Customer Support Technology

Here was the state of the art some number of years ago in online customer support:

Challenges

1.  The relationship between the FAQs and the question asked is entirely for the user to make. There is no integrated knowledge-base which would provide super rapid responses using technology.  There is  a great collection of constantly updated FAQs and training videos. 

2.  It is very "batch" oriented, not immediate. There is no chat nor a suggestion that we can immediately answer their question is a very interactive way.

3.  The design is pretty primitive.  Functional but primitive.

4.  It is not a responsive design.

5. The "contact us" is a separate page. If a user is logged in, the fields for the user are automatically filled in which is good but still somewhat primitive by today's standards. I think the state of the art is for "Contact Us" or better yet: "Have a question or suggestion?" to be a widget that can be deployed across the site. For instance, we have a new great page of training videos that run from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. That would be a great place to ask "Still have a question?"

What's particularly interesting is that VocabularySpellingCity customer support is spectacular. We answer hundreds of calls and emails daily. Less than 1% of our calls ever go to voice mail or become "abandons."   And this stat is true not only across weeks and months but we track it everyday and we review it on a daily basis.  We use Desk to track all of our calls and emails and "Call Sweet" to monitor our calls and how they go. We manage even on the very busy days (ie August to September) to never give me an annoying recording about "Your call is important to us."  

BTW: Rant Alert! Am I the only one who feels that it is totally cheesy and Orwellian to put people on hold (showing that you are being cheap on customer support and don't staff adequately (or that your software is creating problems) and then instead of apologizing, tell people why you essentially ignore them how much you value them and their call?  We don't do that.

Next steps. I'd like to collect a number of modern awesome examples of customer support systems and use them as a model for us to build on.  Any suggestions?

Customer Service - Inspired by BufferApp

I just had a service go around with the BufferApp.com people. I continue to be amazed by the quality of my  brief email interactions with them.  It's a little over-the-top but still, I like it.  I wonder if I can get my support teams to have and share a little of this type of wild enthusiasm.

For example:

I contacted them with a suggestion which he took the time to understand and follow up on. So first point, he responded promptly and seemed to fully understand the problem. So far, not solved but it's a big problem that I highlighted. He gave me a great work-around.

As he gave me the work-around, he added: 

If I can ever help out with anything down the line, or if you have any feedback on how we could make Buffer more awesome for you, we'd love to hear it. We're here for you :)

Cheers!
Dave

I then gave him another suggestion, btw a really good one, which he acknowledged:

Oh wow, thank you so much for taking the time to detail this out. This is the type of thing that reminds us just how lucky we are to have the customers that we do. It's incredible that you would take the time to share your thoughts here and help us improve. :)

There are certainly a bunch of ways the analytics can be improved, and accurately breaking down the RTs a comments would certainly be a good step in that direction.

We are lucky to have a really close connection between our Happiness team and our Product team, so we'll be sharing your feedback with them and having them take a look at the options here. :) Please do send along any other thoughts, wishes, feedback, critiques, etc. that come to mind! 

Cheers! 

Permently Banned

I tried to login into the seochat forum this morning to comment on a thread and was greeted by this message:

You do not have permission to access forums, because you are permanently banned.

OUCH! What's odd is that I have no memory of having done anything that's not kosher or of being warned or reprimanded. What's also odd is that this "permanently banning from a forum" actually has an emotional sting to it. Weird.

It did cause me to take stock of my online behavior to see if it's spammy in any sense. Here's a quick list of my forum participations.....

1. Lotsa chat. I picked a forum recently and spent some time on it a few times / week to get my rating up above 50 posts so that my signature links would become active. While fun, the quality of the forum is mixed and I think the links are probably of very marginal value. As I look thru my posts, I think mine are often the most thoughtful and original and show the most research. Others (of mine), particularly in the forums that are "other" or "greeting" new members, my posts are pretty sloppy often missing words in the sentence.

2. Tech support. In our new site, SpellingCity.com, there's a serious Firefox bug which we have been trying to understand and resolve. To pursue help, I have posted into several tech forums with similar comments. Is this spammy?

Best discussion: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289873
Others:

http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1891#1891

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3012474#3012474

http://firefox.8ez.com/showthread.php?tid=2085

http://www.techsupportforum.com/alternative-computing/mozilla-firefox-browsers/172507-solved-lost-sound-firefox.html

3. And of course, we run our own parents forum which helps parents discuss common areas of interest and get feedback from members (not just us as a vendor). We permit links to competitive and personal sites although there have been a very extreme examples where we had to remove them. We've never banned a real member although there are plenty of extreme spammers that we ban (although since they switch sites constantly) I'm not sure that it does any good.