Learn to be a customer support pro.
From Scott Brown, Director, Amazon Customer Service:
75% of customer contacts for Fire HDX now come via the Mayday button. Even as the Mayday button has grown to become the most popular way for customers to ask questions, the team’s been able to beat the response time goal of 15 seconds or less—our average is just 9.75 seconds.”
That’s crazy awesome.
When CEOs actively spend time supporting customers, it gives them a reality check. We want to show executives around the world how much of a difference they could make in improving their business if they spent just one day or an hour doing support.
As a fan of the everyone on support idea, I love seeing that idea extend all the way up to the CEO. It’ll be great to see the posts from CEOs that participate.
Jeff Bezos on Amazon’s Mayday tool:
A few of the Maydays have been amusing. Mayday Tech Advisors have received 35 marriage proposals from customers. 475 customers have asked to talk to Amy, our Mayday television personality. 109 Maydays have been customers asking for assistance with ordering a pizza. By a slim margin, Pizza Hut wins customer preference over Domino’s. There are 44 instances where the Mayday Tech Advisor has sung Happy Birthday to the customer. Mayday Tech Advisors have been serenaded by customers 648 times. And 3 customers have asked for a bedtime story. Pretty cool.
It’s cool to see that the Mayday reps are having fun with these kinds of questions. And their 9 second response time on Christmas day is pretty amazing.
From Alex Turnbull at Groove:
When disaster strikes, don’t leave your customers in the dark. Outages can happen to anyone (and they regularly do), but respecting your customers’ trust in you and keeping them in the know is critical. Get on Twitter. Get on email. Get wherever your customers are. Be communicative, be honest, be understanding, and be apologetic.
Alex lays out everything that happened with Groove’s 15 hour downtime. It’s honest, detailed, and full of great takeaways to think about for when it happens to your team.
From Carolyn at Buffer:
One of my favorite “happiness hacks” has been to attempt to remove the word “actually” from my vocabulary. This has been remarkably hard to do, and I still have to struggle not to let it past my lips or fingers. At Buffer, we have found that there is a small band of words that takes away from your message, and “actually” is their leader.
A perfect example of why we should choose our words carefully.
From Bart Lorang at FullContact:
It’s not primarily about whether the solution I provided works or not, it’s how you make the customer feel. It’s about letting them know that you’re there to help them through whatever problem they’re having.
I love seeing what takeaways non-support people have after working a support shift. Bart has a lot of great points so make sure to check out the full article.
From Seth Godin:
Sure, you need someone in charge of customer service. But you also need someone in charge of service design. Someone responsible for fixing what’s broken, not merely apologizing for it again and again.
You’ve put a lot of time and resources into making good self-service help docs for your customers. But it’s all in vain if the docs aren’t designed well.
The benefits were immediate. Within the first few weeks we were able to observe some inefficiencies in queue management and improve continuity of care for people seeking help. We identified some things we should start doing, and just as importantly some things we should stop doing. Unexpectedly, it seems to have given additional focus to the engineering team because we no longer have engineers “on call” for escalated tickets.
It’s great to see more companies giving whole company support a try. It’s even better that they publish articles to let us know how that went so we can learn from it.
We’re also investing heavily in customer service. Not everyone would necessarily consider that a feature, but the best feature of a product should really be the customer service. Right now our response time by email is under two minutes, which is unheard of.
This is why I love the team I work with.
I can’t blame the support rep from India for suggesting I pirate their software. I cannot blame the sales rep for pushing me to upgrade, and ignoring the root of my problem. They’re all pieces of the puzzle, and are all informed of only what they need to know. But to truly make an impact, you have to bring a human element back into the game. Most people genuinely want to help. When their hands are tied, they aren’t acting human any more. You have to allow your employees some sort of freedom to help customers in need, Adobe. You’re making it difficult for your employees to succeed, and for your customers to be humbled by your support.
That’s the missing piece for every big company support team I’ve dealt with. Even when the support rep wants to help, company policy limits what they can do.
The solution? Don’t burden your team with a ton of policies. Hire great people and then trust them to help your customers.
Don’t think a big company can do this? Here’s proof that big companies can – “Lessons from Southwest Airlines“.