When we first started the customer support department at Plaxo, it was offered by a handful of engineers with very little (or zero!) experience in support. It was a good learning experience for all of us as we were able to get instant feedback from our members. It was also a time when we only had 10,000 members.
Fast forward several years and a few more members (just add 10 million) and things got a bit complicated. Though engineers still answer questions, we have a customer care team that handles the bulk of our support emails (this has been expanded to include voice and chat). So how does an organization get better? There are many sources of good information detailing ways to improve. The basics are common sense, simply following what you would expect yourself.
I'm not alone when I tell a story of calling some company's customer support that didn't know any of these common sense rules. The call spirals out of control, where the support agent becomes abrasive, defensive and less than enthusiastic about resolving the problem. And no matter the proof our conversation showed, assumed I had no understanding of technology. Being in the business, I should be a fairly easy call to handle.
In general, customer support has a bad rap. It also doesn't help that companies have 15 levels of paid support typically in your favorite colors: silver, gold, fuschia, titanium, plutonium, whatever. In the end, customer satisfaction dwindles while companies simply try to find ways to mask the weak points in their support offering. But we're not all bad. And as the head of Plaxo's customer care, I'm actively looking for ways to set a new standard in care.
I'm always curious what makes someone feel good about their support experience. In reading through discussion lists, forums and blogs, I came across one, 37 signals, that captures the summary of what any support agent hopes for in every email, chat or phone call they receive. As much as support agents are taught "treat your customers the way you would expect to be treated," this is a nice twist addressing the fact that many customers come into a tech support experience with a bias. They're already on the defense or attack because they assume they're about to be mistreated.
So in the sake of making the world a nice place, here are some tips from that blog, combined with tips I've added from our experience. Remember that communication is the important ingredient.
1. Treat each interaction as unique. It's not right to take your anger out on one particular tech support representative, even if you are really busy or have never received good support. In turn, tech support should always assume the customer has a basic understanding of the product or service. Let the customer lead you to whatever level of technical detail they're able to talk at.
2. Remember there’s a human on the other end. It doesn’t matter that you’ll never "meet" again. You're still talking with an actual person. Treat them with dignity and respect. It is simple human nature that the nicer you are, the nicer the response you're likely to get.
3. Be patient. Sending the same email ten times to ten different support channel emails will only slow things down. The support agent is forced to read each of your emails before responding. And for the agents, when you've asked the customer for a specific piece of information, don't lose your focus, or begin helping another customer when the customer is getting you what you need.
4. Provide useful, descriptive, relevant information. This can be tough since people don’t always know what’s relevant. If you are having trouble logging in, don’t just say "I can’t login. Any ideas?" Instead say "Whenever I try to login, the login screen just reloads without an error message. I know my username and password is correct. Any ideas? Thanks." That extra bit of information will help considerably and will reduce the number of back-and-forth emails between you and the support person.
5. But don't get overly detailed and wordy. If your email is too long (I’ve seen simple requests balloon into two printed pages), customer support has to sift through the entire thing to find what’s meaningful. This means more time spent figuring out exactly what’s wrong. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. Be clear and concise.
6. Starting a conversation with a threat is not a good idea. "Do this immediately or else" or "If you don’t respond within 4 hours you’ll be hearing from my lawyer," are not uncommon first lines in the first email from people. I don’t know if folks assume you are out to get them or they’ve been burned before, but starting with a threat never helps. Given the choice to help two people, the customer service person is naturally going to help who appears easiest, first. Plus, back to point #2, people will do more for others who are kind to them than they will for someone sounding bitter and dismissive right from the start.
7. Screenshots, screenshots, screenshots. These are a support agent's best friend. If you have the ability to visually show your problem, it can be diagnosed quicker and, hopefully, resolved faster. Screenshots are a first step, but remote assistance (a support service we offer to our Premium users) almost guarantees resolution within minutes.
8. Escalate. If you feel that you're not getting the proper support, ask for a different agent to help you. Or ask for a supervisor or an escalation technician to assist in the matter. Every support agent should know that your time is valuable. And it's very important for you to know that their time is also valuable - their success is based on finding resolution to your problem quickly and efficiently without giving up any of the above customer support rules.
