Do This, Not That: Creating an Exceptional Customer Support Experience – Sarah Hatter

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0:15thank you guys for having me oh thank you this guy is great give a round of applause to Zander for organizing this isn't he amazing this is such a great conference I mean I think anybody who comes to the conference every year year it again knows that it's great speakers it's great content but it's also a really amazing audience yeah great photographers it's about all that paparazzi here so I this is my second time speaking and the last time I spoke was three years ago I'd been in business for a year Coast support is a customer experience agency we teach and train companies of all sizes how to do amazing

0:52customer support sometimes that includes us implementing the sport for them or we actually handle their email or social support or we write their help documentation but mostly it's a long process of us evaluating what people are doing the customer support that they're providing the good and the bad and then helping them make it better we also wrote a book the actual we actually wrote the book of customer support I can actually say that now it's extremely cheap on Amazon and by the way if you ever really think about like you want to become an expert in something and write a book and put it on Amazon I want you

1:26to know that you will get rich very quickly and it's really easy I get checks like this every month the one time I got a check for 17 dollars from someone in Finland so that was like a hundred and forty books I think at that cost but anyway if you're in Turkey thank you one of the other things too that you might have noticed is that I call it customer support I do not call it customer service how many of you guys call it customer service raise your hand shrug I don't call it customer service for a reason and that's because when I think of customer service I think of the

2:01return line at Walmart or I think of like a gas station employee or I think about calling Comcast and so what we like to do is to teach our customers that it's better to be a little bit more intentional and elevate the support that you're offering to your customers rather than just be Walmart right there's this idea that we like to talk a lot the transactional versus the relational transactional support is really easy it's a help link at the bottom right hand corner of your screen or it's a really crappy help section that you wrote at midnight one night just trying to stop people from emailing

2:39you or it's a phone call that people have to make whereas more relational support is the stuff that you've been hearing about from everybody talking on stage about the way that we keep customers engaged keep them loyal keep them interested in our product and also keep them educated about what the product can do from them so that's the difference between customer service customer support customer support is not a transactional experience it's a habitual experience that a customer has with your product it's your pricing it's your marketing it's your splash pages it's your tutorials it's your social media accounts all of that comes together to be customer support so we

3:21think about it we think about customer support great customer support exceptional customer support being very intentional it's something that you actually choose to make it great you choose to plan for it and hire for it and actually do it well we're going to talk today about customer support myths there's just three of them that we see historically have been problems for people that are there single founders launching a business launching to startup within their first year of business so all of this hopefully relates to everyone who wants to build a business who has launched a business raise your hands wow you guys are awesome who does

4:02customer support for your business it should be all of the exact same people and probably more so this is for you ready myth number one I can do support with myself then we'll just hire an intern to do it so you'd be surprised right now the word intern is so archaic it's so historical and ancient but people still actually hire idiots in college to do customer support and we're talking like big companies like Toyota has interns on social media Toyota is a huge company and they just don't pay people that means that they don't really value that when I here I'm gonna do it myself I'm gonna hire

4:37in turn I think automatically what are you investing monetarily in this role that means you don't value it now I love the fact that people founders single founders are involved in customer support from day one I think you should be I think you should know what customers are asking what they're interested in but customer support is actually a very difficult job I know it's a very difficult job because I did this job for a long time and now I teach people how to do this job it takes a very specific type of personality to do this job well and when we're hiring for people to do customer support whether

5:12it's for a software company or you know even like like a retail company there are basic requirements that we have to think about does this person and body every single one of these and if you look at these you're noticing that most of these are not just acquired skills most of these are innate to their personality someone who's empathetic and has thick skinned and who's tenacious and kind kindness is one of the most overlooked traits for hiring customer support people so if you're doing customer support or you just plan on doing customer support for the rest of the existence of your company you have to sort of think do I embody all of

5:55these things as well as being a founder and knowing my business and knowing my product the reason that all of this stuff is really important to focus on when hiring is because customers have baggage customers hate customer support they hate customer service we all have baggage I'm not sure how many of you guys ever read the oatmeal but he has this great comment about why I would rather be punched in the testicles and call customer service and pretty much this is what I deal with on a daily basis this is what people bring to the table and this is not just people who go to Walmart and go to gas stations this

