How To Slay the Customer Support Beast – Ian Landsman – MicroConf 2014

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0:07[Music] if for those who don't know me have a company called user scape we've been making customer support software for about nine years we have two products help spa and snappy so help spa is downloadable as Rob mentioned that's are still our main product the the big product and then snappy is a new sass customer support tool I do bootstrap the FM how many people have heard boot cut the I fan whoa all right so you you know you might not be surprised that this talk will kind of be part tactics part minor rant so we'll see how that goes whoa I didn't I do it with on reboot are

0:53there I figured get them all screen time we also the discuss forums so a great place for everybody to check out a lot of really interesting boost shop or into discussion going on there I saw I'm a little bit old-school kind of like LL Cool J here at this big box and you know so I want to talk a little bit about the business kind of side of things and how customer support has directly impacted user escape it's kind of hard to get information on that I mean to to talks leading up Dave and Josh for actually really good lead ends for for a lot of

1:26us so to me customer support is the original growth hack like before we all got obsessed with measuring every little minor thing somebody touches on your site right like you just had a great product and you supported it well and you had happy customers and that's how you got more customers as they referred you and they brought you with them to their next next you know jobs and things like that so so here's our growth hacker in residence that's max my son he's obsessed with metrics as you can see but you know it's just something I like people to think about you know these days with customers

2:06we we tend to think about customers like this right like churn what's their lifetime value what's the average revenue per XYZ and we kind of lose sight a little bit of the human factor I kind of feel like we're doing this to the customers a little bit like I'm gonna turn them into the battery you know and we're just gonna plug them in so and that stuff's important but I want to try to keep I wish I could keep in mind you know the human factor so you have children your customers have children they have their own hopes and dreams desires and you know being your battery's not not in a

2:39soy on that list so try to keep a picture of your customers in your mind just always trying to be human with your support is really a big big part of great support is just being human about it okay so enough touchy-feely I know you guys are all capitalist bastards so we'll get into some money to start things off so to me the support is sales-ready especially for most of our size companies you know you're not going to have a distinction between your support channel and your sales channel you might have different email addresses or different forms or whatever but at the end of the day they're all going to

3:16be coming in to the same place and usually the same people are gonna be dealing with those so I wanted to share some kind of concrete examples of what that means and what that's meant for freezer escape so I wanted to look back a user scape from 2005-2008 so that's when we first started the business it's just me and my wife and you know we we didn't really know what we were doing essentially we have scratched our own niche back then there wasn't a lot of web-based help desk software there's a lot of client-server I came from a job where we only had three lines in a

3:55mainframe terminal where you could enter the customers issue so that wasn't ideal and didn't do email or anything like that so so we built our first product help spot so we had no employees we did no marketing we did no advertising we had no email list we didn't do any a/b testing we didn't track anything at all really the only thing we actually did we did have a mailing list of beta sign-ups 80 people I emailed them one time mm let them know it was that one and I'd never emailed any of them ever again we did do a little bit SEO but we were never never number one or anything

4:37like that or anywhere close to to the first position so we know we had no idea what we were doing like literally that was me just like working around the clock just trying to figure out what the heck we're gonna do but the only thing I knew is I had a product that solved the problem and you know that I knew how to support it well and so here's some actual numbers which I think are kind of telling so we did nothing but support the product in these first three and a half years nothing at all so the first year we we you know we made $15,000 the

5:11second year double you know ten ten times to one twenty three and I was like whoa cuz I only thought I'd ever make $60,000 like that was my goal 60,000 and I'm and I'm how so then 264 then 488 I had no idea what's going on you know so just to show I graph our ad spend and marketing spend so we spent nothing the the only thing we spend is in 2008 there fourteen thousand ten thousand of which was an ad on the deck which was not a good idea we didn't we didn't even have one conversion all for that so what I want to look at though in even more

5:54detail so that's kind of like the overview right is our first hundred customers because that's that's a more manageable size to think about and your early customer is kind of like what Josh was saying in a certain sense of the early customers to me are really hard to hold onto right these are the people who go through your I trashed all my code and rebuilt everything in two weeks right they go through that and they go through the horrible bugs that you know where nothing works for days on end and all those kind of things so this first hundred like I wanted to really look into how we held on to them and what

