Three Steps to Kickass Customer Service - and why it's the best investment your company can make

from paypalsucks.com

It absolutely blows my mind how terrible most companies are at customer service- form emails, useless responses, nothing personal, nothing actionable, just the dregs of mediocrity. Whenever I call Bank of America I’m put on hold for fifteen minutes as a robotic voice informs me how much of a valued customer I am. Really feeling the love, guys.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d prefer they just hired enough people to not waste my time. And that’s for our corporate account! It’s even worse when I call a bank for my personal one.

On the other hand, whenever I email an early stage company I usually get a quick, personal, helpful response. It’s not any single thing that makes me walk away from the interaction feeling happy, but rather three core things- things that we try to apply in Spreadsong each and every day.

A lot of companies (hi PayPal!) seem to consider offering great customer service as a cost center to be minimized. Huh? Customer service is an investment in your company- it’s an investment in happy customers that stick with you for years, tell their friends about your products, and, most importantly, feel really good about their purchase of your product.

Customer service makes you money!

But only if done well.

1) Approachability

The most important thing, I think, is approachability- don’t make people feel bad for emailing you. This means taking every opportunity to answer questions and be easy to get ahold of. When we send an email we make it a point to tell people that while the email’s automated, their reply will go straight back to us. We sign the email with our names, not some vague “Spreadsong Customer Service” ridiculousness. On all contact forms we make it clear we want people to contact us- we even have a big Contact Us button within our app, Free Books for iPhone.

Exactly the same approach holds true for a large company- they’d be extremely well served to just sign each message with the name of a random person from their customer service department, complete with direct line phone number and email.

Make it easy for your customers to contact you, and take every opportunity to reduce friction.

2) Write like you talk.

Professionalism gone wild, what’s going on? It seems like a lot folks are afraid to actually sound like human beings when sending an email from their company. That doesn’t mean you should be rude, just that you should be friendly- like if you were meeting a new person in real life. Ok, you’ll want to avoid casually swearing, but outside of that it’s the same- you’d be yourself. You’d use their first name, you’d joke, you’d act like a human being. And, if you did something boneheaded, you’d be sure apologize and take responsibility. You’d have a conversation.

When a customer emails you, there’s usually one of two things going- something is awesome or something is screwed up. If it’s awesome, you want to thank them for their support and offer something cool- we usually ask people if they’d like to get early versions of the app, and are sure to ask if they have any suggestions. You want to thank them for making your company successful, and treat them like you would anyone who helps you out- offer to help them out! Especially when it comes to working in a feature request they have.

That doesn’t mean you want to integrate every request, of course. But it does mean you want to always be problem solving- the question isn’t the feature, the question is the goal. Do they want to read their own collection of quotes they’ve collected on their computer from Free Books? Well, they might ask for a desktop app, but what they really want is a way to get their own content onto Free Books.

We always try to figure out a way to work in customer requests into our development plan- if it’s going to be a long-term addition, I’m upfront with them about the timeframe and offer to let them be among the first to check it out.

3) Take responsibility, offer a solution, present a path forward.

But, wait, you say! It could be a feature request! If you get a feature request, something has gone wrong- your customer used the app, wanted something cool to happen, and that something cool wasn’t there. Suck. They then let you know about it- and, no matter how positive the email, something has gone wrong.

The most important thing here is to offer a path forward- a solution, a timeline, a quick explanation of what’s going wrong, and assurance that you’re on the job in fixing the specific issue at hand. And, in the case of a bug report, we usually have to ask for another piece of information to help track down the issue.

Even when someone requests that we add Twilight or Harry Potter to Free Books, I still like to explain how the app works with public domain content, and that, indeed, we’ll be trying to get the book onto Free Books as soon as possible, even if that’s sometime around the year 2071. “Jetpacks, hover cars, and Harry Potter- a good year all around!”.

This stuff isn’t rocket science, but it is critical to building a business. Make your company easy to reach, be a person, offer a solution, and present a path forward- easy!

Don't Be a Lonely Planet Entrepreneur- startup mythology and the death of capitalism

On starting this blog I decided to make a habit of writing for it- hell, that makes it sound like work. In reality, it’s a great excuse to take an hour out from the flow of the day, sit down in a nice sidewalk cafe and write down some thoughts over a espresso and a Heineken. It’s a nice habit and I’m really enjoying it- today, however, as I started walking to the cafe I was at a loss for what I would write about.

Walking along and trying to think of something to write about, I saw a group of backpackers walking out of their hostel. Surrounded by a beautiful boulevard in a great city, surrounded by activity and an atmosphere full of life, all three of them were nose-deep in their Lonely Planet guides. Eventually they started walking, glancing down at their guide every now and again, and at the end of the street, again buried themselves in their guide- Lonely Planet walking tour ahoy! In every city of the world you see it, people experiencing travel through the block by block directives of a four year old travel guide.

Three weeks ago I needed to renew my three month EU visa, so I took a week trip on over to Tunisia. I didn’t really know anything about the country, certainly not which cities would be cool to visit, spots that would be great to see. I just had some vague directions jotted down in my notepad on how to get to the Tunis hostel, deep within the medina of the city.

Arriving at 11pm, having procrastinated on packing until 3am and hopping a train to Vienna at 7, I hadn’t slept a wink- but, on getting in, I wound up going out into the city and hanging out with a couple of Algerian guys from the hostel, getting a recommendation to visit Hammamet, and, by chance, there attending a Michael Jackson trance tribute. This naturally got led me to meeting more new people, getting more recommendations, and so I wandered Tunisia, new friend to new friend, city to city, awesome experience to awesome experience.

I think there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who start their businesses like Lonely Planet travelers- Lonely Planet entrepreneurs, if you will. Move to San Francisco, apply to seed funds, get VC, scale operations, don’t worry about the business model, build something people want and roll with it, get profitable eventually, and go from there.

Somewhere along the way the tech world has left behind that whole ‘capitalism’ thing. The part where you make money, the part where you build businesses that generate revenue and scale operations and your product line as cashflow allows. This is mostly a matter of lag time- it takes about seven years for most major business success stories to develop, by IPO or by acquisition.

The major shifts in the economics of starting a business, cloud services, on demand, pay as you go computing, and lowered prices across the board, those shifts are recent. The businesses that have been built atop them have not yet had time to develop, so when people look to the past, when they look to mythology, when they look to the great companies of the past for guidance on how to move forward into a successful future, they look to companies built on a fundamentally different economic model.

Google, Ebay, Amazon, Facebook- venture capital, venture capital, venture capital, venture capital. The success stories of the past point in a direction certain, but that direction now serves to lead new companies astray. The facts of our industry, the costs of our industry, and the marketing methods of our industry have shifted and that shift serves to permanently reroute the pathways of success.

Let’s get back to capitalism, and, in so doing, leave behind Lonely Planet entrepreneurism at last.