Support Ops

Learn to be a customer support pro.

#52 – Customer Support as a Career

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This week, we’re talking about staying in customer support as a career. Most people tend to think of it as just another job – something to hold them over until they can really get their career going.

But could you have a career in customer support?

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From Phil:

The mentality that you can’t make a career in support – is from the same era as when companies saw customer support as an unwanted but necessary expense.

That is no longer the case. Companies now see the value in providing great customer support and how it is ESSENTIAL. As such they are hiring and compensating more accordingly. At our company we start our support team’s salaries at the upper end of the market range. That’s because we want to attract amazing people who are passionate about customer service. This is the face of your business. You expect big things from them, so it’s important you value them as such.

If you aren’t making it a viable option for your support teams to have a lasting career in support – you aren’t likely going to build world-class team that you want.

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#51 – Is it ever okay to fire a customer?

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We’ve all experienced exceptionally rough customers. When a customer is continually abusive or really high-maintenance, most teams look at some sort of way to drop that person as a customer.

Is it ever okay to fire a customer?

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From Wren:

Under the right circumstances, it’s absolutely worth while to fire a customer. Our team was hearing repeatedly from a woman who was unhappy with our product and incredibly rude to any phone support she worked with. If you reach a point with a person where they will never be happy with the product, it’s smart to let them go. In this case, it made our support reps feel validated and cared for to know that negative treatment like that wouldn’t be tolerated and the customer was happier in the end with a new product. We gave her a free month of support and usage of our system to give her time to find a new system and were happy to help with any info transfer she needed. Putting the needs of the customer first sometimes means pushing them towards a different product.

From Chris:

Absolutely, it’s ok to fire a customer. Seth Godin has a dynamite post about this.

Because if you want everybody to like you, nobody does

The firing might rival that of a middle school breakup, but hey, let it happen.

From Mariah:

The hours and resources it will take to change a users opinion and calm them down isn’t worth it to us due to the adverse effect the long-drawn-out conversation has on our team mentality. In the early days of RK Support, we spent a lot of time working with angry users to explain bugs and offer extended assistance until the issue was resolved, to which we were lucky to receive a mere, “thanks.” Catering to abusive users in a way condone’s their behavior, which is bad for all future support interactions with RunKeeper or elsewhere. We found the constant harassment on the end-user’s side would take a huge toll on our support agents. There’s only so much sass and name-calling one agent can take. Actually instead of “agent” I should be saying “person.” It seems a lot of the time users forget we are people too and we do empathize with their situation. Not sure what’s up with that, so we beat on.

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#50 – Saying “No” to Customers

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This week, we’re talking about saying “no” to a customer. Ben Vance from Emma wrote in with a great question:

Something I’ve been thinking about recently that I’d love to hear your thoughts on: is it ever OK to say “no” to a customer? I know we all have tricks and tips on ways to say it without saying it, but do you think that there are ever support situations where the word “no” is really the word for the job?”

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#49 – Does Language Matter?

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This week’s show is all about language. Chris Gallo sent in a great question last week – one that we’re devoting a full episode to.

Buffer calls their support pros “happiness heroes”. Wistia calls them “champions”. Does it matter?

Then there’s your internal lingo. Some of us refer to support issues as tickets and other teams call them cases. Do you call the people that pay for your product – customers, clients, or users?

All that to lead to the main question – Does language matter or is it just semantics?

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#48 – Is Email Still the Best Support Channel?

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This week’s show is all about support channels. With companies like Automattic, Buffer, and even GoDaddy moving towards live chat over email, it’s a good time to take a look at that good old email channel.

GoDaddy rep Nick Fuller explained that email consistently finished last as far as their customers’ preferred method of help.

“After reviewing customer behavior and satisfaction scores we decided we could better serve people in ways they were telling us work better for them.

Customers love the ‘real time’ support experience. Email is not instantaneous and in fact many in the industry are putting an end to their email service as well because fewer than half of tech customers believe their problem can be solved by email – it’s sort of going the way of the cassette tape.”

So is email support going the way of the dinosaur?

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#47 – Scaling Support at Buffer

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This week, we’re talking about Carolyn’s fantastic article on why Buffer doesn’t scale support. We also talk about support utopias and how to get your product lead to listen.

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#46 – Automated vs Manual

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This week, we’re looking at a question that Jeff and I go back and forth on a lot. What can you automate for customers and what should you keep more manual / high-touch experiences?

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#45 – Extreme Niceness

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This week, we’re talking about extreme niceness. You know, the support reps that say things like “Your patience on this is amazing” or “Do you think you’d be up for…. (clearing your cookies, sending an email, etc.)”. Has the pendulum swung so far away from corporate speak that it’s reached the too nice side? 

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#44 — Empower Your Team Part Two

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This week, we’re talking more about what it means to empower your support team. We’re looking at what they should focus on besides support and how we help them grow their other skills.

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#43 – Support with Social Tools

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This week’s hangout is all about using social media tools with your customers. Using tools like Twitter and Facebook are a two-edged sword. When you get it right, people like to let others know you got it right. But when you get it wrong, they make sure to let their followers know about that too.

More than one million people view tweets about customer service ever week. Just one bad interaction can wipe out a slew of good ones. So let’s talk about ways that you can use social media to make your customers happy every time.

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If you’ve got a question for us or an idea for a future episode, send us a message here. And if you enjoyed the show, show us some love by giving us a review in iTunes.