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Archives for July 2013

The Social Contract

July 31, 2013 By Chase Clemons 2 Comments

From Miguel Perez at Media Temple:

From the beginning, our support team has been engaged in a conversation with our customers. We have been listening, talking, and sharing our knowledge in a way that unintentionally fulfilled that unwritten social contract.

In return, our customers have rewarded us by staying put and telling their friends. Our support effort to honor the “social contract” together with the efforts of Engineering and Product are why (mt) Media Temple can boast a very respectable customer churn rate of 1.3%.

Interesting way of putting it. There definitely is this unwritten contract between customers and the support team. Miguel’s got some solid points here.

When Buffer Hires People

July 30, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

Buffer is Hiring Logo

Clever way of getting your job openings in front of the people that actually use your product.

Draining My Cognitive Resources

July 29, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

From Kathy Sierra:

If your app is confusing and your tech support / FAQ isn’t helpful, you’re drawing down my scarce, precious, cognitive resources. If your app behaves counter-intuitively – even just once – I’ll leak cog resources every time I use it, forever, wondering, “wait, did that do what I expected?”. Or let’s say your app is super easy to use, but designed and tuned for persuasive brain hacks (“nudges”, gamification, behavioral tricks, etc.) to keep me “engaged” for your benefit, not mine (lookin’ at you, Zynga)… you’ve still drained my cognitive resources.

First, go read the whole thing. It’s that important. And make sure to check out her pony photos.

Now, specifically to support teams – you’ll have some input into how your company’s product works. Your job should be to minimize confusion inside the app. Then, make sure your help site is as clear and concise as possible. Your help articles are there to help the customer, not just make them more confused.

On to the company as a whole –

What you consume here, you take from there. Not just their attention, not just their time, but their ability to be the person they are when they are at their best.

Your product should help customers be more awesome. It should give to them rather than take from them. She uses the deathbed analogy but I think it’s apt here. On their deathbed, your customers won’t be wishing they used your product more.

Seriously, go read the whole thing if you didn’t earlier. Kathy’s writing always makes me think more about what I’m doing.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon

July 29, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

A Sneak Peak into At-Home Apple Advisors

July 28, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

The Customer Support Weekend Roundup #13

July 27, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

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.

Hangout articles

We’ll also use these articles on Monday’s live Support Hangout. You’ll get to hear what our panel of customer support pros think about them. I recommend reading through the articles this weekend rather than having to skim them quickly during the live show.

  • Apple’s slow reply to the developer website hack
  • Treat angry customers like toddlers
  • How to get users to read the manual
  • Voice and Tone

Make sure to join us at 5:30pm Central / 6:30pm Eastern for the live Support Hangout!

Bonus articles

These articles and links didn’t make it onto the list for the live hangout Monday. But you should still definitely check them out!

  • From angry to awesome: an AirBNB experience
  • 7 keys to documenting a customer interaction
  • Why your company’s customer experience may be falling behind

Did you see a good article that I missed this week? Leave a link to it in the comments. I’ll include it in next week’s support roundup!

The Under Over

July 26, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

Earlier today, I emailed a support team and got the standard auto-reply with:

Hi Chase!

We just wanted to let you know we’ve got your question. One of our support reps will get you a reply back within twelve hours.

I didn’t think anything of it and just archived the email in my inbox. When I checked my email again a few hours later, I already had a reply from the support team answering my question. They were pretty quick and had sent me an email about three hours after I had sent them mine. It was a welcome surprise.

When you can, under promise and over deliver. If you promise customers a response within twelve hours, getting an email to them in three will surprise and delight them.

Customers will love it more than the reverse of that. Imagine getting an email promising a reply within twelve hours only to wait for a full day? That’s definitely not starting the conversation off right with a customer.

What do you think? Do you do anything like that with your customers? 

Eliminate the Friction

July 24, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

From Bryan Johnson at Braintree:

“We intuitively sort of knew what we didn’t like in customer service everywhere else: automated calling trees, slow response times, poor problem solving, etc., so we made sure there was as little friction as possible between the customer contacting us and actually getting their problem solved.”

So simple yet many companies don’t get it. Don’t try to automate everything in the quest for providing better support. Don’t do things just because it’s easier on you while putting more burden on the customer. Instead, focus on eliminating the friction between a customer and you connecting. Everything else is secondary.

The Apple Developer Website Hack

July 23, 2013 By Chase Clemons 11 Comments

From Apple:

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

I finally received this email Monday night, a full four days after Apple’s developer website went down. That feels like a long time to be leaving your customers in the dark on what’s going on. I understand they needed time to investigate but Apple left everyone in the dark on what was happening for several days.

How would you handle informing your customers in this kind of situation?

 

Phone Support Done the Right Way

July 17, 2013 By Chase Clemons 2 Comments

I’m not the biggest fan of phone support but I totally get that sometimes it’s needed. If I get to my Airbnb spot and no one’s home, I want to be able to call customer support right away instead of waiting on an email. Or if my Internet is down, my ISP’s live chat won’t help at all. There are some businesses and products that need a solid phone support setup.

But what does a good phone setup look like? To do phone support right, it comes down to a few basic things.

Make it easy to find

Don’t hide your phone number beneath lots of text. When a customer needs to use it, they need to be able to find it quickly and easily.

Answer quickly

When a customer calls, you don’t want to keep them waiting. You should be able to answer every call within two rings. If you can’t, you need to bring in more people until you can get to that mark.

Have their info ready

Don’t have a customer repeat their account info multiple times. You should be able to pull up anything you need to know about them in your system quickly and easily. And don’t rely on just one piece of info to find them. They might not have their account ID handy so have a way to look up their account by some other option.

These are just a few things I know I’d want for great phone support. For you teams that do offer phone support, what other tips and tricks would you add? 

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