# The Value of support ## Give a good experience The typical customer experience most people in the world have with companies is awful. It's usually one or more of the following: 1. An annoying menu system of some kind (phone, chat bot, webpages) that add a barrier to getting help. 2. A "please send us a message and we'll get back to you" style of interaction where there's no sense of who you're actually communicating with and no idea when/if you'll hear back. 3. An effectively-useless and sometimes-hostile first level of support agent, where people are generally now well aware they're talking to a script (and this is sometimes outsourced support). 4. Support personnel who have more leeway, but are often not informed enough to be able to directly help on anything but basic usage issues, requiring the "we'll file a ticket internally" dance. Nobody likes these. Everybody experiences these. This is a checklist of what not to do for support, if you want customers to have a good support experience. Because "hello, is there anybody there?", "hurry up and wait", and "no seriously, I know what I'm talking about, can I speak to someone _there_ who knows what they're talking about??" interactions are the de facto standard, we've found that customers _truly_ value their initial contact being someone who can: 1. Fully understand the question they just asked 2. Provide a meaningful, informative, non-condescending response 3. Do something about their problem 4. Be a contactable human who they can follow up with if they have further questions. People are willing to wait for that, because hey, they're probably having to wait _anyway_. ## Don't make them wait We always aim to get back to our customers as quickly as possible. Short of bad timezone differences (and often even then, depending on the customer), we make sure customers get a response usually within an hour or two of their ticket. We do this in part through a home-grown integration between Freshdesk and PagerDuty. If you haven't used it, PagerDuty is a tool designed to integrate with monitoring services and help IT teams designate on-call schedules to ensure a person will be contacted through several means (e.g., push notifications, phone calls) if there's an outage or another problem, and to escalate based on various conditions. We treat customer tickets like outages. If we get a ticket from a paying customer, we immediately look at it. If we can answer it right away, we do. If we need further information, we ask for it, and begin a process. Sometimes that process can take days, depending on their issue. Sometimes it's a "we'll get to that in the next release." Depends. But the key thing is, we get back to them almost right away. And that's manageable, if you prioritize support. ## Prioritize support And you want to prioritize support. There's a few things we've learned from making that a core part of how we do business: 1. **You learn more from the users.** You can see the problems they face early, not just the individual's problems but the problems in general faced by multiple users. Those problems may be a symptom of a core issue, and can all act as data points to improve the product in a way that may not have been obvious during development and may not be obvious if you just see a portion of support tickets. 2. **You develop relationships with users.** A user who is comfortable working with you will approach support requests differently than a user who is new and expecting a hostile experience. They're usually easier to talk to, more appreciative, more willing to champion your response to their team, and less likely to try to engage in an argument with you. 3. Customers who experience good support like to tell people about that support, and are more likely to recommend you _when_ they leave their company and find a new one. **Good support is cheap marketing, and improves customer retention.** Plus it's just the right thing to do when you have a product. # How to Conduct Support It can be hard, at first, to actually handle responding to people over support tickets well. Especially as a techie person who is used to talking frankly to other techie people. And it's easy to try to mitigate that by swinging too far on the other side, talking in a way that feels insulting. And _especially_ when the person says something that gets your blood boiling. Whether in a support ticket, or in a tweet to your brand account, or in an e-mail, or in a chat. A "solution" some people adopt is canned responses, but I generally tell people to steer away from those (it gets you back to the "menu system" or "reading a script" feel, which removes the human connection). So we aim for a few rules: ## 1. Be human, use your voice Try to connect with the user, and let them see that you're a person. People interact better with people than with a canned response or an AI. Don't try to sound like you're Some Big Professional who has to talk all formally. Just talk to them. ## 2. Be compassionate People coming to you for support usually don't reach out until they've tried things and are now feeling frustrated. Bear that in mind, and sympathize. "Oh, man, I'd be frustrated too. Let's see if we can find out what's going on there. Don't worry, we'll help get this sorted." That can go a long way. ## 3. Take a bullet A frustrated customer can come off as aggressive, and feel that they need to battle you before they get somewhere. And they might fire that first shot in their e-mail. Don't deflect that, don't get on the offensive. It may not be your fault, but they don't care whose fault it is. You can disarm them pretty much immediately if you just say something like, "You're right, seems we screwed up on this." ## 4. Go for a walk, write a fake response When they're _really_ heated, and you feel heated, you're going to feel an impulse to say something snarky or to push back. _Don't do that, ever!_ Read the ticket, internalize it, go for a walk around the block, or even write a fake response saying what you _feel_ like you want to say. Breathe, get it out, discard what you wrote. Then respond. ## 5. Give them something for their trouble If the customer just lost some time trying to deal with an issue, a really powerful thing you can do is say in your response that as an apology and thanks for pointing out the issue, you're proactively crediting them a 10% (or 15% or 50% or whatever!) coupon for next month. This does a few things: 1. It shows them that you actually care about their issue as a company. They'll appreciate that, and are often far more willing to be patient while waiting for a resolution. 2. It helps keep them around another month. That credit is for _next month_, it's not a refund for _this month_. It's a really cheap customer retention bonus. 3. Once again, **good support = good marketing**, and this does that. It's not just words, it's actions. ## 6. Give the customer some information Don't assume they know how your service works, but don't assume they're an idiot. A "The reason you hit that is because we have a server we misconfigured (if you're familiar with AWS, it was a problem with our Load Balancer health rules (or whatever), so we'll start testing a fixed configuration and try to get that deployed by tonight" tells them something, even if they don't fully understand it (don't get _too_ technical unless they show curiosity). It beats "We have a bug. We'll work on a fix." It's like when you get updates to an app and they just say "Fixed some bugs." That's useless information, right? Tells you nothing. Think of your responses like that. Try to inform, and even teach if it's useful/not condescending. ## 7. Re-read your response, and run it by a team member If after you re-read it you're not sure you're conveying something right, ask someone else to be a second pair of eyes. You can even use ChatGPT for this nowadays. I frequently type up a response and end up rewriting it after a couple read-throughs. If you have trouble reading it, the customer sure will. ## 8. Don't respond if you're too tired without a review This ties into #7 a bit. _But_ it can also tie into #1, especially for repeat customers. "I hope that made sense, and let me know if it didn't! I've been up all night working on a new feature, and I'm getting ready to head to bed, but I wanted to give you an answer before I did." Sleepiness is human. It's _very relatable_ to a lot of users. It sets expectations, it's honest, and surprisingly beneficial. Don't be afraid to be human. ## 9. Set expectations and follow up If something will take a week or two, tell them. Add a follow-up reminder to your calendar. They'll appreciate both.