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Archives for September 2013

The Customer Support Weekend Roundup #22

September 29, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

weekend-roundup-new

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. So I round them all up for your reading pleasure here.

If you’ve got any articles or links that I’ve missed, make sure to let me know in the comments.

Care

Evan’s last article at UserVoice is a great reminder for everyone working with customers.

Customer Service is a Two Way Street

“What we often forget, however, is that we, as customers, also shoulder some responsibility in the service that we receive. Customers themselves play a very important role in the customer service process, but this role often goes overlooked.”

Best practices: Developing content for your knowledge base

Jennifer Rowe looks at the best practices for creating your help docs.

How Fab.com Dispelled My Hate for Daily Deals with Low-Effort Customer Service

Holly Aker from Software Advice pass this particular one on to me. It’s an interview Fab.com’s Senior Vice President of Global Communications, Deborah Roth, to find out how Fab.com uses low-effort customer service to keep their customers coming back.

Did I miss one from this week? Leave a link to it in the comments or get in touch with me here. I’ll include it in next week’s support roundup!

An Interview with Jim Sadusky

September 27, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

Meet Jim. He’s an American expat living in Australia working at Red Guava. But I’ll let him tell you more about himself rather than me going on and on in the intro.

Tell us a little about yourself.

My Name is Jim, and I’m a husband and soon-to-be father, and an American ex-pat living in Australia. I’m part of the awesome team over at Red Guava  – the company behind Cliniko.

Unofficially my title is “Vampire Hunter”, but officially we don’t have job titles, so really everyone wears whatever hat is needed at the time.  I do spend most of my day offering support to our wonderful customers, whether it’s over the phone, Skype, email, or anything else.

How did you get into customer support?

I’ve been doing support in one form or fashion since I was in high school, working the service counter at a local supermarket.  I’ve also always had a huge fascination with software, so when Joel approached me to be Cliniko’s first “Support person”, I discovered a way to blend my two passions.

[Read more…]

Amazon’s New Mayday Support

September 25, 2013 By Chase Clemons 6 Comments

From Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HDX:

Live Support with Mayday
NEW—Simply tap the “Mayday” button to be connected for free to an Amazon expert who can co-pilot you through any feature by drawing on your screen, walking you through how to do something yourself, or doing it for you—whatever works best. Mayday is available 24×7, 365 days a year, and it’s free. Throughout the process, you will be able to see your Amazon Tech advisor live on your screen, but they won’t see you. 15 seconds or less is the Mayday response time goal.

From the customer support side, this is simple awesome. It’s like having a dedicated Amazon expert ready to help you if you run into any trouble. With the response time of 15 seconds or less, it’s a no-brainer for customers to use that channel to get help.

What’s your thoughts on the new Mayday button?

TextExpander Advanced Snippets

September 24, 2013 By Chase Clemons 4 Comments

macbook-keyboard

Anyone that writes as many emails as the typical customer support pro should have a few advanced TextExpander tricks up their sleeve. If you haven’t read my intro article about text snippets, make sure to read over it first. For this one, we’re going to look at a few advanced snippets to help you be even faster and more efficient with your email replies.

Use snippets as much as you can.

Whenever I see someone starting with text snippets, the biggest mistake they make is to not use it enough. They’ll use it for longer paragraphs or such but rarely do they see the power in very short or simple phrases. For me, I use snippets for any phrase that I continually repeat.

For instance, when I don’t have a customer’s name, I use the snippet “`ht” to trigger “Hey there!”. I use snippets even down to days of the week and months. Instead of typing out September, just put that as a snippet with “xm9”. Every few seconds you save adds up.

Grabbing from the clipboard.

I use my copy tool a ton to move info from one program to another or even from one place on the page to another. For instance, you probably have the customer’s name on their incoming ticket. Here’s why the TextExpander clipboard snippet comes in handy.

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You are the Company

September 23, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

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.” – Unknown

The Customer Support Weekend Roundup #21

September 22, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

weekend-roundup-new

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. So I round them all up for your reading pleasure here.

If you’ve got any articles or links that I’ve missed, make sure to let me know in the comments.

Mailgun’s explanation to customers about their outage

This one’s a masterclass in how to properly explain outages to customers. Go read it now and make your notes so you can have something ready for your next outage!

Understanding human psychology

“You have listened to your customer. You’ve communicated clearly with them. You’ve gone a step further and empathized with them. You’re well on your way to providing great customer service. Now it’s time to get inside your customer’s head. Don’t rely on fixing problems as they happen. Anticipate their needs and try to identify where they will encounter trouble before they do.”