6:28is people who buy software and spend $49 a month you talk about churn and loyalty you know this you know kind of stuff we also have to think about the emotional investment that people have where if they run into a problem in a free trial or after they've only paid $49 and they can't get an answer themselves and they think oh I have to call customer support they're probably not going to deal with it they're probably going to cancel or stop using the product if they run into a problem because they don't want to deal with your support so hiring for customer support you have to think about what is

7:02their emotional intelligence what is their personality type customer support is not this sort of throwaway position that anyone can do and the way that I like to think about it is my personality because I was built to do customer support I'm highly extroverted I'm highly personable I don't get kind of burnt out on people and so I think about if this is not you if this is not how you think about answering every single customer support email you probably aren't the right person for the job so that's unfortunately me most days so before you're gonna hire someone the best thing that we say is start eliminating incoming support start

7:47paring it down start doing whatever you can to eliminate as much customer support need as possible that starts with having a searchable and accessible Help section can you guys see these slides okay could you see the text okay so having a searchable and accessible Help section means not something hidden at the bottom of your webpage I always see you guys it's like the black footer and it's like these tiny links like if I'm a customer and I need help I want it like a big part of your application includes the fact that it's intuitive into intuitive and I can find answers right use questions of friends family

8:24and early testers to create articles and tutorials everyone has a FAQ page you don't have FAQ snow ones frequently asked you anything but you can be pre-emptive about what you know customers might have questions about confusion they may have there's like a big 20 list of questions you should always have in your help section how do I cancel should be the number one thing everyone's very scared of me saying that because we're supposed to pretend no one's ever we're gonna hide cancellations boom how do I cancel if I'm a customer signing up you're charging me ninety nine dollars and one of the first things that you say is how

9:00do I cancel it doesn't translate to my mind as this is a software they don't even want me buying it means like okay they have confidence in this I can keep reading I can keep learning more education should be as prominent as your pricing I kind of said it before like I hate the little tiny help links customers hate it too and the little tiny help links usually mean this is an afterthought to us it's not really that important but your customer your education should be as prominent as any other feature that's on your website if I'm starting to use your products I want to know that if I have a

9:35problem I can answer the question myself customers the ease of use should be considered ease of using and education should be considered a feature you can mark it same thing put it big and bold invest the time in it find someone to write you an amazing Help section that's what we do if you want to hire us it's easy easy to do so when do you hire how many of you guys have been in business for more than one year two years three years okay of the people who've been in business for three years start shouting out to me when did you decide to turn over customer support to someone else

10:08what year your three your two three haven't done it yet pretty average that's pretty average we live in a be a very bizarro culture where somebody said five years ago founders should do support well that's awesome if you wanna sit there and do support but most of the time founders shouldn't be doing support they shouldn't be doing support if they're not doing it well so here's my markers for when you should hire somebody else to do support for your business you receive more than twenty emails a day end of story that should be an automatic marker for any one twenty customer emails a day it's time to hire somebody

10:52else to do it your customers needs are outgrowing the time you have to invest in those needs and secondly if you're starting to see customer support is like this burden like this shitty thing that you have to do at the end of the day that you're not excited about and then it's just like oh I have to get to my support emails stopped doing support and finally probably the easiest barometer is if you hate people if this is you when you think about customer support it's time to hire somebody else there's no shame in it there's no shame in hiring somebody who's great at support to do it

11:27better than you okay so then who do you hire it's actually completely okay to outsource or contract we contract design work all the time we contract conference organizing all the time we contract devs all the time there's people out there that do customer support on contract work that's what Co support does for a lot of people about 50% of our business is outsourced support for startups or software companies as for writing samples and tests with support scenarios please do not put a job board ad about you're looking for a customer service professional must be great communication skills be conversational be relational and ask them I need to know what what

