After releasing my Brief Guide to a Better Email, I got a lot of questions about how to use snippet apps and the best way to set them up. So let’s dive in to some nuts and bolts of how I use my snippet app.

Personally, I use TextExpander. It’s easy to use and really affordable. TextExpander allows you to create “Snippets”, which are bits of text you can insert into an email with only a few keystrokes. It’s easy to organize snippets into folders and extend them for all sorts of use cases.

Your snippets aren’t locked into your support app so you can always take them with you if you change. Plus, each person on your support team can customize them to their tone and writing style. You can go with other apps if you’d like but for this one, we’ll be focusing on Text Expander.

[Read more…]

You’ve got a good problem. Your product is a hit and customer growth is skyrocketing. You’re getting new customers every day trying out your app, your service, and whatever you’re selling. But more customers means more questions from customers. It’s a good problem but one that you need to solve.

How do you scale customer support?

It’s a question that many teams out there struggle with. To make it a little easier, let’s take a look at the three big areas you’ll need to focus on as you start scaling up your customer support.

1) Setting up a solid help site.
2) Mastering specific support channels.
3) Bringing in more people.

As you grow, these are the ares that you’ll want to look at to make sure you’re scaling an awesome customer support experience.

[Read more…]

Fun question to start the week off. What’s your perfect work spot?

Maybe it’s a bustling coffee shop? Or a nice, quiet hammock? There’s always the kitchen table with others on your team too.

My perfect work spot is my backyard deck. It’s nicely shaded so it stays cool most of the time. Throw in a nice breeze with the mockingbirds singing and it’s a wonderful place.

Your turn. If you could work from any place in the world, where would it be?

From the Endurance International Group (they own bluehost, HostGator, HostMonster and JustHost):

The resources of our entire company are focused on the recovery, including our executive team, which is leading these efforts from our command center in Burlington, MA. The team will issue updates at enduranceresponse.com every 30  minutes until all customer services are restored. Following the restoration of services, Endurance will conduct a thorough review of this incident.

You probably recognize the bluehost and HostGator names from this company. They’re having a really rough day with most of their customer sites down.

Kudos to them for setting up a centralized site to direct all customers to for status updates. And their promises of a response every 30 minutes have been kept. The post updates have happened regularly at 3:30pm, 4:00pm, and 4:30pm Eastern Time.

The only downside has been the content of the updates. They feel stiff and almost like really short press releases.

We are working to reboot the core switches.

As a customer, I’d be wondering what that means. It sounds important so must mean that they’re doing something, right?

We apologize for any delays you may be experiencing as well as any disruptions to your business.

Seems pretty widespread so I don’t think “may be experiencing” fits. And “we apologize” still sounds too stiff.

Overall, about what I’d expect from a big company so far. Hopefully their review will be written with more of an eye towards the customer.

What do you think of their responses so far? 

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? 

You’ve heard of an air traffic controller, right? They’re the person that keeps all those airplanes in the sky flowing smoothly.

When your team is small, you’ll want to have someone who helps do the same thing for your support emails. They’ll be something like an email traffic controller.

In the morning, you’ll have a ton of emails in your support inbox from overnight. Some are going to need answers right away while others can wait for a moment. Things like someone being locked out of their account is way more important than someone with an idea they want to share.

Have someone who can triage your inbox and take care of the higher priority ones. It can be something as simple as assigning a label to them or putting those emails in their own queue. If you’ve got people on your team that specialize in certain emails, the same person can pass out emails to specific people. That way, if you have a billing person, the billing question gets sent over to them.

Just like an air traffic controller helps flights flow smoothly, your email controller can make sure those important emails get taken care of first.

You probably have a good handle on what individual customers think about your product just from the support emails you answer. But support cases are a tough place to get a general sense of what all of your customers are thinking. For that, you’ll want to use some sort of survey.

Here’s a few simple things to keep in mind as your crafting your survey so it’ll actually work.

1) Keep them short.

Your survey should be drop dead simple because happy people usually don’t answer long ones.  The only time I’ve ever taken more than 5 minutes to fill out a survey is when my Internet company screwed me over.

2) Don’t use the word “satisfaction”.

When I’m in a hurry and want to buy a product at the cheapest price, I head to my local Wal-Mart. It’s not a great experience by any means but since I can get that product quickly and cheaply, I’m generally satisfied with that experience. Just because I’m satisfied doesn’t mean I like it.

A better gauge is “happiness”, even though the support industry is on the verge of over-using it. Instead of asking if a customer is satisfied with you, ask if they’re happy. It’s a small wording tweak but a powerful one.

[Read more…]

When you think help desk, think HelpSpot. It’s designed to handle anything you want to throw at it. Email support, phone support, web support – you name it, it can handle it. There’s a reason why big teams like Campaign Monitor and the University of Michigan use it and trust it.

The basics

HelpSpot covers all the basics really well. Your queue is easy to organize and see what’s going on at a glance. You’ll be able to pull questions in from emails, your web portal, even your own setup using the API. As you grow, it’ll scale right along with you. Throw thousands of support tickets a day at it and watch it handle them all.

You’ll be able to set up workflows to handle the inflow of tickets. There’s triggers and automatic notifications to make sure you never miss anything. Those also come in handy for meeting any SLAs that you have with customers.

HelpSpot is for customer support what Outlook used to be for email (back when Outlook was the defacto email app). It’s the whole deal that’s able to handle any level of support that you want to provide to your customers.

[Read more…]