Presented at Denver Startup Week - 2014 http://www.denverstartupweek.org/schedule/400-how-to-support-your-customers-painlessly-for-you-and-them A good experience can win you incredibly loyal customers. Your awesome product is the biggest part of that, but helping people find the answers they need, managing feedback and responding to issues well, is vital. Every customer contact can provide you with great information, and finding out what people are looking for can be an invaluable guide for product decisions. But all those conversations can get overwhelming, especially for small teams. To get gain over pain, we'll run through straightforward, scalable ways to look after and learn from your customers, without it becoming a black hole of effort. So who is this "we"? Anyone who's startup either: - Hasn't tackled providing support yet - Would like a few tips for making support easier - Wants to hear how good support gives back, in all kinds of ways and Joanne Webb who looks after Support & QA for the Tracker team at Pivotal Labs.

1. How to Support Your
Customers Painlessly
(For You and Them)
Straightforward, scalable ways
to look after and learn from
your customers, without it
becoming a black hole of effort.
JOANNE WEBB
Head of QA + Customer Support
jwebb@pivotal.io
@curojo

2. How To Support Your Customers…
TYPES OF SUPPORT
TOOLS FOR SUPPORT
WHO DOES SUPPORT
LEARNING FROM SUPPORT
Q & A

3. TYPES OF
SUPPORT

4. Getting in touch
Humans help your customer:
• Email
• support@…
• Form
• Feedback link or widget
• Forums
• Chat
• Twitter
• Phone

5. Self-serve
Your customer helps themselves:
• Knowledge Base
• FAQ
• Tutorials
• In-context help
• Tooltips
• Videos

6. TOOLS
FOR
SUPPORT

7. Are you down?
A status page makes it
easy for customers to
check if there’s a
general issue
Have a visible link to
wherever you post
system health info
Differentiate between
maintenance and
unplanned outages

8. Keeping on top of requests
Ticketing systems
• Automatic reply - Set
expectations clearly, e.g.
typical response time, support
hours & where to self-help
Triage
• Help stuck customers 1st
Beta feedback
• Have a separate channel

9. Choosing or building your main support tool
Goals
• Single solution for Customer Support
tickets, KB, Forum for public questions &
ideas voting
• Manageable per agent cost
Help Desk features you'd expect:
• Agent collision avoidance, autosave, can
submit private tickets, can check status of
ticket, email automations, templates, tags
Other desirable features
• Sandbox
• Easy to find answers (ideal Search across
KB, FAQ, forum, blog, for users)
• Encourage self-help before submitting
tickets and/or publicly requesting features,
e.g. Autosuggest
• Easy for customer support people to keep
track of and reply to tickets
• Can suggest features/ideas & vote on them
• Can use same login as they use for your
product to get help or suggest features
• Able to give company announcements
• Easily sharable custom reports/metrics
• Gather customer satisfaction stats/feedback
without being spammy
• Easy content management (for FAQ and
how-to articles. templates, etc.)
• Private how to use notes on templates
• Data Export
• Can merge topics & tickets, like duplicate
questions or feature requests
• Can open closed tickets or add tags to them
• Can easily turn a ticket answer into KB item
• Can turn forum post into ticket
• They have good support/are responsive

10. The dark side of templates
Use canned responses with care
Always customize / personalize a
reply
Too easy to
• come across as impersonal
• seem like you haven’t listened
• miss placeholders
Hi Smith, Steve,
!
We’re beyond thrilled you’re
interested in purchasing our
product for
<COMPANY_NAME>.
!
You can find our pricing here
http://fees.superthingy.com
!
Don’t hesitate to get in touch
with any questions.
!
Have a beautiful day!
!
-- agent

11. Making templates work
Time-savers
• Great for standard
troubleshooting steps
• Encourages consistency
!
Red flags
• Using same one over and
over? Fix the cause so you
can delete it
Hello Chris,
!
I’m sorry you’re having problems. I’m wondering
if some combination of your browser cache,
browser and/or browser extensions might be
causing them. Here are a few things to try:
!
• "Force" reload the page instead of a normal
reload/restart of your browser (e.g., press
Control-R or Command-R).
• Try clearing your browser's cache.
!
• If you are still seeing the problem, please
write back with answers to the following:
• What OS/Browser/Browser Version do you
use (and is the behavior any different in
another browser)?
• What browser extensions/add-ons are you
running and does the behavior disappear if
you disable the extensions/add-ons
• Do you or anyone else see the problem on a
different machine in your location?
!
Thanks and look forward to hearing from you,
-- Joanne

12. Admin
Financial/credit card
processing
Diagnostic
Analytics
App logs
Email system logs
Other Tools

13. Customer data import/
export inquiries
Feature requests
Security questions
Refunds
Customer surveys
Have official stance / policies
Repeat customers
Saying goodbye
Be consistent, kind and fair
Be ready for …

14. WHO DOES
SUPPORT

15. Who should help with support
Everyone!
But it helps to have one or more dedicated team members

16. Empathy
Compassion
Patience
Ability to rise above &
not take things
personally
Professional, but human
Excellent communication
skills
Troubleshooting talent
Psychic powers!
The right stuff

17. The extra mile…
If you possibly can, try to go above and
beyond
Even small touches tell the customer you
have personal investment in helping them
If you have to say “no”, offer workarounds
Although not exactly what they wanted,
being offered an alternative is appreciated

18. Measure your product, not your people
Customer satisfaction ratings
• Even when they’re happy with the person who
helped them, people tend to rate the product
rather than the person
• Someone frustrated that the feature they wanted
isn’t available will give a low rating
Read tickets, they tell you all you need to know
Quality of answers over quantity, so they’re not
rushed
Fewer email exchanges are better for your
customer & for you
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19. LEARNING
FROM SUPPORT

20. Candid Feedback
The real measure of your product’s quality
Free domain knowledge
Real use cases
Helps you prioritize issues and features

21. In a nutshell…
Treat your team, tools how you help your customers
as a vitally important part of your product
Make easy for customers to self help
Use templates wisely
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes
Leap on the reasons people contact you fix them -
most frequently reported first
If you can delight someone - do it!

22. Q A…
Over to you…
!
!
!
!
!
Get in touch
jwebb@pivotal.io
@curojo
?

23. Thank You