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

TYPES OF SUPPORT

TOOLS FOR SUPPORT

WHO DOES SUPPORT

LEARNING FROM SUPPORT

Q & A

How To Support Your Customers…

TYPES OF SUPPORT

Humans help your customer:

• Email

• support@…

• Form

• Feedback link or widget

• Forums

• Chat

• Twitter

• Phone

Getting in touch

Your customer helps themselves:

• Knowledge Base

• FAQ

• Tutorials

Self-serve

• In-context help

• Tooltips

• Videos

TOOLS FOR SUPPORT

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

Are you down?

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

Keeping on top of requests

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

Choosing or building your main support tool

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

The dark side of templates

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

Making templates work

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

Admin

Financial/credit card processing

Diagnostic

Analytics

App logs

Email system logs

Other Tools

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 …

WHO DOES SUPPORT

Everyone!

But it helps to have one or more dedicated team members

Who should help with support

Empathy

Compassion

Patience

Ability to rise above & not take things personally

Professional, but human

Excellent communication skills

Troubleshooting talent

Psychic powers!

The right stuff

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

The extra mile…

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

Measure your product, not your people

LEARNING FROM SUPPORT

The real measure of your product’s quality

Free domain knowledge

Real use cases

Helps you prioritize issues and features

Candid Feedback

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!

In a nutshell…

Q & A…Over to you…

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Get in touch jwebb@pivotal.io @curojo

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Thank You