If you've read this blog before, you probably know that I am the biggest advocate for doing support myself. A while ago I wrote an article encouraging founders to reply to support tickets, where I wrote that founders should answer as many support tickets as they can. After doing it for another year I admit that I was wrong.
continued...A lot of our readers are bootstrapped businesses and self-funded startups just like us. So I hope it's OK if we share our findings and challenges from time to time.
These are the results of a recent AB-test we ran on our "buy now" pages. Nothing new or special, just a trivial hypothesis and variations, but the results were overwhelming. Here we go:
continued...All these companies are known for amazing customer support (apart from offering a great product/service). And all these companies have one thing in common - customer support is everyone's job. Engineers, developers, executive officers, founders - everyone works in customer support every now and then.
continued...How many times have you "marked something as unread" to deal with it later?
Don't get us wrong, email is perfectly fine if used appropriately. Especially for early stage startups that need to focus on launching their first product and getting their first customers. But once the "early stage" days are over, it's time to consider more powerful support tools.
continued...Just a quick update on the current state of our mobile apps - something that has started as a hobby project, grew up to be something used by thousands of people every day. But as you've probably noticed, we haven't pushed new updates in a while (especially for the iOS app). And while the apps still work perfectly fine, they have various problems that need fixing and we can't delay this any longer. Currently there are two main issues:
continued..."Canned response" is a popular feature present in some email apps and most helpdesk systems, that allows inserting a quick pre-defined text into your response to a customer. Just like "self-support" help sites and searchable knowledge-bases can help you get rid of up to 45% of incoming support requests, the "canned responses" can speed up the remaining 55% drastically. If you're not using this feature you're really missing out.
continued...Every app is going to go down at some point. No matter how good your team is you are going to have a major downtime. It’s not a question of “if” it’s a question of “when”. Even Google goes down from time to time. And when downtimes do happen, things get ugly quickly. These are going to be the hardest times for you and your customer support department.
Every serious outage causes loses. How much you lose depends directly on how your customer support agents have handled it.
continued...How do you measure your customer support team success? The answer that immediately comes to my mind is "customer happiness". It is an ultimate helpdesk metric: if your customers are happy, it means that you've done a great job. However, "customer happiness" has one problem (apart from it being an obvious buzz term and sounding cheesy) — it can't be measured.
continued...At Jitbit me and Alex have been handling support tickets ourselves from the very beginning. We didn't have much choice since it was just the two of us. Two years ago we have started hiring customer support employees, but we still answer a significant number of support tickets daily.
continued...So, you've decided to become a customer support agent. But do you have what it takes to be effective, successful and still enjoy your job? It mostly depends on your personal qualities and professional skills. But how do you know, if tech support suits you? Here are some signs that you are not ready to take on a customer support job:
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