Customer Service Archive

Last summer I wrote a real world review of the NY-based appointment planning and physician review service ZocDoc. The first usage went very well and I was looking forward to testing out the service with a dentist. Let’s just say the experience was the complete opposite but the story has a positive ending.

Early this morning I headed down to the Financial District are of Manhattan to meet my new dentist. I found him on ZocDoc and while he had no reviews, he had a few openings and accepted my insurance. I entered the dentist office 10 minutes before my appointment to fill out the silly paperwork. I sat and waited 25 minutes, finally get called, sit down in the chair and then learned that they had no one to perform the services I specifically requested on the ZocDoc site. Not one apology except to tell me that if I was willing to sit out in the waiting room for "hours", maybe they could fit me in. I lost three hours when I could have been writing startup reviews! I told the office manager that their first review on ZocDoc wouldn’t be pretty.

So you are wondering why in the heck I am telling you about my dentist appointment. Here’s why…

I arrived back home and within minutes the phone rang. Karsten from ZocDoc called me to apologize for what happened this morning. I told him that it wasn’t ZocDoc’s fault. We spoke for about ten minutes and he offered me an Amazon gift card for the trouble. I couldn’t take the card as it wasn’t their fault but very much appreciated the offer. I hung up the phone and smiled – not a form email but a personal call to tell me they were sorry for what happened. Remember that ZocDoc is basically a marketplace service.

Have you planned out what your support strategy will look like? Do you have processes in place to monitor and report on your support inquiries? It does not mean you need to go out and buy an expensive package but having a way to classify and categorize your support inquiries will give you an eye into the business.

Isn’t it amazing that so many of us running web service startups are willing to help our customers and potential customers at any time of the day or night but those in the real world can get away with horrible service? It’s almost where if we don’t reply to an email, Facebook message, Tweet, etc. in minutes at any hour of the day or night, people wonder.

Last week I commented on another blog that what we write is what the new crop of developers think about and build. I don’t think enough bloggers think about this when they write. And I believe that it’s services like ZocDoc that developers should be looking at for inspiration in process and details (concept will be different) rather than wondering how to build the next Fart app or Twitdock.

AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold has a post today discussing his time doing customer service. He suggests that all CEOs should do some customer service and support noting, "you will never think about your product and customers in the same way."

I’ve always been a nut about customer service starting from my very early days delivering newspapers. I would take Alex’s statement one step further. During my time leading product teams and large-scale marketing programs, everyone had some time on the customer service hotline. Designers, developers, marketing, it didn’t matter to me. While some of the team needed a coach from customer service to help them with the replies, it taught the team lessons about what customers look for in a product. The projects always seemed to finish stronger and we’d consistently receive more positive feedback.

It’s one thing to see the feedback on a chart or graph, it’s another thing to be immersed in it yourself. Products like GetSatisfaction are a good start. Check out what happened when we put 10 of the top Web apps to the customer service challenge. It’s worth a read – Technorati ranked worst, Dogster ranked at the woofpack.

Below I’ve emebdded a video from VW. It’s their latest commercial for the Golf. It made me wonder how many times we just hear, but don’t listen. Goes along with the customer service theme above.

Canadian blogger Mark Evans discusses customer service when a service is free. Let's clear this up quick; Skype is free for some but not all. I just renewed my SkypeIn for $18 (did this go up in price??) and voicemail at $6. I also paid for unlimited SkypeOut ($25?) and in my book, that's enough to expect better communication than I received last week. It doesn't mean the service can't experience an outage, but it means I better know what is going on. Skype used their Heartbeat blog to let us know what was going on and that's great but why did I receive not one email? They have my email, they have every bit of info on me since I pay for their service.

Andy Beal agrees and notes:

Well, I pay for a Skype In number and Skype Out credits. I use Skype as my main office phone – so, yes, I expect more from them. ;-) What sucks is that I didn’t get a single update from Skype. I had to rely on reports from the web.

Mark does raise an interesting point about Freemium services, those that offer a free plan and a premium option. What should the support level be for each? Should it be the same or different? My belief is that a company like Skype needs to offer staggered levels of support based on the plan(s) a customer subscribes to. Customer service has been a very important part of my package since I worked at the grocery store at 14.

Last November I wrote a post titled, "Customer Service: Free vs. Paid Services" in which I describe the minimums that a free service needs to offer for support. They are:

Must have:

• Community Help Forums – I like Drupal as the example here, a completely free app with no advertising and their support forum is awesome – 85% of the time, someone has helped me (or I have helped) within 12 hours. This can also help you gain valuable knowledge into how your users view your application.
• FAQ – This is a must have. As inquiries come in, either through email, forums, etc. Get it up, make sure it is updated frequently. A good job for an intern.
• Wiki – This is similar to the FAQ but allows for open editing by service users.

