Learn to be a customer support pro.
I never thought I’d say this about Microsoft support but wow do they have a good idea here.
Microsoft mans its Answer Desk with Answer Techs. Get past the cheesy name and notice that you can actually pick which Answer Tech you want to work with. Photos are there to show there’s actually a human on the other end. Plus it only shows the ones there to chat with you at that moment. Pretty clever idea.
Check it out for yourself here.
What do you think? Good idea or bad one?
Imagine this. You’ve got a company meetup next week. Since your team works remotely, they’re flying in for it. Travel day arrives and you realize that all of your support team is in airports or on flights at the same time. That leaves no one taking care of your customers. Yikes!
I know you’re thinking “Chase, our team would never be in that situation.”
Maybe.
But I’ve seen it happen with lots of great teams. They didn’t pay attention to their schedules. They didn’t look at the calendar before booking a flight. They didn’t take into account an airport not having WiFi or their Internet hotspot not working.
It all comes down to one thing.
It’s as simple as that. Communicate, communicate, and communicate some more about what time you’re leaving and what time you’re arriving.
Have a central calendar with that kind of info on it. Mention in your weekly updates. Remind everyone when you start working that you’ll be leaving early that day.
There’s no such thing as too much communication, especially when it comes to making sure you’ve got enough coverage. Because if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself in a situation where your whole team is on a plane with no one watching out for your customers.
This is part of a series on apps and tools that will make your support life so much easier.
I absolutely love Text Expander. It’s easy to use and really affordable. Without it, my customers wouldn’t get replies as fast and I’d end up repeating myself so many times my head would spin.
Text Expander 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.
When I get an answer, I’m able to type a few characters and have the bulk of the email ready. From there, I go in and customize the name, add a few other things like “Go Tigers” if they’re an Auburn fan or such. When it’s ready, I send it and move on to the next ticket.
For instance, my closing line is
If you have any other questions, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help. And have an awesome Wednesday!
Chase Clemons
37signals Customer SupportPlease Note: I work T-F, 8-5PM Central Time.
I get all that from just typing “mq” with Text Expander running. All from an app that’s only $35. Pretty cool, right?
When you’re using a support app with your team, lots of people will try to push you on their special macro tool inside that support app. Don’t focus on it. Use Text Expander instead. 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 me, I’m using Text Expander.
This month marks two years since I left the wonderful world of the restaurant industry. Since restaurants played a core role in shaping how I interact with customers, I’m updating a previous article I had written about lessons I learned from my customers there.
Out of the many lessons I learned over the years, here’s my favorite ones.
Short and simple will always win. Always. The current menu at the deli has over 50 different selections you can choose from. Unless you have 15 minutes to study (and I mean study) the menu, you’ll get lost on your first visit. And don’t forget to factor in training the restaurant staff on all those choices. It’s a nightmare where things can go wrong easily.
For your dream, product, service, etc., keep it simple and clean. Too many choices overwhelm. Focus on selectivity and then making those selections the best ones possible.
This is part of a series on apps and tools that will make your support life so much easier.
Hively lets customers share their thoughts with you every step of the way. It’s kinda like Smiley, the app we use at 37signals to see what our customers are thinking after they read our email. Instead of building it from scratch like we did, you can just plug Hively into your support app and be ready to go in just a few minutes.
Every person has their own unique code that goes at the end of the emails they send out to your customers. Customers click on the link and share what they thought about the experience. Your team gets to see what the customer’s thinking, which helps deliver a better overall support experience.
Team members get ratings just like you’d expect. Hively even tracks those stats for useful analytics and leaderboards. It’s handy for seeing which of your team members is rocking it out that week.
Hively’s definitely a handy little app to have. It’s a super easy set up that you can be rocking within three minutes and will help make your team better.
I’m cool. I’m fine.
It’s so easy to get frustrated with customers when doing support. Makes you feel a bit like this guy.
That’s when you’ve got to stop and back away from the computer. Take a break. If you don’t, tempers will flare and you’ll miss something in your quest to fix their problem.
