Learn to be a customer support pro.
For the next two weeks, I’ll be pretty much offline spending time with the family and such. You should do the same as much as you can!
At the very least, go watch some Muppet Christmas Carol – the best Christmas movie ever.
Enjoy your holidays and I’ll see you on the flip side!
From Brennan Dunn:
When most of us think of customer support, we think something bad happened. The app broke or I can’t figure something out. But I think supporting customers is much more than just helping them overcome roadblocks. Supporting means helping their business succeed as a result of you being in the picture. This can mean offering your customers helpful resources that don’t describe the how’s, but the why’s.
Most support teams are always in reactive mode. Something breaks, you fix it, and the customer continues on with using your app. But amazing customer support can be so much more than that. I love this from Brennan:
“Supporting means helping their business succeed as a result of you being in the picture. “
This is our final show of the year! We’ll be on a holiday hiatus for the next two weeks to give us some time to relax and refresh.
For the last show of the season, we look at how to keep the support role from getting boring. If you do the same thing over and over every day, it’s easy to get bored and burnt out. We talk about ways to recognize and prevent that.
From Andrew Spittle:
From documentation to personal experiences, support turns a faceless product into a product that these people made for me.
Your goal is to craft joy. Out of a frustrating customer experience your team will create a memory of happiness, helpfulness, and appreciation. Instead of a cost center your support team becomes a department which creates and educates loyal customers. Where once resided a team just answering questions now lives the frontlines for creating your tribe of happy, repeat, and profitable customers.
Beautiful way to look at the support pro’s job.
This week, we’re talking goals. With the end of the year approaching, you’re probably thinking about next year and the goals you want to set for yourself and your team. But what are some good goals for support pros? What kind of areas should you be looking into for improvement? Lucky for us, we’ve got two gents ready to tackle the topic.
From Gregory Ciotti at Help Scout:
Knowledge base content should be easy to read; it is meant to be quickly browsed so users can identify the problem, read the solution, and fix the issue.
It’s important that you don’t intimidate users with a wall of text—if things aren’t easy to find, they’ll instead contact support, creating a ticket where a problem could have been solved by the user.
The entire article is a must-read for setting up your help site articles. But this one stood out to me. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the answer on the page – the customer must be able to find it quickly and easily. If they can’t, they’ll just skip over the help article and go straight for your support pros.
Design your support pages as carefully and clearly as you design your app.
On this episode, we’re talking about the ways you can say thanks to your customers.
The holidays are here, which means it’s a great time to show your customers how much you love them for using your product. It’s something that’s easy to do with you have a few dozen customers. But when you’re at the millions of customers scale and still running a small team, it can be a challenge. But thankfully our panel is up for the challenge!