9. Provide feedback. Good support organizations ask their customers for feedback. Great organizations listen very carefully and carry out those suggestions, especially on feedbacks or surveys. It's an opportunity for you to let them know if and how they need to change. Take that quick 30 second survey. It only helps the organization, and the agent, become better the next time around.
Have any tales of good support experience or additional useful tips?
Hi, I'm Hong Kwon, one of the senior QA leads at Plaxo. I'm not going to write much about how we do QA at Plaxo, other than there are currently 5 of us here in Mountain View sitting in a desk pod near the center of the office, and yes, we do test our products a lot. No, what I'm going to write about is somewhat more momentous: dog poop.
Let me preface by saying (because first, Plaxo loves dogs, and second I'm sure many of our dear readers do as well) that I really like dogs. I've just never owned one, which may explain my discomfort at the experience which I will now relate.
We were on our way to one of our quarterly team lunches. We'd split into two cars and were headed to the Country Gourmet on El Camino and Rengstorff. Mohamed and Ramesh were in one car, and Wendy, Ana and I were in the other. Suddenly, a little reddish-brown dog shot across the street, barely avoiding getting flattened by a Hummer H2 (no joke).
I looked in the rear view mirror and saw the dog running in zigzags across the street, like a neverending game of Frogger. Wendy (my manager) and I looked at each other, and I said, "We should stop, or that dog is gonna get killed." Indeed, cars were swerving and screeching to halts, and it seemed only a matter of time before the dog became pavement paste.
So we pulled a U-turn a few intersections down (illegally, sorry Mt. View police!) and headed back towards a parking lot where the dog was now leading a guy wearing glasses on a chase. Ana and I got out of the car and jogged over, planning on trying to head the dog off. Just as I was starting to meet up w/ the guy, the dog did a U-turn and streaked by me, back into the street (nearly getting flattened by a Pontiac) and into the Google parking lot. Damn, that dog was fast.
To make a long story short, eventually the 3 of us cornered the dog underneath an SUV in the Google parking lot, and the guy with the glasses was able to pull the dog out from under the car, but not without getting bitten under his fingernail. All of us were panting, and smiling at each other somewhat sheepishly, in that "We're strangers who met performing a good deed" kinda way.
I felt bad for the guy so I offered to hold the dog while he washed his bleeding cut. Since the dog had all her tags (I think her name was "Tessie") and looked like a reasonably cared-for lap dog, I assured him that he was probably safe from rabies.
I was holding Tessie, while we were calling the owner and the animal control respectively, and I gradually became aware of the a) smell and b) liquid warmth of Tessie's dog slobber, which was dripping down my arm. Well, what are you gonna do, dogs slobber. But this seemed to be particularly stinky dog slobber.
Ana got the owner's answering machine. Doh! But I was able to get through to the Palo Alto Animal Control and had the dispatcher send out an officer to pick up the dog. At this point, our friend with the glasses Dave (who happened to be wearing a Google visitor badge, that's why I know his name) came back. I handed the dog over to Ana.
That's when I noticed the dog poop on my hand and shirt.
I really do like dogs. However, since I've never had dog poop on my hand and shirt, I was pretty grossed out. At this point, Wendy brought the owner over, who turned out to be an elderly woman. She explained that her dog had jumped out of the car window ("She must've opened it herself, it was just open a crack!") and had proceeded to run down Amphitheater Parkway through the slalom of cars.
The owner looked at my shirt and said, "Oh, I'm sorry, is there anything I can do?" I was about to say, "Yeah, I'll send you a bill for the dry cleaning, lady" but instead I just smiled in my best Good Samaritan way and assured her that it was quite all right, all in a day's work, you know. I called the dispatcher and told him that all was well.
The owner went off with her dog (according to Wendy, the owner told her that she was on her way to bring the dog to get shots... sorry Dave), Dave the Google Visitor went to go catch a flight (which he was on his way to when the dog cut across his path), and Wendy, Ana and I went off to Country Gourmet for lunch, I holding my hand out at a distance, careful not to touch myself or anything else in the car. Once we got to Country Gourmet, I spent some quality time in the rest room trying to disinfect and deodorize myself. Then we had to explain to Ramesh and Mohamed what happened. They were quite amused.
