I’m always dreaming up new ways to help you better when it comes to supporting your customers. Can you take 60 seconds and let me know what you think?
Archives for February 2013
The Customer Support Weekend Roundup #5
The community here is fantastic. I got so many links this week for articles that I didn’t know where to start! This week’s roundup is going to be a little longer than normal but there’s some great reads here. I didn’t want to leave any out.
If you’ve got any articles or links that we’ve missed, make sure to let us know in the comments.
Now grab that cup of coffee and dig in!
Episode #9 – Sweating the Commas Interview with Jason Rehmus
Jason Rehmus is on the show this week. We talk about his new business Sweating Commas along with the importance of editing your writing in general. While his business focuses on writers more than customer reps, he still has lots of great advice for editing all those customer emails you send every day.
Listen to the show
Customer Support App Reviews
If you haven’t noticed yet, we’re pretty fanatical about support. When it comes to the tools we use to support our customers, we’ve tried a lot. Being the sharing types that we are, customer support tool reviews seemed a natural thing to do.
Every support app is a little different. Some focus on covering lots of support channels while others just focus on one. Some are made for big teams and others just for the small teams. Sorting through all of them can be a challenge so let me help out a bit.
Here’s the ones that we’ve taken a look at so far.
Help Scout
Help Scout does one thing really, really well – provide the best way to do email support. The team focuses on that first as the driving force behind their product. And I gotta say, they do it well
Tender
Tender is a great little support app with all of the features a growing support team might need. It seems to be geared toward start-up type organizations, with a minimalist design, only the features you need, and an “easy as email” feel.
Desk
Desk is made by the very successful folks behind Salesforce, a well-known CRM tool. Desk goes beyond emails and tracking tickets, it allows for social media integration, live chat, and even phone support. It’s no wonder then that companies like DirecTV, Square, Vimeo, and many others turn to Desk for their support app. Since it’s the app I use every day at 37signals, I’ve also written about what it’s like from that point of view.
UserVoice
UserVoice provides the whole deal. When you sign up with them, you’ll get feedback forums, a knowledge base system, a support ticket tool, and reporting for all that. It’s definitely targeted towards the company that wants everything in one system.
SupportBee
SupportBee allows you to use an email-based workflow. You can reply to the support request as a normal email and it will be stored on SupportBee and then sent to the customer. That way you can work from inside your email inbox or login to the app and reply to customers from there.
HelpSpot
When you think help desk, think HelpSpot. It’s designed to handle anything you want to throw at it. Email support, phone support, web support – you name it, it can handle it. There’s a reason why big teams like Campaign Monitor and the University of Michigan use it and trust it.
If you use one that’s not listed here, I’d love to add your review to the list. Just get in touch with us here.
Now on to the reviews!
Valued Customer
Dear AT&T Valued Customer,
AT&T needs input from customers like you, to provide the best experience it can to its customers.
For your participation in this important study, you will be entered into a drawing for 1 of 10 $100 Visa Gift cards.
Thank you in advance for your assistance.
If you require technical assistance with the survey, please access our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for answers to common questions or you may click here to Contact Support.
Just got this email from AT&T. I’m valued but they can’t even use my name? They’ve got it right there on my account with them.
Also, anyone want to take a guess at how complicated the survey was? 18 different “submit this answer” pages. Yikes.
The Person Over the Channel
You’d think that every company out there just discovered how great Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or other social app is for talking with customers. It’s like they all woke up and said “This one’s the magic bullet that will make customers love us!” Just do a search for “customer social media” and you’ll get a ton of results from “social media experts” showing why it’s the best thing since individually wrapped cheese slices.
Except that it’s not. Just like anything else, it’s a tool that’s got to be used by someone on your team. If that person doesn’t understand customers, then that brand new Twitter account you just had them start won’t be worth a pack of… well, individually wrapped cheese slices.
Great support comes from great customer support reps. Hire the right people. They’re able to rock whatever tool you give them.
