The Customer Service Advantage

Users of software are used to being treated badly. By the nature of a startup, you’ll have a small number of users in the early days so you can offer much better customer service than the giant companies with 50+ reps. That’s a structural advantage you should exploit.

AWS is a prime example of, let say, less good service for lower-level customers. You actually have to pay $12/mo to raise a technical support ticket (via a 9-step form!) and then you wait 24 hours for an email. If the rep doesn’t solve your problem on the first attempt, you’ll wait another 24 hours.

I guess the counterargument, is that AWS is quite established and their model has been proven to work. Do they need prime support? They probably see it more as a burden, and the resources involved in, for example, cutting response time in half with a 300-rep support team would be immense.

It’s not only AWS though. For the last twenty years, it seems like scalability, self-service and automated software companies that require little human involvement have been cherished.

However, good customer service now surprises customers and this is the trend where I think the opportunity lies. We’re now so used to being maltreated I can’t help but wonder if the pendulum is about to swing the back? Are we increasingly going to value personality, context, and the human service layer on our products?

If you reply to a customer within 10 minutes or go out of your way to solve their problem, that’s actually something people will tell their co-worker, boss, or friend asking how they manage that problem, which just so happens to be your product.

Superhuman, as I wrote about earlier, is a great example of this trend. See this tweet, this tweet, and this reaction to their support efforts.

This might represent a window where, as a startup, you can be ridiculously inefficient and obsessed with going out of your way to make users happy. And because you won’t have many users, still yield positive ROI through word of mouth, retention, and insights about the users you talk to along the way.

It’s not easy to measure though and I must say, I don’t have much suggestive evidence of positive ROI, so let’s explore it a bit more.

A Balance of Trust

I think the best way to think about it is as a balance of trust or emotional bank account with each individual user.

Let’s take surveys as an example. Everyone hates filling out surveys, and for that reason, it’s a big ask to put on users. You need to use these asks sparingly so that users don’t tune you out when you ask them to try the new feature you launched, pay for the service, or sign up to your this and that.

A deposit on the account is what a user subjectively considers a value add. A transaction where they get more than you take from them. For example, when you jump on the phone to help a user figure out a problem, or honestly advice them on what’s in their best interest.

You’re creating trust, and I think this is why it might be a good idea to tell someone when your product is not right for them, rather than try to fit a square peg in a round hole. It makes you trustworthy, and when that person talks to a friend that your product would be right for, they won’t hesitate to recommend you because they trust you.

Withdrawals are more nuanced, but if you tell a customer you will call them but never do, or sell them something that doesn’t do as advertised, you’ve cashed out.

Harnessing Insights from Users

Making users happy is powerful enough, but the insights you can gather from merely talking to your users are probably more important. Let’s take a fictional example I would often experience. Imagine Susan, a user that reaches out for help on your live chat. Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, or whatever you use.

She is trying to export some of her data from your web app but can’t get the date range working.

You grab screenshots of the steps and instruct her on the configuration. Well done, you’ve made a deposit on the account and she goes:

Wow, that was quick, thanks a lot Thomas!

She’s now much more likely to permit a small withdrawal, like answering a question.

No problem Susan, anytime. Do you have any suggestions on how we could make the date range more obvious for other users?

I found that users would actually be flattered to be asked for their opinion when it was so contextually relevant. Typically, I’d see them go something along the lines off:

Well, because I export the data to use in such and such system, it would be much better if you just had such and such.

Bingo. You’ve harnessed feedback on the UX that should go straight to engineering - and now they feel like you’re receptive to feedback, they’ll often keep going.

Actually, I’d also love to see this and that, and if you could fix that annoying thing with this, and make it easier for my boss to see this…

Suddenly, this support ticket is turned into real insights about the user, the market, and UX.

Now, it’s one thing managing this as two founders. You just tell the other when something remarkable occurs. But how do you capture this data and share it with 20 support reps, 30 engineers, 40 sales reps, and 10 marketers?

Do you raise a feature request in GitHub for the engineers? Do you screenshot a message and slack it to the marketing team? Do you hire a data science team to build models and dashboards for this?

Hmm… I don’t know, but it’s a challenge I never managed to crack. There doesn’t seem to be products that directly address this besides giants like Qualtrics that were snapped up by SAP for $8b in cash!

I guess I’ve should have a look at that.