6:30that meant for us so over the past nine years those first hundred customers have submitted about seventeen hundred support tickets the majority of those summers are still customers not all of them but the majority and this is what we made on those customers in the past nine years so 2005-2006 were the first hundred customers initial sales $90,000 in licenses and then over the next nine years on support and on upselling of you know additional licenses we made another 200 thousand dollars from those so just was first hundred customers so $207,000 like to me that's kind of a quantifiable thing that's what our customer support was worth - as far as hundred people

7:18those people stuck with us every year they pay their support renewal every year you know we're we're helping them encouraging them and helping them grow their businesses and in turn they're buying more licenses and and you know generating additional revenue for us so you know it's it's hard to make the connection between customer support and revenue there's not a clean way to do it it's just not something easily trackable to say oh I helped this person and that equals X dollars but in an aggregate over this long time span that we happen to have I think it's a little bit interesting to look at it that way now

7:55over that time span this was our support volume so it kind of went up with revenue as you'd expect it was just me answering support for these first three and a half years so at one point we're doing about 400 tickets a month with with just me answering those and one of the metrics I do like to look at and support his first response speed so this is an basically how fast you initially reply to the customer and for the most part we did pretty good for companies kind of our size if you're under an hour you know that's that's pretty good obviously as you could figure companies

8:35can have a lot of support people and they you know you see companies that sometimes just a couple minutes but for you know if you're just by yourself we're just a couple people then you know wondering how I was really good and we were able to keep that most of the way until the end and then we hired a support person which is why this is also kind of a good thing to keep an eye on if you see your response speed is getting longer and longer and longer you know it's probably time to look at outsourcing or well the outsourcing support or hiring part-time support or

9:06full-time person and your your volumes and then this will come a little bit later as well but I just want to show the categorical breakdown here of the support we did and now remember this is all for help spot so this is an on-premise product so there's a lot of weird technical support you know Windows 2000 server weirdly configured with seven help desk apps and they're trying to try help spot also and it doesn't work so we have to help them with those those things but even so you can see that we have account issues and what's kind of like a sales category we use pre-sales and how-to so these are

9:46all things not really related to direct kind of support at all in terms of technical customer support and that will come up in a little bit so so how do we do support so we get into a little more kind of tactics of it and I don't want to I'm not gonna beat you over the head too hard with this but you should probably have a support tool whether it's one of mine or somebody else's but you know email really does break down pretty quick you know something gets marked read you then you miss it and you don't mark it unread because you want to go back to it later and actually reply

10:21to the person you forget to do that and now you never get back to them and then you get an email two days later from a very angry person because you never got back to them you also haven't really any reporting I'm you're not gonna be able to get first response speed you're not gonna be able see who's assigned things things like that so as you get just a little bit bigger even if it's just you and one person who works part-time at that point it's it becomes very complicated to see what they've done what you've done what they're working on what you're working on so you do

10:53probably want some type of support tool okay so for small companies these are the support channels I really like to focus on so a help site in app support and email so before we get into details on those marketing stuffy different marketing is not support so that came up in the earlier talk you're gonna be blogging people are gonna ask you stuff on the blog about hey how do you do this in your app that's not where you want to answer them you don't want to be trying to answer people in all these different places you market so that's what the help site comes in you want to afford

11:37people to the help site give them your email address get them into the channels that you maintain and don't try to be everywhere answering support on Facebook and all these other places it's just way too much for for really any company up before you get into having numerous support people you want to really funnel them into just a couple places that you can effectively manage those are the asterisk for Twitter Twitter's kind of an in-between so if you're on Twitter which I'm sure everybody is you know obsticle are gonna ask you questions on Twitter so kind of my rule of thumb is if you can answer them in 140 characters

12:12then answer them 140 characters but for most kind of things you're gonna need a more in-depth response or you're gonna try to answer them 140 characters and they're gonna get back to you and say well I don't understand what you mean and so then you have to go back and forth back and forth so again sound of the help site give them the email say hey just send us an email and we can we can then go back and forth properly on that in us with the proper space to elaborate okay so I'm gonna talk about help sites this is kind of the main content you generally want