12:04you would write to a customer if they wrote you this specific scenario you will weed out a lot of bad personalities and bad hires by getting really specific examples over you know job experience great candidates or baristas bartenders librarians a-team hospitality alumni any people who are used to dealing with like exploding sprinklers and know how to handle it really well they're probably great with customers probably great for a reason I poached people from Starbucks all the time I carry recruiting cards all the time and I travel a lot so anytime I find someone who's amazing who gives me great service I'm always asking for their information because that to me is

12:44a qualified candidate who's awesome working with customers think of support hire is important as your next dev or designer that includes salary if you're hiring someone on contracts to do customer support probably you're gonna be hiring them hourly to between the 20 and 24 and hour range it's just as important as anything else and then finally give them title influence trust Authority whatever you think will make them a part of your company roadmap and a part of your company's influence with customers with anything else they need to know that they're just as important as anyone else on your team so any questions on that no well hold them to the end so customer

13:27support myth number two you will do what everyone else is doing and it'll be fine I don't think that a lot of people say this out loud I don't think that people just say oh I'm just gonna do what everyone else is saying but we think it all the time we go to our competitors web pages and we see what they're doing but the problem is everybody else is doing crap support nobody out there it's just in the normal world is doing exceptional support probably besides about 10% of businesses that are actively running so we're gonna focus on one thing that makes their support so crappy and that's the

13:59language that they use with customers and this is an experiment that if you've seen me speak before you've probably seen me do this experiment we run it every six months every single year we do secret shopping of huge well-known national international brands so this is how we contacted this time you guys recognize these names I think in this what this was done in November there's 64 more names on this list but all of these names are people that we contacted through their direct customer service channel which means not logged into an account not using live chat or or you know intercom but actually through the help link contact support writes your

14:37email we send them all the exact same email then we average their responses and that's how we kind of get a gauge on what people are saying to their customers so this is who wrote back of that list these people plus 12 more you know that's pretty average sometimes though the numbers lower sometimes it's more sometimes we just get form letters back but we count that as a response if that's all we hear from them so here's the average email that we received back from the people who actually did choose to respond to the customers almost every single one of them started with hello no-name and I hate this so much I hate

15:22hello I know that interculturally internationally hello seems very polite I hate it it's a thing to start an email with so yeah it's totally and I've been telling people this for five years I have these LG appliances in my home in every single time I start the washing machine it's hello so this is my washing machines version of communication that you're using to contact customers it's terrible stop it next the average response that we got to feature request email I think the email is like something you could add but aren't adding right so the average email thank you for contacting our customer service team unfortunately we have no plans to add new features to

16:06our product at this time we appreciate your feedback and hope that you continue to enjoy using our product reply to this email if you have more questions or comments sincerely again hate it horrible the product team in a continuing effort to provide our customers with the best possible product experience Wow I'm not even gonna read it click here to take our survey this is the stuff we got back from people and if you look at all of these words I've highlighted terrible words terrible words to berating people because we've someone writes you a feature request I know that we all sort of like Oh seriously we're

16:38supposed to say no to feature request well no you're supposed to say Wow here's a person interested in continuing to use my product they want to use it more they want to have new ways to use my product and they took the time to ask those are actually really valuable emails and most of the time they get a crappy form letter back this part that I crossed out that's just my rage I just crossed it out and they're just like I can't even handle it and that we copied and pasted from PayPal that's at the bottom of almost every single one of their emails just I had to include it so

17:10how do you do better how do you do better if you don't want to do what everyone else is doing because again everyone's doing crap support well this is how I would have written this email hi Rob I would have used the person's name I would have used an exclamation point I know like people like Joanna probably hate exclamation points I use them all the time obviously I do thanks for the great idea it's one we've heard before and we're definitely going to consider it it may not be something we're able to add right away we always like to make sure before we add new features that it

17:37can benefit the majority of our users don't be too disappointed if we are able to add this feature it's still awesome of you to suggest it thanks again and let me know if you need anything else which emails better this email right here is a form letter it's a form letter we train people on they don't know how to answer feature requests we basically all they have to do is insert the feature that they requested and the person's name and send it out but if you were a customer and you got that back from PayPal or you got that back from Dropbox that would be shocking to get because it's not what

