Support Ops

Learn to be a customer support pro.

Archives for April 2013

Hively App Review

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This is part of a series on apps and tools that will make your support life so much easier.  

Hively lets customers share their thoughts with you every step of the way. It’s kinda like Smiley, the app we use at 37signals to see what our customers are thinking after they read our email. Instead of building it from scratch like we did, you can just plug Hively into your support app and be ready to go in just a few minutes.

How it works

Every person has their own unique code that goes at the end of the emails they send out to your customers. Customers click on the link and share what they thought about the experience. Your team gets to see what the customer’s thinking, which helps deliver a better overall support experience.

Team members get ratings just like you’d expect. Hively even tracks those stats for useful analytics and leaderboards. It’s handy for seeing which of your team members is rocking it out that week.

Final Thoughts

Hively’s definitely a handy little app to have. It’s a super easy set up that you can be rocking within three minutes and will help make your team better.

Stop waiting and go set it up.

Sponsor: Papertrail

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Huge thanks to Papertrail for being this week’s sponsor.

Papertrail is a system administrator’s dream come true. Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. All your logs are in one place that’s instantly searchable. Papertrail even provides alerts to let you know when something goes wrong. And since this is Support Ops, I’ll point out that their customer support is top-notch. You’ll love it.

Check it out with an easy signup here.

New: The Live Support Hangout

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I’m so excited about this news on the podcast front. A few episodes ago, Chase L. and I tried out a new format with a new/commentary kinda show. The response was better than I could’ve imagined! Lots of emails about how our podcast listeners liked the format and wanted more.

So that’s what we’re going to do.

In a few weeks, we’ll go live with The Support Hangout. It’ll be a weekly show focused on news from the customer support world. The show’s live via a Google Hangout every Monday at 5:30pm Central / 6:30pm Eastern.

The team

I’ve got a great team already signed on to the show. They’ve all been on The Support Ops Podcast before so you already know how awesome they are.

– Chase Livingston from Ubuntu One
– Carolyn Kopprasch from Buffer
– Jeff Vincent from Wistia

We go live May 13th

Mark your calendars for Monday May 13th. We’ll go live with our first show then. Watch supportops.co/live for the video stream and chat with us during the show at tlk.io/supportops.

And just to make sure you don’t miss it, follow Support Ops on Twitter. I’ll tweet out a reminder and those links before the show starts.

Huge thanks to Chase, Carolyn, and Jeff for jumping off a cliff with me on this one. It’s going to be a lot of fun and we’re all going to learn a lot along the way.

Tone During a Chat

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From Micah on Tone and Communication:

After a short wait I chatted with someone who answered my question quickly and with reference to documentation that I had missed in earlier searches. It was the perfect user/support interaction, the user gets good news(that made me a paying customer), and gets it quickly.

At least it was until the end. There I expressed my gratitude for the help I had received, and the response I got was “sure”, and that ended the conversation.

As I stopped to reflect on my experience on the other side of the chat, that “sure” gnawed at me. Every teenage insecurity I could summon came flooding back. Was that a warm “sure” said with a smile as the agent waved goodbye to our chat session? Was it an eye-rolling sarcastic “sure” given by an agent that lacked engagement or was annoyed that I didn’t find the answer in their docs? It didn’t ultimately change my behavior as a customer, but it colored my experience, despite the irrationality of my feelings.

Micah’s whole post is jam-packed of goodness but I really loved his story here. We’ve got to pick our words carefully when dealing with just text interactions. There’s not body language or visual indicators to let our customers know what we’re thinking. That means everything comes down to the words you choose.

Go read the whole thing.

Stay Calm

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I’m cool. I’m fine.

It’s so easy to get frustrated with customers when doing support. Makes you feel a bit like this guy.

That’s when you’ve got to stop and back away from the computer. Take a break. If you don’t, tempers will flare and you’ll miss something in your quest to fix their problem.

The missing items

In my last job, I had a customer who was arguing with one of our team members. The customer was yelling through the phone about some missing items from their catering order. And I mean yelling – you could hear them through the phone from a few feet away.

I picked up the other phone and jumped on the same line to listen in on the conversation. I saw our team member getting frustrated because they couldn’t even get a word in edge wise. As soon as they got a break in the yelling, they calmly asked for the customer to hold for just a moment so he could double-check something.

When he put the customer on hold, I looked at him with that “What are you doing?” look. He looked up and just said, “I’ve got to take 30 seconds. Otherwise, I’m going to lose my cool and say the wrong thing.”

He picked back up the phone and before he could say anything, the customer started to apologize. Turns out the missing items were actually there. Then we found out the customer was rushing to get the catering set for her meeting so she could get to the hospital to see her dad. It was just a bad situation that could’ve been a lot worse if not for that break.

Take a moment

When things go south with a customer, you’ve got to step back. Take a moment before you start on that email reply back to them. Walk around the block. Throw a frisbee with your dog. Make a cup of tea.

Do something to help you refocus.

Transporting the Info

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I got this review from a customer this morning:

Fast answer, short enough to read quickly, long enough to transport the information.

I love how they phrased it. My email to them was fast and just the right length to get the info to them.

That’s what your customers want. Clear, concise, and fast.

In-Person Support

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I’m going to be out the rest of this week with Basecamp Delivered, an in-person support session with our awesome Basecamp customers. It’s something we’ve done before in Austin, Texas, that was really successful. So we’re hosting more of them this year.

If the idea of in-person support intrigues you, check out the Austin recap here. I talked about it along with other “non-traditional” support ideas at UserConf 2012.

And speaking of UserConf, it’s almost here! Make sure to grab your tickets. Use the code “supportops” to get a nice $50 discount.

I’ll see you all next week!

Real World Response Times

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I ended up spending part of my weekend at the ER with my mom. That’s why you haven’t seen much from me these past few days. She’s fine and everything’s going to be fine but there was something that caught my attention while in the hospital.

The nurse mentioned a door-to-door time for each patient. From the moment they sign in, a clock starts that only stops once they’re discharged. Hospitals use it to make sure the ER team is running efficiently and such.

But the nurse mentioned there’s a huge risk to this approach. In the quest to make their numbers look good, they rush through tests and exams. That increases the chance of missing something important, especially if it’s the end of their shift and they’re tired already.

Keep that in mind for your email response times as well. Email support isn’t life or death like the ER but similar mindsets can happen in the push to get better numbers. Those stats are important but what’s more important is taking care of your customers. If that means spending a few extra moments with them, do it!