All for a QA team lunch. Yep, QA and saving dogs is a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.
I just got back from being on a panel at Supernova entitled, “The Personal Infosphere.” The panel was moderated by Jeff Clavier, (SoftTech VC), and included Dalton Caldwell (imeem), Yael Elish (eSnips), Hans Peter Brondmo (Plum), and Tariq Krim (Netvibes).
The format included ~6 minutes of introductions/product demos, and then we dove deep into the discussion. Since most of the other panelists run businesses driven by user creation of rich media and the associated broad sharing and categorization of that media, we had some interesting debates related to:
- The relative value of social filtering (e.g. recommendations from people you know) vs. more collaborative filtering (i.e. relying on the wisdom of crowds to derive implicit recommendations/rankings)
- The ways in which the relatively unstructured modes of communication and sharing popular in consumer applications can get translated into a more structured enterprise environment
- Privacy and copyright issues
- Whether a lot of these sites are just creating new information silos, rather than promoting broad sharing and discoverability
All in all, a very interesting panel, although we studiously avoided any discussion of such mundane matters as business models or the applicability of some of these services in the broader marketplace. Plaxo was somewhat of an outlier in terms of the nature of the content we provide, maturity of the company and business model, users base, etc.
Dan Farber just posted an interesting write up of the panel.
Were you at the panel? Any thoughts?
Also, just a reminder that our own John McCrea will be on a panel at Supernova on Friday called Who Owns "You"?.
Today is a big day for Plaxo. It’s the first day of Supernova, and that means it’s the first day of the first show Plaxo has ever sponsored. Why Supernova? As big conferences are disappearing (thank goodness), and largely considered irrelevant, Supernova came out of nowhere three years ago and took the industry by storm. The organizer, Kevin Werbach, isn’t swayed by hype or big names, and instead, is intrigued by the disrupters who are influencing and changing the way things are done. In other words, Kevin's created a venue that "keeps it real" and facilitates conversations we believe we can contribute to.
Specifically, Ben, our CEO, will be on a panel (The Personal Infosphere) this morning with Dalton Caldwell of imeem, Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum, and Yael Elish of eSnips to discuss the tools needed to tame the torrent of information we’re all bombarded with daily. And I’ll be on a panel on Friday afternoon (Who Owns “You”) with Seth Goldstein, Root Markets, and Kyle Brinkman, MySpace, to talk about our online identities, reputations and who owns that info. Should be interesting.
Our second move into the sponsorship arena is next month’s Mashup Camp, but more on that later…
UPDATE: Here's Ben's write up on the panel he was on.
What excites us in particular about Yahoo's latest hack day is the focus on actually shipping working products--"from idea to prototype in a day" as Chad Dickerson says. While it's great to see all the internal demos of Haxo projects people have worked on, the hard question is always "how do we get this stuff into the hands of real users?" Some projects end up getting rolled into future versions of our officially shipping products, but others are better suited as "side attractions" for a smaller audience of interested users to play around with. With that in mind, we're working on creating a "Plaxo labs" site where we can release many of our Haxo projects outside of our normal release channels (i.e. quicker but rougher). The plan is to have them all hit our production databases (so you can try them out with your real Plaxo account and data), but hopefully to reduce the risk that comes with releasing software that hasn't gone through the usual rigor of design and testing by keeping the code largely separate. As soon as we have it up and running, we'll let you know.
One thing that will help us (and others) ship new Plaxo features more quickly and with less risk is to make greater use of our APIs. As we continue to enhance our APIs and expose more of our core functionality, it will be easier to build rich experiences that interact with your Plaxo data and clients, yet which live entirely outside our main codebase. That's also why we're trying to make it easier to do simple Plaxo mashups like our Address Book Access Widget or the contact-info-on-your-blog widget mentioned above. Yahoo's hack day tagline is "mashup or shutup", so they clearly feel the same. :)
Part of the task is getting the word out to developers that you have these components available to use. So look for us at a lot of community events like the recent Dojo Developer Day and the upcoming Mashup Camp 2 and OSCON, both of which we'll be presenting at. And please continue to tell us what you'd like us to build to better enable you to build on top of the Plaxo network!