18:08you're expecting because your baggage tells you you're going to get a crap response so imagine if you're starting a company and let's say you've been in business for two months and you start sending stuff like this out to customers this customer thinks that you're they're having a conversation with you a relationship with you like it's a real-life friends talking to friends and they're gonna continue to want to be in that relationship with you language changes everything about the way that customers perceive us and I have a lot of experience and numbers and demographics and whatever to tell you about why I can prove to you that this

18:45is like would really just change everything that's really true but I'm just gonna talk about one little experiment we just did recently we just wrapped up a project a six month long project with an airline evaluating all of their customer support that means that we read hundreds of thousands of emails and hundreds of thousands of reviews online and pretty much everyone hated this airline and I'm not going to say their name but what we found out was that where a lot of the reasons that customers hated this airline and hated their customer support was because they were saying things and emails like did you even read my email thanks for the

19:20forum reply oh thanks for the stock answer we were seeing that over and over and over I wrote their support team and I just got this stupid stock response so we started there and we went into their offices their corporate offices where all of their customer support team was we did training we said you are never allowed to use this word again you can't use this phrase you're supposed to use this and I know it works because their customer satisfaction rating went to 34 percent from 34% to 89% in about two months and all we changed was language those same people that were writing reviews and responding to emails saying

19:57what the crap with your stupid language I hate you we're now saying okay I get it not that bad they were responding thank you so much we started seeing customers respond back with awesome great to hear thanks for the link thanks for your help and they really meant it and all we did with that was changed the words we used so some of the more basic structures of what other people are saying that you shouldn't ever be saying thank you for your feedback anyone who knows me Richard and Justin and Eric they know that I hate this word and if I'm in the middle of a conversation with someone

20:34and we're having a like a face-to-face eye-to-eye meeting and they say feedback I will stop them I will interrupt them I will be an and say please don't ever use that word because it doesn't mean anything it's just what you've heard other people say it's just what Citibank said to you and it's what Chase says to you and American Airlines us to you when you say why did you cancel my flight but thanks for telling me how you feel about this thanks for your ideas thanks for sharing your insight that sounds like a real human being really said those things and they actually meant it so why is it so

21:05difficult for us to sort of transition that language that we use with customers into how we speak to them face to face another one we apologize for the inconvenience who said this I've said this I've written it before I feel terrible about it but we don't customers are you seeing this member the baggage they're used to hearing this we should be saying something that's a lot more personable I'm so sorry that this happened oh my gosh I am so sorry I always use the analogy that if well I can change the analogy now if I was at a conference standing under a sprinkler that went off Rob would never say to me

21:41I'm sorry for the inconvenience he would never say that to me he would say oh my gosh I'm so sorry are you okay I'm so sorry that happened listen I'm so sorry I'm so sorry that happened and maybe down the line the next time we talk over email or something in six months he's like gosh I'm so sorry that happened again I hope everything's okay that's what we should be talking to customers if you're a business in your new business and you want people to sign up you'd never ask them to go to Kinko's and print out a signup form and fill it out with a pen and then fax it back to

22:09you we'd never do that so why are we okay using language that's irrelevant it's irrelevant like old technology really quickly empty words never use these ever again we can talk about it later at lunch or after news if you guys have questions about these we can go into more detail try to replace them with these full words try to get used to saying your right to customers who are angry thanks for sharing your thoughts ideas insight it's empowering for customers they need to hear this ok the last customer support myth we can just figure things out as we go along customer support is a total afterthought and if it's an

22:46afterthought to you it's an afterthought to everyone but this story that I'm going to tell you hopefully I've gotten across I'm passionate about this subjects probably more than most and this is a story that happened to me recently it's a bad support story so I just so I'm just setting the tone here that I'm gonna I'm gonna go off the reservation a little bit with my rage about this story so most people know that there's like people are doing private Kickstarter's now it's like this new thing where instead of doing Kickstarter we just raise funds on our own website or something and I participated in one of these because I

23:22was really excited about this product called ringly who's heard of ringly anyone few people few people it's an awesome product it's a beautiful piece of custom made really high-end jewelry that acts as wearable technology it gives you a little light ping a little buzz on your finger when you get specific customized notifications what's amazing amazing I bought three now look at the prices look at the prices down here that is a lot of money okay but I'm passionate about this idea and I'm like holy crap I couldn't coordinate this with everything I wear I was really excited about it i pre-ordered in May of last year so

