How to support your customers painlessly (for you and them) - Denver Startup Week 2014
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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.
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How to support your customers painlessly (for you and them) - Denver Startup Week 2014
- 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
- 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
- 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 +VņUPQV[QW KVņU[QWT RTQFWEVŎ
- 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