--Joseph Smarr, Software engineer and Haxo enthusiast
From the "what's life without a passion outside work" files... I've been working for the past three years on learning to play the piano and accompany myself singing (I've been singing for many years now, since learning Indian music as a child). It's been a great challenge; learning a complex instrument, a new genre of music (the blues and jazz), and singing while playing.
Anyway, my teacher had her annual student recital yesterday, and I sang and played "How Long Blues." It's tradtional blues, first popularized (I think) by Big Bill Broonzy. This version is an improvised arrangement I created for piano and vocal, based on a version by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson.
Here's the video:
Would love your feedback. Hope you enjoy it!
-- Swami, VP of Business Development
I didn't think it was possible to see the entire San Diego Zoo in less than 3 hours. I didn't think I would enjoy seeing elephants, hippos, and dik-diks going by in a blur. I didn't think we would ever make it out of Los Angeles. But over the last 18 hours, all of those things happened.
We drove up the beautiful coast of California, marveling at the vineyards...then just looking at the vineyards...then praying to never see a vineyard, grape, or raisin again in our lives. Even though it was a long day, the end was in sight. Midnight brought relief to the HipCal team when we saw our house in Los Altos, despite the fact that our beds would be the bare floors in the unfurnished 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath, quaintly appointed estate seated on 1.2 acres (I'm also going into real estate). We all had a great time on the trip, but we're looking forward to settling in and getting to work at Plaxo (whom we'd like to thank for bankrolling this operation, which included paying Silent Chris' bail after that incident in Nebraska).
Our new digs in Los Altos
-- Pete Curley, Product Manager
Ring ring....ring ring...Hello? Hi it's the moving truck man, we're going to show up 3 days early...whuh-oh. We cut our trip short in Vegas and booked it to San Diego. Massive thunderstorms blocked the way but we didn't let that get in the way of unloading our small kitchen appliances on time. We chose the Ramada Inn Limited based on their website which CLEARLY shows that Shamu (who seems to live forever and travel from SeaWorld to SeaWorld whenever I happen to be there) and his orca whale buddies would be joining us. No whales. Even Silent Chris' best orca whale mating call couldn't draw them out. We found solace at the Wendy's across the street that could be easily accessed by running across 4 lanes of traffic in the middle of the night. Tomorrow we wake up early and head to the San Diego Zoo before driving 8 or so hours to our home in Mountain View.
-- Pete Curley, Product Manager
With the $29/night deal at the South Coast hotel, we decided to splurge and get two rooms this time around. Pete and I decided to take it back to freshman year and share a room, while Glenn, Garret and S. Chris took the other.
We started off our day in Vegas with an early dosage of the slot machines while we waited for the Lunch Buffet to open up. While the slot machines entertained Silent Chris and Pete by doubling the money they put in and then slowly taking it away from them, Garret and I sat and kept pulling on the lever as it just kept eating away at whatever we fed it. Glenn was still recovering from the money he lost the night before in Poker.
After the buffet, we hopped onto the complimentary shuttle and went into the famous Las Vegas strip. While the Bellagio, Caesars, and Mandalay were great, we ended up sitting down at the Barbary Coast to enjoy their $2 drink specials and experience in first hand Elvis reincarnated as a 300 lbs man, otherwise known as Fat Elvis.
Half way through the show, we decided to move on and start heading back to the hotel to cool off in the pool, the weather outside was a beading 109 degrees. Although we initially planned to go back to the strip to check everything out at night, we decided to grab dinner and catch a movie (also part of the hotel+casino) instead and leave the night-time exploration for the following night.
P.S. Does anyone know of a good car carrier that can ship my car from New York to Mountain View? So far, the only company that has offered to ship it in a timely manner has over 200 complaints with the Better Business Bureau.