The Customer Support Weekend Roundup #4
Every week, there’s some great articles out there on customer support and the overall customer experience. Most of us working on support teams tend to be busy helping customers so we don’t have a chance to go scouring the web for them.
To fix that, I’ve got a brand new section of the Support Ops site with the customer support roundup. Each weekend, our team here will make sure you’ve got the best articles from the past week. Weekends are perfect for reading so it’s a good chance to see what might have been missed in the past week.
If you’ve got any articles or links that we’ve missed, make sure to let us know in the comments.
Grab that cup of coffee and dig in!
Episode #8 – From the Designer View with Ian Landsman
Ian Landsman from UserScape is our guest on this episode. He gives us an inside look at designing a customer support tool a little different from others out there today. Instead of a straight SAAS model, his HelpSpot app is managed by the company itself. Enjoy!
Listen to the show
How Zapier Supports 160+ Services At Once
At Zapier we support integrations between a great number of services, 162 at the time of this writing. We’re very proud of the world of possibilities this unlocks for our users, as the breadth of services combined with multiple options available for each service make the potential uses nearly incalculable.
Our Unique Challenge
However, this nearly limitless functionality comes with it a downside. With 160+ services each having their own nuances and more getting added daily through our developer platform, it’s impossible for any of us to truly know the entire product.
This means that every day we see users who are touching on edge cases of functionality we’ve never seen before, and maybe will never see again. Even more worrisome is that this edge case is often the sole reason those users will need our service, so we have to get it right or lose them as a customer.
We’re essentially asked to find a single square in a Rubik’s cube made of a 160+ Rubik’s cubes, so even if we can satisfy one request, it doesn’t become any easier to answer subsequent requests.
So how do we handle this challenge as a team? How do we satisfy customers who come to us with requests we haven’t seen before, probably won’t see again, and absolutely need to be resolved in order to earn their business?
Head Off Confusion With Design
As a starting point, we do our best to head off confusion with design. Wherever possible we try to adjust help text, error messages, even design elements like buttons in order to keep our users pointed in the right direction, and aware of what exactly we’re able to do for them.
We’re able to keep a handle on this because everyone our team does customer support. Our developers are not divorced from the user experience, and as such they’re clued in to where the pain points are and can make better decisions in what design and functionality they build.
Iterate Quickly
On that note, we also iterate quickly. We’ve streamlined the process of hearing what a user wants to do, finding out if that’s something we can do for them quickly(I’ve become pretty good at reading API docs while live chatting), and then getting it in the hands of our developers.
Our developers, aware of the urgency being so close to the front lines themselves, do a fantastic job of adding features quickly so we can delight those customers with new functionality built just for them.
Become An Efficiency Machine
More personally, we make ourselves into efficiency machines. Because so many issues that come in are one-off problems, we need to be really good at moving through those. We have internal tools that help keep relevant information at our fingertips, and we take advantage of shortcuts where we can to make everything fly behind the scenes.
Find A Way
Lastly, we simply find a way. With so many services at our disposal, we’re often able to find alternative means to meet a user’s needs if the route they propose isn’t possible. A user can’t quite get a Gmail->Dropbox zap working how they want? Turns out switching to our Mailbox->Dropbox zap saves them time and allows them to do more without creating additional zaps to do so.
This is by far the most enjoyable and rewarding part of my job, overcoming an initial obstacle to get a user to his desired use case. That Rubik’s cube made of Rubik’s cubes is just a giant puzzle after all, and solving one piece at a time is how we create satisfied customers.
The Customer Support Weekend Roundup
Every week, there’s some great articles out there on customer support and the overall customer experience. Most of us working on support teams tend to be busy helping customers so we don’t have a chance to go scouring the web for them.
To fix that, our team here will make sure you’ve got the best articles from the past week. Weekends are perfect for reading so it’s a good chance to see what might have been missed in the past week.
If you’ve got any articles or links that we’ve missed, make sure to let us know in the comments.
Grab that cup of coffee and dig in!