12:46on your help site it's pretty early on you can get into a lot more stuff than this but detailed information on any initial setup so like for our products you have to integrate your email with the products so you want to have very in-depth instructions on that because that's something you're just gonna reference all the time people gonna be looking for that on their own so you want to have that settings is a really good one because a lot of times settings you know as a developer you just say oh I'll put a setting and you know it'll change the way the app works entirely you've just this little

13:15toggle and customers you know don't necessarily understand the implications always of those settings so I find I refer to settings documentation a lot so having having docked in settings and then any advice or best practices okay so here's some just an example help site a couple things here to point out you want to always have a clear way to contact support so this has been something I've been seeing a lot lately his help sites with no way to actually contact support so that's not good so you want to make sure that if somebody ends up on your help site and they don't find out the need it's very clear how to

13:53get to you again you don't want this person to say oh heck with it I'll go over to the competing system where they are willing to help me so make sure it's very clear how you get a hold of somebody it's good to be very clear also about where the customer is so this is the help site for snappy very clear we are they might been coming in on Google who knows how they got over here originally sometimes you may have your customers customers ending up on your support site so again it's good to be clear about about where the person is and then of course search these days

14:31everybody wants to be able to search so you need to be all those search or help site pretty common a couple of little things you want to pick a URL that reinforces that they're in the right place so help be snappy calm or maybe it's you know company slash support whatever the case may be doesn't matter the particulars there but just want to be clear about again where they are you know especially nowadays you'll have resources other places so for instance in our case we have support docs on our API those are actually in github so make sure you link out to those things the help site should be kind of central

15:09place where anybody can show up and they'll find everything you have available even if some of those things aren't you know in the help site itself so sending them over to github and then also navigation so navigation is something that kind of sometimes falls out of favor I'm a big fan of having specific navigation on the help site because while people tend to want to just say oh search for the help lot of time the customers don't know the proper term in order to do that and so they end up just searching randomly and they can't just browse for the different areas and say oh yes the users thought that's what my

15:44where my question is and it also lets them discover much more easily where again if it's just search based they're not going to really be able to discover anything this is just another company audiophile engineering they this is a help spa installation you can see very clear how you contact support very clear where to search and very clear to navigate so you can go into the documentation for each app another one campaign monitor so this isn't this particular site isn't on any support tool at all they just built it and also you could build in WordPress sir any other CMS these days but again very clear where to contact you can search

16:24you can navigate okay so some help site tips just one's gonna be a little rant II don't require registration this is one of my pet peeves I really don't like registration for customer support sites I'm already your customer I'm paying you money and you're putting this barrier between me and you and a lot of times I'm only contacting you rarely so I'm going to come back in a year and have to contact you again not gonna remember the password I'm gonna have to do go do the whole password forgotten password thing and reset my password all just to ask you a question I'm already paying you

17:03substantial amounts of money in most cases but to me this is kind of like a battery thing right like you're turning the customer in a battery you're trying to optimize for the metrics so heavily that you're like okay we'll just blockade these people until they log in and give us their information and then the most infuriating part you'll find is that always 100% of time if you're on a site that requires registration for support if you go over to sales you can get a sales email or you can get into whatever the sales process is with no registration and always or almost always that sales email just ends up in their

17:37ticket system so then you'll get the reply from sales and it's just in the ticket system and they just say ok and you know they'll move it over to support so you're making your customer jump through hoops that they don't need to jump to don't expose the internal metadata of of your helpdesk so this thing's like status types categories anything like that nobody cares so nobody cares that the internal status of your ticket is waiting for customer reply right it's totally irrelevant to the customer they have a problem they're waiting for you to give them the solution that's it so don't don't bog them down with a bunch

18:18of internal details and then organize content for customers so you see this a lot too with help systems that might be folder based in their help sites so a traditional knowledge base where it's organized by the staff for themselves so there's this deeply nested folder of information and unless you're kind of on the inside you don't really have any idea of what the proper organization is or where anything you need might be so you really want to keep it organized for the customer always keep the customer in mind they don't know everything about your product they don't know everything about the industry or the proper names

18:58for things often so kind of keep that in mind again that's where navigation comes in to make it easily scannable so they can kind of feel their way around a little bit so in that not a lot to go over in-app I think probably kind of the basics of this but at the very least here's customer i/o you want to give them a link to your help site and then probably have a way to explicitly contact support as you can see at the bottom there so very simple but just making sure when they're in your app they know how to get ahold of support here's so here's snappy our product and