--Tawheed Kader, Product Manager
Salt Lake City was a welcome stop after the tedious, 8-hour, drive from Sidney, Nebraska which consisted almost entirely of the state of Wyoming. When checking into our hotel we were told that no pets over 45lbs were allowed so Silent Chris had to stay in the car (we made sure to leave the windows open a crack). While heading up to our rooms we came across an elevator which continued moving down after the doors had already opened, so we decided to take the stairs.
According to Wikipedia the capital of Utah is said to contain over 1,500 people per square mile, but every street, sidewalk and store seemed entirely deserted. We began to wonder if we’d missed an important evacuation notice on the way in. The fact that every building had been rebuilt four years ago for the Olympics added to the awkward feeling we had while walking around. Since an indoor pool and hot tub were waiting for us back at the hotel, we quickly ate and hurried back. Unfortunately, a very grumpy man kicked us out after 20 minutes so he could lock up.
Tomorrow we head to Vegas to test our self control...
-- Garret Heaton, Software Engineer
After waking up at 9am and purchasing our hearty Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast, we began our trek from Chicago to Nebraska – easily the most boring 12 hours of our trip. Once we were through the bizarre tolls of Iowa and Illinois, paying 80 cents every 10 minutes, the long, long journey truly began. Halfway through Iowa, we made a quick stop at the “Largest Truckstop in the World” before grudgingly returning to our cars for the next 400 miles.
For dinner, our target was a dine-in Sonic located in Grand Island, Nebraska. Although we have been subjected to Sonic’s national advertising for several years, we have never had an opportunity to actually eat at one, since the nearest one to Troy is hundreds of miles away. The stop was well worth it: push-button ordering, prompt service, easy debit card payment, and dozens of drink options made our experience one to remember. Unfortunately, the next five hours spent on I-80 to Sidney, NE was perhaps the most uneventful, mind-numbing drive in the whole trip. Upon arriving in Sidney, we promptly checked in at a local Holiday Inn (four to a single room) and fell asleep to prepare for tomorrow's trip to Salt Lake City. Even though the trip is fun, we can’t wait to get to Plaxo.
-- Chris Rivers, Server Engineer
We spent the second day of our trip in Chicago. We started the day by walking down the "Magnificient Mile". There were lots of cool things to see, especially this crazy thing:
I'll tell ya, we had a hard time tearing Silent Chris away from the image of himself. Once we got "Silent Narcissus" out of his trance we went to this mall thing where the only interesting thing was the Lego store and found this:
Then we visited the Navy Pier:
At this point we were pretty tired from walking around all day so we went back to the hotel for a bit. We all ended up taking a nap except for Garret who used this free time as an opportunity to iron his entire wardrobe. When we woke up, we were in the mood for some authentic Chicago cuisine. That was all too expensive so we went to Bennigan's instead.
-- Glenn Dixon, Server Engineer
After loading our meager possessions (a Ron Popeil food dehydrator included) onto the moving truck and saying goodbye to our 3-legged kitty Wobbles …we set off on our voyage to Plaxo in Mountain View, California. Our first day of driving would be 13 hours to Chicago. We went to the RPI student union to spend what was left of the money in my student account (it turns out that I had zero). When we walked out to our cars, Garret and I found freshly written parking tickets on our windshields. Not a great way to start off the first 5 minutes of our trip ☺. The drive was mostly uneventful until around 10pm somewhere in Ohio. In the road was what was left of a deer who had had an unfortunate accident with a previous motorist. But that didn’t stop Chris “Deer Slayer” Rivers. Thump Thump. That deer just couldn’t catch a break. The Slayer denies any hostility towards our woodland creatures but we’ll make sure nothing like that happens again.
We drove into Chicago and found our Best Western on East Ohio Street. After parking and trying to check in, we were told that we were at the wrong Best Western…ours was 5 blocks down the street. I’m not sure how there could possibly be two Western’s that have been considered the “Best” in the same city but I have alerted the company and I’m sure the error will be fixed. We got to our rooms and did something we had always wanted, watched Law & Order in a different timezone. Cross that off the lifelong to-do list. Tomorrow we’ll be spending the day in Chicago before heading off across the Midwest.
-- Pete Curley, Product Manager