Good to have:

• Email support – offer a way for users to email you for help. Make sure you tell them when to expect a response (24/48/72 hours, etc.)
• Phone support – most probably can't afford this, but with new services out there, you could have customers leave voicemail messages with questions or comments, and then get back to them. I would consider this to be the best possible level of support.

So I ask, what level of support do you expect from a service that you use for free or generating revenue from your usage of their product?

Pingdom, the company known to help alert you when your site is down, continues to put out great blog posts about uptime statistics. This one is a doozy!

They claim that there has been over 11,614 years of website downtime in March alone! Check their blog for the math.

Here is a snippit:

Even though 0.27% of downtime may seem like a relatively small number, it becomes huge when you look at the whole picture, i.e. the entire internet. Even a small improvement in overall uptime of websites on the internet would have a big impact overall.

It’s hard to put a price tag on downtime. For some websites it simply doesn’t matter, and for some it’s a disaster. However, 4.2 million days of downtime in just a month should leave a significant financial mark. Over a year that would mean a total of more than 50 million days of downtime.

How long was your site down in March? I believe CN was up 100% as Pingdom did not alert me even once during the month.

One of the questions I am asked a lot is, "Allen, how do I convert my free-plan customers, to paying customers?" The answer I typically begin with is, "Ask them." Customers are happy to stay where they are. You need to poke and prod them to move.

Tonight, I walked over to the golden arches (I know I know….) to pick up some heat lamp food. I placed my order and the cashier (a young girl about 16) asked me, "Would you like 2 apple pies for $1 with the order." I replied with yes and she smiled. After I paid, the manager said to her, "see nadine, all you need to do is ask." Of course he had no idea I wanted the pies anyway! (I wish they would bring back the old-school pies, these new baked ones bite!) Then she tried a slushie. I said no to that. So she was able to "upgrade me" just by asking. Next customer in line also took the pies! Now the manager again tried to explain how just asking a customer if they would like a dessert item makes them think about it when they may not normally think about it.

Netzero is also a master of this technique. They poke and prod me to upgrade my mother's free subscription about once a month, sometimes offering a free week trial of their ultimate package.

So here is my suggestion for your startup. Gently poke your free customers every once in a while. Make it seem like upgrading is more than just spending money, but explain the benefits. Perhaps offer a trial of x time to incentivize them to upgrade. Remember, a good percentage of the time when a customer starts a trial upgrade, they will remain on the upgraded package.

If you give this a try, drop me a line and let me know if it worked for you. I would be happy to provide some guidance for options for the incentives and "poking" options. Most importantly please remember that if you don't ask your customers to upgrade, they may never make the jump.

Tara Hunt has an excellent post today about customer service and how to both receive and integrate it into your product or service. I have been a nut about customer service since I was a youngster and have written about it several times.

This post is so well written that I am entering it into the "Post of the Year" contest. Here are her 12 points, go to her site for all the discussion…

1. Listen to expert users, but don’t (often) integrate their suggestions. 
2. Intermediate users may not tell you what they need, so watch their behaviour. (and sometimes when they tell you what they want, what they actually want is very different)
3. Respond to every feedback suggestion, even if you respond to tell them you won’t be integrating it.
4. Try not to take flames and other negative feedback personally.
5. If you do use a suggestion that is unique, give credit to the person who gave the suggestion.
6. Indicate changes with a flag.
7. Smaller, incremental changes or one big dump of changes?
8. Don’t hire your biggest fans.
9. Don’t overlook really simple, small suggestions.
10. Ego doesn’t belong here.
11. Trying to please everyone will leave you with a boring product.
12. Do it right over doing it fast, but don’t take forever.

Customer service can absolutely be a differentiator for your product/service and it is important to think about from day 1. Ted from Dogster made one of the first people he hired a customer support person. Number 10 is one of the hardest things to handle when you created the app, own the app, love the app and also do the service.

This is just a quick note that I received excellent service today from Digg. It appears many of the stories that people have submitted to Digg from CenterNetworks have been buried. I just didn't get why or if some group of baddies were burying everything.

I sent in an email asking for help and received a reply within 20 minutes. In fact our email conversation went back and forth 4 times and each time the reply was quick, intelligent and on point.

Thank you Digg… now if we can just get some stories to hit the home page!