19:40our we obviously use snappy to support snappy which is kind of handy and so we have a widget and so you know this is another kind of more advanced if your support tool supports this kind of thing it's kind of handy you can search from right within the app you can navigate from within the app you can also contact support from within the app so you're not actually sending people out to another website that can do it all right from within the app I'm gonna show off a little bit here but another thing that kind of bothers me is in support documentation you often duplicate yourself because you're

20:18writing you'll have in-app help right like you have a little question mark you know add next to form fields and things like that and so in your app code you have help documentation and then you also help site which has the same documentation and but you know they're in separate places you have to maintain those they always get out of sync with each other you know developers build a new feature and they update the the in half one but they don't update the box because they don't go over to the docs and all that kinda stuff so in snappy and shows a couple of tools I probably

20:51do this as well as you can see here if you click a link in the app that's for help text it actually opens up the widget and pulls that from our help site FAQ system so it's only in one place it's not duplicated when we update it in one place it's a bit everywhere and we don't make mistakes about what's documented and and have errors like that okay so email so email is definitely still king in the support world seen a lot of support tools a lot of new support tools that say we're not doing email any more emails old and funky no more email and six months later they had

21:33email always because customers want to talk to people you know talk to companies do email so you obviously the Hale email pretty much all your support will be email either directly or even if they contact you initially through a forum or widget or whatever that'll end up turning into an email conversation so we'll talk about the ABCs of email a little bit here I got this from Glengarry Glen Ross right so this is how this goes I think always be compassionate right so you want to be compassionate just like Alec Baldwin said always be compassionate so it's hard right it's hard to be compassionate it's really

22:16hard especially when you are the developer of the product too because it's very personal and when people say you know your app sucks and I hate you then take that personally like oh man and it's only because you know they couldn't find a setting somewhere right it's a little thing it's always a little thing but you know the customer gets upset you know you don't you don't want to panic alright so I'm always thinking this all right we're gonna turn that frown upside down so that's what that's how you think you always want to be you always want to have the moral high ground in the conversation of the

22:50customer so even though they're getting upset and using abrasive language you always want to think how am I gonna turn this customer around how am I gonna make them happy and a lot of times you know that customer you turn around that's the one that loves you the most that's the one that goes on Twitter and says those guys are the best because you turn them around from being so upset to being you know the magician who made it all made all okay um so this is kind of my strategy for that I pretty much always apologize doesn't matter if I should apologize like if I was wrong or

23:23not right apologize kind of in that first email back and then I ignore from penis so any any other kind of back and forth after that initial one I apologize and then I focus entirely on the problem I don't think about anything else with the problem and no matter what they say back to me my reply is always something helpful towards getting us to the solution so I ignore any front penis and I just say okay well check this in that and then they'll write back and they'll have checked it and they'll throw in a little one line or maybe that's you know supposed to get me or whatever but

23:57that's fun and I ignore that and I carry on and because once you solve the problem that's it then they're happy so it's all about solving the problem okay so replying to the actual emails this is how you start the reply to a support email a proper greeting Oh ease so you could say hello could say hi whatever you want to do but not just the name you know it's too too formal we're trying to get on a human level here with the customer and definitely not no-name or nothing at the top which I see quite a lot too just a dump in - here's some

24:36info with I can't even bother to type hi and put your name in or even bother to set the support will do that for me outro so the outro is where I like to have a little fun I stole this one from Chase Clements of support ops and the base camp support team so if you have any other questions just let me know and I'll be happy to help so you know letting the customer know how you feel more questions keep me coming and have an awesome Monday like just a little bit of humanity right like is if you were in person there it goes a long way because

25:07remember this is also sales right you want to stay connected to the customer want to know that positive experience so little things like that make a huge difference it takes no time it can be automated honestly but just that little thing is a huge help keep a human so another kind of practical thing is canned responses respond 5000 per front percent faster I've measured that it's a fact but really I mean you have to use care responses so but just be careful it's be careful with care responses because you don't want to be like I don't know if you've ever emailed like Amazon right like you get back the worst

