Archives for November 2013

From Seth Godin:

A $75 bottle of wine tastes better than a $14 bottle of wine. Even if you switch the wines. The promise implied in the price actually changes the way we experience the product.

Once you make a big promise, you have to work harder to keep it. Easier, it seems, to merely make tiny promises instead.

But the fact remains: Human beings have better experiences when they expect to have a better experience. To hold back on your promise is to deprive your customer of something valuable.

It’s a two-edged sword for sure. Take for instance the posting of wait times on your help page. When they’re at six hours, ten hours, or even the dreaded “within 24 hours”, customers are left with pure anxiety. Imagine having a problem and knowing you won’t get an answer for ten hours. The wait time tool sets a terrible expectation.

But when they see they’ll get an answer within five minutes, it reduces their anxiety and replaces it with a better overall support experience. Customers love seeing those low wait times for email and phone support.

Look at some of these companies that make big promises with support and keep them:

• Squarespace – 24/7 support. They’re always there when you need them.
• Buffer – Open and transparent support. When something bad happens like their recent compromise, they let you know immediately.
•  Olark – live chat for instant answers. Yeah, they’re selling a live chat tool but they back that up by using it themselves.
• 37signals – fast answers via email. You know I’d have to put our team on there since we make a big promise too. We promise fast answers during business hours and deliver. The average response time right now is two minutes.

With each of those big promises on better experiences, you’ve got to deliver. It’s worth the energy and resources you put in to pull it off. Like Godin said, “Human beings have better experiences when they expect to have a better experience.”

From David Spinks at The Community Manager:

The rest of the questions can be boiled down to this one very important question:

Can they earn the respect of the community?

That’s it.

If they can earn the respect of the community most of the other things just start to fall into place.

If you’re thinking about that community manager role like Buffer is, David’s site is a fantastic resource for you and for the CM you hire.

From Gregory Ciotti at Help Scout:

In other words, blaming external situations (even if true) often created a sense that the company was unable to fix their own problems or were simply looking for an “out.”

Conversely, owning up to poor performance or a specific shortcoming instilled the sense that the company had a tight grip on the reins and were more likely to rebound from the situation since they had already identified the problem and accepted responsibility.

Gregory lays out the right and wrong way to handle a company crisis. Go read it and then start putting together notes for your team on how to handle one when (not if) it happens to you.

From Geoffrey James:

There are five words that every customer hates with a passion: “That is not my responsibility.”

From inside your company, you know which person and group has responsibility for various aspects of your business. Therefore, if a coworker comes to you with a problem that’s not in your bailiwick, you can send that coworker elsewhere.

The customer does NOT see your company that way.  The customer doesn’t care a rat’s rear-end how your company is organized.  All the customer sees is a person–you–who represents your entire company.

“Not my responsibility” is a phrase guaranteed to put you at odds with the customer. It instantly moves the conversation from you and the customer versus the problem to you versus the customer.

Even if it’s not your department, your area, your whatever… help the customer. If you don’t, they won’t be your customer for long.

From Evan at ZOZI:

Although I wouldn’t call this entirely scientific, it’s my conclusion that the “pending” status and process doesn’t actually benefit our users. Customers who don’t respond, won’t respond. Instead, it wastes agent time and may annoy the customer.

Awesome to see Evan putting this practice through a test. Personally, I’ve never been a fan setting a “pending” status for cases where I’m waiting on a customer to respond. I use it for cases where I need to contact the customer in the next few days. But if I’m waiting to hear back from a customer, I go ahead and use the “closed” or “resolved” option for them.

Nice informal testing Evan!