In my last job, I had a customer who was arguing with one of our team members. The customer was yelling through the phone about some missing items from their catering order. And I mean yelling – you could hear them through the phone from a few feet away.
I picked up the other phone and jumped on the same line to listen in on the conversation. I saw our team member getting frustrated because they couldn’t even get a word in edge wise. As soon as they got a break in the yelling, they calmly asked for the customer to hold for just a moment so he could double-check something.
When he put the customer on hold, I looked at him with that “What are you doing?” look. He looked up and just said, “I’ve got to take 30 seconds. Otherwise, I’m going to lose my cool and say the wrong thing.”
He picked back up the phone and before he could say anything, the customer started to apologize. Turns out the missing items were actually there. Then we found out the customer was rushing to get the catering set for her meeting so she could get to the hospital to see her dad. It was just a bad situation that could’ve been a lot worse if not for that break.
When things go south with a customer, you’ve got to step back. Take a moment before you start on that email reply back to them. Walk around the block. Throw a frisbee with your dog. Make a cup of tea.
Do something to help you refocus.
I got this review from a customer this morning:
Fast answer, short enough to read quickly, long enough to transport the information.
I love how they phrased it. My email to them was fast and just the right length to get the info to them.
That’s what your customers want. Clear, concise, and fast.
I ended up spending part of my weekend at the ER with my mom. That’s why you haven’t seen much from me these past few days. She’s fine and everything’s going to be fine but there was something that caught my attention while in the hospital.
The nurse mentioned a door-to-door time for each patient. From the moment they sign in, a clock starts that only stops once they’re discharged. Hospitals use it to make sure the ER team is running efficiently and such.
But the nurse mentioned there’s a huge risk to this approach. In the quest to make their numbers look good, they rush through tests and exams. That increases the chance of missing something important, especially if it’s the end of their shift and they’re tired already.
Keep that in mind for your email response times as well. Email support isn’t life or death like the ER but similar mindsets can happen in the push to get better numbers. Those stats are important but what’s more important is taking care of your customers. If that means spending a few extra moments with them, do it!
This is part of a series on apps and tools that will make your support life so much easier.
Gaglers focuses on just live chat. Not emails, social media, or anything .Just chat with your customers and with your team.
Gaglers has the typical SSL security and integrations with lots of other CRM / support apps out there. Transcripts of chats and reporting also show up in the app. Most of it was standard for any chat app out there.
One thing that did stand out was their single sign-on option. You can use your websites login to sign customers into the chat tool at the same time. That could come in handy for some teams.
Thankfully they make pricing super easy. Every plan comes with all the features and unlimited users. The only thing you’re paying for is how many chat conversations you have with customers and how many simultaneous users you have in the group chat. The founder route about the decision to go this route here. Starts at $9/month and runs up to $149/month.
I took it for a test run and liked how easy it was to set up. Both the customer chat and team chat are easy enough to set up. I played around with the Gtalk integration, which meant it used the chat box inside my Gmail inbox. Whenever someone started a chat on the site, it popped right up just like a chat with anyone else inside my Gmail account. Nothing weird to install and it all just worked.
This is part of a series on apps and tools that will make your support life so much easier.
Paste Vault does one thing. It gives you encrypted expiring text that you can share via secure link. And it’s something you need to be using with your customers.
When you talk with customers via email and chat, there’s going to be times that you need to communicate sensitive info. Passwords, secret URLs, login details, whatever. You could send them inside your support app but then those details live inside your app forever. You could go back and clear out those emails but that would wipe everything rather than just that sensitive bit.
Paste Vault takes care of that problem easily. When you go to the site, there’s a big text box that you’ll enter your text in. Then create a password to share with the other person and set the time expiration. And that’s it.
You’ll be given a link to send to the other person. They click on it, enter the password, and can see your text. Then the text disintegrates (sadly not Mission Impossible style but close enough).
Paste Vault is from the team over at HelpSpot and entirely open source. You can fork it on GitHub here. That way you can use the online hosted version or bring it completely in house.
Seriously, go check it out. You’re going to love how easy it is to use.