25:48care responses it's totally generic and horrible and you know it's just some machine that turned it out and it's horrific so you don't want to do that so the the intro the greeting and the kind of outro to the email helped with that a lot and then also I use can responses you know not necessarily for entire replies so use just a paragraph right like be customized the beginning in the end but that bit of text that's like how you actually reset your password where you actually go just you know shove that in with a can response and save yourself that paragraph of typing I use them a

26:23lot just for links to like people always ask for a pricing page so I just insert the link to the pricing page but then the rest of my answer might be custom it just makes you way more efficient eliminate the common mistakes all that kind of stuff you know again if you're using a support tool I'm you also have other options here usually and a good one where you can for instance whenever you say I use the pass where it can response right whenever you use that can respond it'll also set the category of that request and it can set the status and it can you know set other fields that might

26:59be options in your system so that you can just use the can response hit you know update and close and be done without having to click all those off and when you're doing 400 tickets a month that's important that's click saved which is money saved okay so I'm organizing tickets I'm not huge on necessarily having a ton of crazy organization I'm like we have customers and help spot who have 200 custom fields and then you know the support they have to fill in these fields in different scenarios and things like that so for a big formal helpdesk sometimes they need those things but for our size companies

27:42you know just the basic stuff is fine so categorize them like just like I was able to show you from you know nine years ago the types of requests we got that's good information to have especially again when you start to maybe get the scaling the support team to have some idea of the types of requests that come in is pretty important at least on a broad level I'm they also big on broad categorization so you don't want to when you go to think about categorizing you don't want to have 50 options you want you know six eight maybe ten categories on the outside we don't even have ten

28:15but just keep it simple so you can quickly select is it pre-sales there's a technical issue keep it simple so you can go through it fast but still collect that basic data I like to assign to individuals so if you do have more than one person working support in any capacity it's usually good to try to not assigned groups of people because they just end up thinking the other person's doing it and then that causes delays it's usually better to assign to a particular person and then let let that you know ticket be reassigned if you need to reassign it to somebody else to work on it and then prioritize so you

28:54know your time is kind of limited gotta prioritize them generally I prefer very simple prioritization also so urgent not urgent done obviously you can get into 1 2 3 4 5 all kinds of different schemes but generally I find urgent not urgent is really all you need because there's either urgent the person's freaking out or it's not urgent and it's fine so you get to it you know after the urgent ones okay so schedule so this is mostly for those of you who are you know on your own doing support right now you know how you schedule these that you're getting back to people efficiently and so

29:32something you want to put a little thought into so this is kind of the schedule I I like to use first thing in the morning then give yourself that break to do coding or marketing or whatever work needs to be done and then after lunch to kind of get your replies so you respond to everybody in the morning those people are going to reply to you you can then get back to them after lunch and then end of the day kind of make sure you clean sweep to have that all all cleared out I think I'm trying to keep it under an hour on that first first response if you can

30:05okay so talk a little bit about scaling support so this was the mistake I made is I definitely didn't hire early enough for support because remember this chart here you see at the end kind of got away from me a little bit there I was taking us a long time to reply so you know it's and it's there's a lot of different options out there now I'd say more than 2005 so hire somebody part-time hire a virtual assistant I think Patrick if he's here uses a virtual assistant with snappy so you know there's a lot of options and again if you know what your support is you know a lot of times sales

30:50support or a basic account issue how to's right those are easy things to bring somebody on and let them help with you can train them if you've been organized about your support over time you'll already have everything kind of ready so you can eliminate that low-hanging fruit you can just drop somebody in there and they already have def accuse they need they already have the can response it's bill you could do a little bit training with them and they're gonna be able to effectively reply to a pretty sizable portion of your customer base early on this is even more true with SAS apps which is I

31:25assume what most of you are working on where there's basically no technical support so there's nobody mailing you with hey my windows 2003 servers broken right so you know how many of those so you pretty much only have you know how do I do something a sales question and those kind of things which are you know very easy to train somebody who's not necessarily developer or or very technical another nice tactic here too is if you hire a part-time support person then especially think you work the mornings doctorly ideal so they can work just like a four hour shift in the morning then they're gonna be able to what's

32:04called triage your your support so they can go through all your support answer anything that they can answer and then they can escalate to you you know what they can't handle and you know they can still do and this will reply to those people so that the person can get an initial response okay where we got your issue we're working on it I've escalated it because you know I need to send it up to developers so the customer gets a fast reply and you can handle that then you know after lunch or later in a day and keep the whole morning to yourself which is usually when most people are

