1. All of a sudden ...
no luck!?
Things we have learned while supporting Perch.
Industry Conference, April 2013
Thursday, 2 May 13

2. Thursday, 2 May 13

3. Thursday, 2 May 13

4. Thursday, 2 May 13

5. WOW!
No More Clients.
Thursday, 2 May 13

6. HALP!!
All those customers.
Thursday, 2 May 13

7. In business you get what you
want by giving other people
what they want.
Alice MacDougall
Thursday, 2 May 13

8. http://xkcd.com/627/
Thursday, 2 May 13

9. Most of your competition spend their
days looking forward to those rare
moments when everything goes right.
Imagine how much leverage you have if
you spend your time maximizing
those common moments
when it doesn’t.
Seth Godin
Thursday, 2 May 13

10. Value of amazing
customer support.
Thursday, 2 May 13

11. People talk about
the help they get
(or don’t get)
Thursday, 2 May 13

12. Thursday, 2 May 13

13. Thursday, 2 May 13

14. One customer well taken care
of could be more valuable
than $10,000 worth of
advertising.
Jim Rohn
Thursday, 2 May 13

15. A commercial
product in a
world of free.
Thursday, 2 May 13

16. Support is something
people pay for.
Thursday, 2 May 13

17. Customer service is the new
marketing.
Derek Sivers
Thursday, 2 May 13

18. Email is hard to scale.
Thursday, 2 May 13

19. Even if you are a
support team of 1.
Create a system that
can scale.
Thursday, 2 May 13

20. “Canned” responses
Thursday, 2 May 13

21. Collecting data on
support helps you
plan for
growth.
Thursday, 2 May 13

22. http://helpspot.com
Thursday, 2 May 13

23. Thursday, 2 May 13

24. Thursday, 2 May 13

25. Thursday, 2 May 13

26. http://zendesk.com
Thursday, 2 May 13

27. Assess solutions based
on the type of
support you need and
want to offer.
Thursday, 2 May 13

28. https://twitter.com/TMobileUKhelp
Thursday, 2 May 13

29. https://twitter.com/grabaperch/status/322331407991062528
Thursday, 2 May 13

30. Twitter is not good
for in-depth support.
But it doesn’t hurt to
be helpful.
Thursday, 2 May 13

31. If you make customers unhappy in the
physical world, they might each tell 6
friends. If you make customers unhappy
on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000
friends.
Jeff Bezos
Thursday, 2 May 13

32. Customers are human and
humans can view situations in
unexpected ways.
Marilyn Suttle
Thursday, 2 May 13

33. Statistics suggest that when customers
complain, business owners and
managers ought to get excited
about it. The complaining customer
represents a huge opportunity
for more business.
Zig Ziglar
Thursday, 2 May 13

34. Is the customer
ALWAYS right?
Thursday, 2 May 13

35. I get support tickets that are
nothing short of extortion
Andrey Butov - http://bootstrapped.fm
Thursday, 2 May 13

36. The trouble with
feature requests.
Thursday, 2 May 13

37. The more you engage with
customers the clearer things
become and the easier it is to
determine what you
should be doing.
John Russell, President, formerV.P., Harley Davidson
Thursday, 2 May 13

38. Protect the core use
case of your product.
Thursday, 2 May 13

39. Thursday, 2 May 13

40. Thursday, 2 May 13

41. http://docs.grabaperch.com/docs/developers/creating-regions/
Thursday, 2 May 13

42. Thursday, 2 May 13

43. You can’t please
everyone.
Thursday, 2 May 13

44. Add features that
benefit the majority,
not a noisy minority.
Thursday, 2 May 13

45. Customer support
can be your best
market research.
Thursday, 2 May 13

46. Know what your customers
want most and what your
company does best. Focus on
where those two meet.
Kevin Stirtz
Thursday, 2 May 13

47. Building your website
- one ticket at a time
Thursday, 2 May 13

48. customers who have contacted support
26%
Thursday, 2 May 13

49. have raised more than one ticket
10%
Thursday, 2 May 13

50. of requests are from the same 50 people
25%
Thursday, 2 May 13

51. of requests are from the same 20 people
15%
Thursday, 2 May 13

52. of requests are from the same 10 people
10%
Thursday, 2 May 13

53. of requests are from 1 customer
2%
Thursday, 2 May 13

54. 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Thursday, 2 May 13

55. Credit: Flickr user uair01
Thursday, 2 May 13

56. Drew and the
“mental model”.
Thursday, 2 May 13

57. When we enlarge our view of
the world, we deepen our
understanding of our own
lives.
Yo-Yo Ma
Thursday, 2 May 13

58. With a digital
product you are
an export business
from day 1.
Thursday, 2 May 13

59. Design support out
of your product.
Thursday, 2 May 13

60. Thursday, 2 May 13

61. Thursday, 2 May 13

62. Thursday, 2 May 13

63. Provide a variety
of help material,
different levels &
formats.
Thursday, 2 May 13

64. Predicting busy
support days.
Thursday, 2 May 13

65. Jun Aug Oct Dec Feb Apr Jun Aug Oct Dec Feb
Requests
Thursday, 2 May 13

66. Jun Aug Oct Dec Feb Apr Jun Aug Oct Dec Feb
Requests Licenses
Thursday, 2 May 13

67. The “end client”
problem.
Thursday, 2 May 13

68. Clients can lose
contact with their
designer for all
kinds of reasons.
Thursday, 2 May 13

69. Who owns the
license for third
party software?
Thursday, 2 May 13

70. Who supports the
end client with a
third party CMS?
Thursday, 2 May 13

71. Thursday, 2 May 13

72. Not all support is
really your problem.
Thursday, 2 May 13

73. Terrible webhosting
Thursday, 2 May 13

74. We give customers
copy and paste
information to give
to their host’s support.
Thursday, 2 May 13

75. Cheap hosting is
very expensive.
Thursday, 2 May 13

76. A small amount of
extra money on
hosting saves a vast
amount of time.
Thursday, 2 May 13

77. I am adding paragraphs in the
editor but Perch isn’t
displaying them on my
website!
Many, many Perch customers
Thursday, 2 May 13

78. Understanding the
full stack saves you
time and frustration.
Thursday, 2 May 13

79. You don’t need to
become an expert.
Thursday, 2 May 13

80. If you have been able
to learn CSS you are
capable of learning
some PHP or Ruby.
Thursday, 2 May 13

81. HELP!
It’s not working.
Thursday, 2 May 13

82. What
is not working?
Thursday, 2 May 13

83. Thursday, 2 May 13

84. If we can reproduce
an issue, it is well on
the way to
being solved.
Thursday, 2 May 13

85. Tell us what you
expected to happen.
Thursday, 2 May 13

86. no luck
no joy
no love
Thursday, 2 May 13

87. If a suggestion
doesn’t work don’t
forget to say
what it did do.
Thursday, 2 May 13

88. The perfect support
request?
Thursday, 2 May 13

89. Give versions of the software in use.
Include Diagnostic info where available.
Give step by step instructions to reproduce.
Include any code required.
Explain what you expected to happen.
Explain what actually happened.
Thursday, 2 May 13

90. Good support gets
you back to your
project as
quickly as possible
Thursday, 2 May 13

91. @rachelandrew
http://rachelandrew.co.uk/presentations/support
Thank you!
Thursday, 2 May 13