Archives for July 2013

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.

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.

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.