32:36most productive I'm so yeah this is why you know ticket organization is important again if you're using all these the the systems can responses characterisation faq is much easier to get somebody rolling very quickly and and for them just to even be able to properly support your customers because it's all set up for them um you know as you get bigger this is something I definitely like everyone does support so we do that user scape you know developers do support the support and that works out pretty well as well and begin with a SAS app you know normally support people are pretty early hires but with a SAS app if you're

33:20organized by your support you might not have to really hire our support person kind of early on or maybe just a part-time one and people more those resources maybe the developers or sales or marketing or wherever you think those would be be better spent so you know as you do scale your support one of the problems is that then you're kind of out of the loop so you know you're used to seeing everything and knowing what people are saying and what features they're asking for and all the kind of things and now you're not that person getting all the emails so this is really to me is a management issue right like

33:59this is about training people who work for you what to do so they need to keep you in the loop so things like bugs and features obviously can be logged and history trackers but where I see this fail a lot is that so they'll be mechanisms for for reporting up the chain of command problems right so somebody's freaking out there's a bug there's mechanisms for that there's never ever a mechanism for the successes so the nobody ever puts in place a mechanism for the support team you did something great or customers super happy so that's what you want to think about you want to make sure to tell your staff

34:36like hey when somebody's super happy like let me know that and you know then you can work that into marketing and testimonials and all those kind of things but you want to stay in the loop on the successes on the same way you stay in the loop on problems I mean you can use you know chat for that if your remote team our support tools have mechanisms built in that kind of let you do that ESCA Lee or successes as well as problems so different ways to do it so kind of the last thing I wanna cover is surveys so I like periodic surveys because I think it gives the customers a

35:13chance to kind of rate your support over a period of time so you depends on the business but maybe every six months or every year I'm not a big fan of surveys in each support email because they kind of degrade into just the way the people who are mad tell you they're mad and route around your support process and again I kind of view this as a management issue your support team should be able to recognize when somebody's getting upset it's really not difficult it's usually very very clear when somebody is unhappy so I don't like the idea of putting the burden on the customer in every interaction with you

35:54here's a link survey a survey a survey a service like that's not that's not the solution for that I mean if you do want to chalk that chalk it on the support side right the support staff again I've been handling support for ten years I never have a problem identifying somebody who is unhappy or one who's ecstatically happy so track those things on the support end okay so then this one little pet peeve also the follow-up survey a few few days later so like we all hate these right don't you hate these like when you email company and then they solve your problem hopefully and then two days later they spam you

36:33with a link that's like survey us about how we did and it's every single time you contact them Trier's later you get this email so again to me this is again the battery thing you're just you're just trying to push your issues that you're tracking your metrics on to the customer so I would recommend you don't do this but maybe that's just me so big recap time to me support is sales you want to think about it that way and always trying to be delight the customers because over time that's how you're gonna build your business those customers they're gonna upgrade to the bigger plan their business grows they

37:13expand people who work at those companies they get new jobs they say hey that's snappy that was the best we'd love that thing you got why aren't we using that here this is ridiculous you're using this whole other horrible tool right so that's how you get those referrals support channels help site in a half email the rest pretty much ignore and maybe the exception of Twitter and be organized scale your support early thanks man who's about to speak he was up on a mountain about 36 hours ago and acquired a ticket from someone who wanted a refund and this is his only change of clothes because he was he

37:56literally as in hiking gear so after this come up and I have some t-shirts I can give you take up a collection regarding the email I totally see everything about that but do you still do a telephone support and how do you match the telephone support with all the kind of the tagging and all that with with the email support yeah great question so telephone support I I in certain industries you definitely you definitely need it so with help spot we do telephone support how we handle it is we actually use a Ruby which is like receptionist service and so primarily we let them answer the calls who's gonna

38:37have enough people to live answer phone support so we let them answer the calls and then they send us like either a description that they type out or voicemail and then we'll call them back so that's the primary way we handle that it really is pretty effective I know it's kind of fallen out of favor doing phone support so I didn't spend a lot of time on it any time on it but but if you use a system like that where you time shift it the way you can time shift email then it is much more doable for a small company and especially if you're selling anything kind of

