More and more companies are asking the question: how do we provide excellent support?
We can tell you, it’s not easy. But the payoff can be enormous- the better you understand your customers, the easier it is to build something to delight them. Many of our ideas (for everything from new features to slight tweaks) came from talking with you. And by being responsive to customer requests, you start building a relationship so in turn customers will be responsive to your requests for feedback.
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So how do you do it? Here are some of the things we’ve learned along the way:
- Spend your goodwill wisely. Every support request has a limited attention span before they give up and go away. Make sure you do the most work reasonable before e-mailing them back. Did you check the debuglogs for errors associated with their account? Did you run experiments to try to reproduce the issue? Did you check their account configuration? Don’t leave debugging up to your users.
- Drive the issue through the R’s: research, request more information, re-assign, and (hopefully) resolution. Can’t understand what they’re asking for? Do some research, and if necessary, spend some of that goodwill to request more information. If the issue is beyond you, make sure it gets re-assigned to someone what can handle it. And of course the end goal is always resolution.
- Use a tool! If you’re just starting out, an e-mail inbox works okay, but most people outgrow it quickly. We just switched to Assistly and have been loving it; they really nailed what it means to have a good support workflow. It’s set up so multiple operators can easily work on inbound requests at the same time without conflict, you can assign issues to specific operators, and you can easily set up specific rules to get custom behavior that works for your organization.
We’re far from perfect, but with these guidelines we think we’re on the right track. Let us know anything we missed in the comments.
Oh, and if you’re an Olark and Assistly user, be sure to check out our killer integration with them.