret them differently. The cleaner and more concise you can get your reply, the better your conversation with that customer is going to be.
Looking for some other tweaks to make your emails cleaner and better? Check out my entirely free Brief Guide to a Better Email. You’ll be writing better emails before the day is out.