39:06enterprise-grade I think that it's it's important honestly not many people actually call you so it's a nice addition certainly if you've like a tiered plan it's an obvious thing to say and you know three tiers up is phone support and then tracking wise again we with the support tool usually you can just tag it as phone or some will have like it helps out there's a specifically way to tag it phone versus email or something else so you could tag it that way and then we're able to track it and was this enter a short description and tag it as phone great question there's another question

39:45sorry how do you avoid the feelings of personal you know like getting attacked or something and how do you avoid ignoring email support right well you know it's um it's tricky I mean honestly in a user Escape we've really only had one truly bad customer in all nine years where they were just just bad to work with so everybody else is like they're just frustrated so I think you just have to really keep that in mind like you know you know what it's like right on the other end where you're trying to fix something you're trying to do something the tools working against you and you're

40:19just frustrated by it so I don't have a particularly basically my motivation really is kinda like I said like if you focus on turning them around and making them happy then at the end of that conversation it's gonna be it's gonna be good like they're gonna be happy you're gonna be happy usually it's not even something that complicated usually need a small thing oftentimes that kind of people fly off the handle about so if you kind of stay focused on the end so just you know stay focused on fixing the problem is always the main thing because if you fix the problem they're gonna be happy so fixing the problem and then

40:51yeah just kind of focusing on the end game the long-term value of turning this customer around first taking it personal and you know getting down into an attack back to them or even getting rude with them so a lot of people off second I go all the way back to attacking the customer but it's a very fine line to even just getting a little bit rude like when they're rude with you and you just you just get a little bit rude back with them that's bad because then they're gonna really be upset right and then you're gonna have a situation that even if you fix the problem they're not gonna

41:18be happy anyway because you were rude to them so if you just stay above that then when you fix the problem you know you're gonna be golden we have time for two more so as one of the people I've come across that has not doing SAS support and so you're like you said you have users using your software on Windows and you have technical support questions about server this server that so we're in the same boat desktop software and 99% of our technical support questions require a lot of domain knowledge you know like Windows this one is that when it's not working this that right how do

41:50you bring on you support staff give them a crash course on all this you know it's a huge domain knowledge right it's a there's not an easy solution really uh-huh so it kind of comes back to whole team support really for us so like since the developers do support and they're not kind of separated out as people who don't do support you're kind of have to get a two-for-one in that when you're a small size company so you have a frontline support person usually who can handle all the simple stuff and then they're gonna have to escalate to somebody more more domain knowledge when you get into those tricky things where

42:28it just requires somebody to to be who knows about you know Windows XP and there's not really good way around that um the best way around that though is like to make sure you just stay up with those bugs right cuz a lot of times it's bugs or it's not really a bug right but it's at this gray area where it's not their fault but not your fault it's kind of weird so those things I always like to make sure we fix those because then at least you know you never get that weird one again and just trying to stay on top of it that way but yeah it's you

42:55know it's hard to the nice thing about doing that ways in terms of having developers do support is it is very tricky to hire developer for only support it's not a lot developers who want to be only a support person so if you have that model where okay like they're doing some support and maybe they're taking an hour their day and doing some support on the flip side they're still getting seven hours of development time so it's not so tricky to find somebody for that scenario as it is when you're just trying to say okay you're your professional developer but you're only gonna do customer support

43:24eight hours done for a self-funded startups do you see me think for a while and wrong with posting like office hours and adhering to them saying Monday through Friday 10:00 to 5:00 or 9:00 to 5:00 that's one will answer support questions absolutely not you definitely want to do that for sure so we do that 9:00 to 5:00 Eastern and you know we sell to UConn and huge corporations and you know they're fine with that like you know you're occasionally I come across the customer who's like hey we need 24/7 support and you can't you can't do that so I definitely don't want to promise that because you know for sure they're

44:05gonna need support Sunday at midnight and you're not gonna be around and they're gonna flip out but you know with few exceptions the police'll on your product but in our case you know helpdesk is something that is heavily utilized right so we have HubSpot customers with hundreds of staff and they're using it 24/7 365 and you know we still only have support 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday and you know it's really never been an issue so definitely wanna be honest about that and I don't think it's a problem at all to set those expectations for a couple it's again Ian alright hit me up later