When you visualize customer support teams, what image pops into your head? Probably a roomful of listless people in cubicles with headsets on. They read from a script or punch questions into their computer and try to get you out of their hair as quickly as possible.
I've never enjoyed that experience as a customer, and so I vowed that our company would always strive for direct engagement, honest answers, and real assistance. Over the years, we've used various methods to provide support, usually centering on a community-based website. We also supplemented with private tickets using our own home-grown system (dubbed QuestionShark years ago).
We've generally had a small team of people who were "support," and backed them up with help from area experts from outside of "support." In addition, we've been fortunate to have a hard-core group of customers and friends of the company who help each other too. And this gets to the heart of our latest system...we're all in support.
Now that we've turned QuestionShark into a publicly available product, we're using it ourselves to take customer support to a new place. Literally everyone in the company is responsible for monitoring incoming inquiries and offering help. That means that a billing question can be answered directly by Bean Counter Jenny, a product suggestion can be read by our CTO, Barry, and a "hey, my site's down" can be answered by Jeff in Ops.
We're skipping the middleman, saving time on all sides. It takes Jeff 10 seconds to provide an answer because he just came from the data center, whereas a "support person" would have had to seek Jeff out and find out why the customer was having a problem.
This system also gives everyone a chance to interact directly with our customers....the reason they have a job. As a developer, you might have a better understanding of why a feature has been requested if you just talked to a real person who is trying to accomplish something new with your software.
For years, we've enjoyed offering "the CEO answered my question! On Thanksgiving! At midnight!" I hope to continue that tradition for years to come, and with QuestionShark, allow more companies to do the same.
I've never enjoyed that experience as a customer, and so I vowed that our company would always strive for direct engagement, honest answers, and real assistance. Over the years, we've used various methods to provide support, usually centering on a community-based website. We also supplemented with private tickets using our own home-grown system (dubbed QuestionShark years ago).
We've generally had a small team of people who were "support," and backed them up with help from area experts from outside of "support." In addition, we've been fortunate to have a hard-core group of customers and friends of the company who help each other too. And this gets to the heart of our latest system...we're all in support.
Now that we've turned QuestionShark into a publicly available product, we're using it ourselves to take customer support to a new place. Literally everyone in the company is responsible for monitoring incoming inquiries and offering help. That means that a billing question can be answered directly by Bean Counter Jenny, a product suggestion can be read by our CTO, Barry, and a "hey, my site's down" can be answered by Jeff in Ops.
We're skipping the middleman, saving time on all sides. It takes Jeff 10 seconds to provide an answer because he just came from the data center, whereas a "support person" would have had to seek Jeff out and find out why the customer was having a problem.
This system also gives everyone a chance to interact directly with our customers....the reason they have a job. As a developer, you might have a better understanding of why a feature has been requested if you just talked to a real person who is trying to accomplish something new with your software.
For years, we've enjoyed offering "the CEO answered my question! On Thanksgiving! At midnight!" I hope to continue that tradition for years to come, and with QuestionShark, allow more companies to do the same.
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