Every once in a while it feels good to remind yourself why you got into the business in the first place. Building up a new company is fun and challenging and engrossing in equal measure. It can be so engrossing at times that you can lose sight of the original goal – which of course is making the customer experience for users as useful and engaging as possible. Not just our customers of course but our customers’ customers.
So it was really great to read Rock your support a report Nandini Jammi over at Kayako put together of service professionals at some great companies giving their answers to the simple-looking question ‘What is the most important thing you’ve learned in customer service’
The answers from companies like Adroll, Wistia, and Hubspot, although all different began to coalesce around one notion – that the more time that could be given to actively listen to the customer the better the outcome. Note this is regardless of being able to solve the problem: it’s more about demonstrating to the customer that you hear them, that you understand and that you are trying to help. All about the human connection.
Let humans talk onto humans. Let robots do the rest.
This is great to see emerge from the report and it was really super to hear such impassioned professionals talking about what motivates them and their teams about their work at these great companies. It made me think hard about where Nickelled, the company I built, fits into this paradigm.
The answer came in one quote stood out to me in particular from Chase Clemons at Basecamp:
‘From the support team’s side, it’s easy to see the same question day after day and get frustrated. … but there’s a human on the other end of the email that’s never encountered that problem before’
That’s the issue I set up Nickelled to solve, and how great it is to hear it rephrased and current. I want our interactive guides to help users to solve these simple repeatable questions for themselves. Not because I don’t want them to contact support but because I want to them to reach out to the humans in support with questions that humans are best placed to answer. *Let Nickelled guide people through the mundane stuff – it’s a robot, it loves it! *
I want the people in the support teams to have the time to listen, to answer to make the interactions a positive one for everyone. That’s the opportunity I saw when I worked alongside the support teams when I first conceived Nickelled and that’s the opportunity I continue to work on every day with my customers now.
if you haven’t got a copy of the Kayako guide and you work in customer support, go now get one and share it with your team. It’s encouraging and fun. And if you haven’t investigated an easy way for your customers to help themselves and so make your teams more productive – well then please come and talk to me.