24:03it's almost been a year so then in December of this year I was like what the heck where those rings I ordered and I started like what the heck I mean obviously clearly that's the kind of life I lead that I couldn't remember something I did in May I hadn't gotten them yet so I started looking on their social media thinking like did they send them and I didn't get mine maybe that maybe it's my problem right and what I saw was pictures like this of the ringly founders hanging out at the Wynn in Las Vegas taking pictures I don't know how many of you ever stayed at the way

24:34in Las Vegas but my three rings probably paid for half a night there and people commenting on Instagram I was wondering when spring shipments from last year will actually be sent hay in February I was told it was three to four weeks for shipping my August order it's been in for weeks now another person we need an official pole somewhere asking how many people receive defective ring leaves and then one person says too bad about these reviews I was going to purchase one but I'll just wait until get they get the kinks out good luck keeping your business ouch then we look at this thread notice

25:11very few responses from the team but were the one that stands out I understand the concept of a start up but delays and shipping and vague details is unacceptable that's not even me usually I'm the one telling people stuff as unacceptable and that's a real person other than me saying that which means I'm not wrong right I have it in print I took a screenshot it's not just me so then last week I still haven't gotten these rings by the way I did get one it was defective I sent it back a month ago haven't gotten the refund but I didn't get the other ones I noticed this on

25:41Twitter because I'm trying to figure out what the heck right this girl says okay wait so you're available at Bloomingdale's in shop but shop up but some of us who pre-ordered in August haven't gotten them yet not cool and ringly being just a normal old what everyone else is doing kind of company responds we'd be happy to check on the status of your order where the customer is like I already emailed you all so it took you four days to notice this tweet it took you four days to notice this tweet you took our money so this is where I get really off the reservation because this is the moment

26:15where you see my true colors for days unacceptable for days ridiculous ridiculous amount of time Patrick flew here from Tokyo in less than four days Thomas where's Thomas Thomas will here 20 hours still less than four days I drove from Chicago to California less than four days it took me three and a half days to get there the Battle of Waterloo less than four days an entire nation's history was change in less than four days and if we're gonna talk about wars wars have been won in fat and four times less than four days so clearly I'm passionate about this clearly I'm annoyed because I think

26:55that if customers are paying you money you have an obligation to respond to them with as much truth and as much speed as possible this is what ringly said as first-time business owners we are working hard to improve customer service thank you for your patience which was a day later so moral of the story if none of you have anyone in this room takes four days to respond to a customer please leave or face my range because it's not acceptable it's not acceptable that you're just started trying to figuring it out it's not acceptable you've never done it before your people are buying things people are

27:34paying your rent you owe them a rip or reply if someone's paying you money and using your product and supporting your idea you owe them properly planned and well-executed support end of story no excuses and the words that need to stick out for everyone are properly planned and well executed those are things that go hand in hand you can't have one or the other trust me you can't just properly plan to have a crappy intern do crappy support for you it has to be all together so to recap be sensitive to your customers baggage we all have it they all have it and remember there's no more

28:11new ideas so most of the time you've come up with a product or an idea that other people have probably tried to do and some of your customers probably tried that product and didn't like it they've got baggage be relational not transactional eliminate support with as much as education as you can empower your customers to find their own answers to their own problems without having to contact you hire the right person for your customers it may not be you it's probably not you that's okay it's okay language changes everything be intentional with yours and respond to everyone and everything always so the last point here people always ask me

28:49this what kind of support should I do what helped us did I use how many people should I hire I don't believe that there's any right support I don't believe that there's a prescription to this and I don't think there's just a template all I know is the stuff I told you before if you have bad stuff going for you doesn't matter what help desk you use it doesn't matter what tools you use if you've got the great foundation behind you of the kind of exceptional support you're going to provide anything that meets your customers individual needs their expectations and their individual endgame is what's going to be right for

29:23your product so that's it for me we're going to do questions answers