Perils of making customers pay for support

Freshdesk gives us a solid explanation why customers paying for support just doesn’t appeal to them.

A story about the benefits of proactive customer service

A great story on how being proactive can make customers love you.

How to empower your customer service reps, Richard Branson style

Jamie Anderson from Software Advice sent me a great article that I just had to include in this week’s roundup. Start using these tips to really empower your team!

Reminder – The live Support Hangout is skipping this week. Our support pros will be back Monday September 30th at 5:30pm Central / 6:30pm Eastern.

Did I miss one from this week? Leave a link to it in the comments or get in touch with me here. I’ll include it in next week’s support roundup!

An Awesome Partner in Snappy

September 20, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

snappy logo

Swift collaborative email support.

From our friends at UserScape comes a great new customer support app. Most customer support apps have some kind of learning curve as you try to figure it out. With Snappy, their new interface is drop dead easy to use and lets you focus on what matters most – your customers.

Plus, they’ve got two great new tools.  The “Team Wall” is the perfect place to share news, wins, and other important info all without ever leaving your app. Then there’s a really powerful tool called “Triggers”. It’ll let you automate your workflow a bit to make sure you don’t miss an email. 

I love having Snappy as a partner and I think you’ll love having them as your support tool. They’ve got a great 30 day entirely free trial so go check them out here.

Support Hangout Episode #15

September 19, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

This week we’re talking about the pros/cons of offering customers premium/priority support. First, let’s narrow in on what we mean by premium support. This is where the customer pays for a higher plan or a separate package add-on to get them faster response times or special support channels. So a customer might pay for a business level plan and get phone support along with email support while other customers not on that plan just get email support.

All that and more from the best team in customer support on this episode of the live Support Hangout!

Programming note: There’s no live show this Monday, September 23.

[Read more…]

Stop Ignoring Customers

September 17, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

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I’ve never quite understood companies that ignore their customers when they complain online. If a customer is standing physically in front of you and complaining, you’re basically required to at least talk with them. But when it comes to customers complaining about you via Facebook, Twitter, and other online channels., lots of companies just ignore them. In 2011, 79 percent of customers who shared complaints about poor customer experience online were ignored. And why? Because the squeaky wheel gets ignored since it’s easy to do so, especially online.

You can’t ignore customers and get away with it.

The 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report gives us two huge reasons to not ignore customers:

  • 89 percent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.
  • 50 percent of consumers give a brand only one week to respond to a question before they stop doing business with them.

You get one week to respond. After that, your customers will leave and find someone who will listen to them.

There’s power of responding.

One of the great things about customer is they just want to be heard. You probably won’t be able to fix every single problem they have. And they’re okay with that! They just want a response. From the same study:

  • When customers received a response to their complaint, 46% were pleased.
  • 22% actually posted a positive comment about the company or brand afterwards.

A customer makes a complaint, the company contacts them, and almost half are happy just from getting a response.

Keep one eye everywhere.

One of the things I recommend in Support Kit is watching different channels even if you don’t actively participate there. It’s okay to only focus on a few distinct channels to talk with customers. But you need to be paying attention and managing expectations in channels that your customers are trying to talk to you in.

 A brand not responding on Twitter is like hanging up the phone on customers. With millions watching.” – Dave Kerpen

Anywhere your customers are, you need to be watching and listening. Even if you don’t provide full support via Twitter, you need to watch for customers that reach out to you there. It’s fine to redirect them by saying, “Hey, can you email us with that question?” It’s not fine to totally ignore them when they’re asking for help or complaining.

But how do keep one eye everywhere? It’s not like you’ve got a magical piece of technology that can filter for keywords and…. hey – that could work.

  1. Set up a Google Alert. It’s a quick way to watch for mentions on the web about your company name, product name, and other keywords.
  2. Watch Twitter searches. You’ll often find customers talking to you through their Tweets as well as linking to other sites where you’re mentioned.
  3. Buy a monitoring tool. Something like Mention gives you real-time alerts for your keywords on the web, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

What other ways do you keep up with people talking about your company online?

The Customer Support Weekend Roundup #20

September 15, 2013 By Chase Clemons Leave a Comment

weekend-roundup-new

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. So I round them all up for your reading pleasure here.

If you’ve got any articles or links that I’ve missed, make sure to let me know in the comments.

  • Yoda, our support team’s powerful ally
  • Beyond the reboot: being a better tech
  • How the support team improves the product
  • How we reply to 52% of support emails in an hour

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

Did I miss one from this week? Leave a link to it in the comments or get in touch with me here. I’ll include it in next week’s support roundup!

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