7 ms·

I grew up in Brazil, where customer service was bad-to-terrible in 90% of the companies I had to deal with. When I moved to Australia, I thought it would be a

I grew up in Brazil, where customer service was bad-to-terrible in 90% of the companies I had to deal with. When I moved to Australia, I thought it would be a lot better. It wasn't much different. When I joined a wine subscription startup in 2016 as the technical co-founder, I wasn't just building the recommendation engine. I was also helping to pack the boxes at the warehouse. We all got fascinated with Tony's book "Delivering Happiness" [1]. As I packed boxes, I listened to the audiobook several times. Then I read it later on again. I'm still surprised how bad customer service is in most companies. Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now. A few years later and our customers are obsessed not just about the wine we recommend. They also write love letters about how happy they are to deal with our customer service team. I'm still writing code on the other side, but it makes my day to see that part of the business working so well. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happiness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happi...

backtoyoujim 6y ago
Compensation goes a long way to making customer service agents care. So does equity.
- mjayhn 6y ago
  Yeah my one call center experience involved cameras over everyones desk and the cruelest management team I've ever experienced that watched you like a hawk.
all_blue_chucks 6y ago
How do you measure your customer support staff performance? Many companies fire employees for having "low numbers" but since they can't measure tone, they end up driving their reps to optimize for other factors.
- jrowley 6y ago
  Some companies actively solicit feedback after interactions with customer support, about the interaction. Those surveys link back directly to the agent. More generally there's also NPS.
  - foxdev 6y ago
    I always give those the maximum number of stars/smiles/whatever and put the interaction in the best possible light no matter what. I always assume problems at the front line start somewhere further back.
    - vandahm 6y ago
      I do the same. The people I blame for bad service are always outside my reach.
- lozaning 6y ago
  When I used to work support in global escalations for a big multinational, my manager, nor his, ever knew what to do with me. I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else. I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls. Management could never come up with a purely zendesk based overall performance metric I wasn't near the bottom of. I never much cared because at least weekly a customer that I helped would try to convince me to quit and come work for them as a private consultant, making it incredibly hard for my manager to convince me I should change anything at all about what I was doing. I left after 3 years and shortly after the whole thing got outsourced to an Alorica call center. So I guess management did figure it out, they'd rather have 4 people who's only qualification is the ability to fog a mirror, giving out near worthless support very quickly, than pay for 1 person like me.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    I'm curious how come you didn't move to a customer if customers were offering to hire you every week?
gowld 6y ago
> Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues This is what caused service reps to waste everyone's time with elaborate fake displays of empathy and forced unwanted small talk. I'd prefer an efficient robot.
- untog 6y ago
  Everyone is different. What you’d prefer is not what others would prefer. Hopefully a customer service agent is going to be able to pick up on someone who dislikes small talk and just get the job done.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    If I’m calling CS for a problem a robot could fix, engineering have really screwed up.
steve_adams_86 6y ago
I really believe customer service this effective is worth its weight in gold. I worked on a SaaS product that was essentially a booking engine. Vacations, rentals, tours, b&bs; etc. Their product was complete shit and it was so stressful to work on. Nearly a decade of terrible choices and the wrong technologies stacked up like a card house. The only thing that kept the customers there was the insanely talented and competent customer service. They knew the app inside and out and were able to smooth out the insane number of rough edges for new and old customers alike. When gifts were sent to the company, they were typically sent to customer service. Everyone in CS was paid terribly. It really bothered me. The software team was doing a Bad Job and getting paid well for it, and CS was really saving everyone’s asses. Since then I look at the customer support team a lot differently.
Dramatize 6y ago
Also in Australia. That's exactly the same strategy I used growing the initial version of 99 Bikes ecommerce store. CDBaby was also a big influence.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  That site looks great.
- SyneRyder 6y ago
  +1 for the CD Baby reference. Derek's book Anything You Want is maybe my all-time favorite business book. I still remind myself to "Treat every customer like Mick Jagger" when replying to customer emails.
tjr225 6y ago
> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now. This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person. I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to do so. Almost all of my customers speak to me in a rude tone. I have no incentive to pretend to have an interest in their issues. I don’t think the issue is with customer support, but general attitudes among IT professionals. On top of this, customer success is treated as a second class to engineering even if our problems are harder and more stressful. Imagine finding a bug and being blamed for the bug not being fixed while at the same time engineering is mad at you for wanting it fixed. Gross. Anyway- support; never again.
- CarbyAu 6y ago
  For me the biggest issue was authority/power on the Service Desk. The worse cases are when the Customer Rep gets a problem from a customer they have little power to resolve. When you are: - logging tickets to a black hole of "higher tier" support with no communication back to you. - "chasing them up for the customer" aka by putting notes in a ticket ...you feel powerless. Then when the next call comes in from the customer you begin to think "Why am I even here. I can't do anything..." Customer Support need to see their efforts make a difference, just like most people, in order to be motivated to do it again.
  - Gracana 6y ago
    As a customer, it's a painful experience when you realize the support people are in this position. I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. At a certain point (around the third three hour phone call, in my experience) it feels like they're mocking you with their saccharine lies, and I begin to loathe the company they represent. I suppose if I was an entrepreneurial type, I'd try to disrupt industries like that by creating a company that charges extra to provide service that doesn't make customers want to spit in your face. Surely there's a market for that...
cafard 6y ago
In his In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery, Wilfrid Sheed wrote that a guaranteed route to success for any company would be to put its intelligent people on the phones and hide the morons in management where they can do only limited damage. I wish I could remember the context.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I thought the morons were already in management. That’s why they don’t invest in customer support, right?

backtoyoujim 6y ago

Compensation goes a long way to making customer service agents care. So does equity.

mjayhn 6y ago
Yeah my one call center experience involved cameras over everyones desk and the cruelest management team I've ever experienced that watched you like a hawk.

all_blue_chucks 6y ago

How do you measure your customer support staff performance? Many companies fire employees for having "low numbers" but since they can't measure tone, they end up driving their reps to optimize for other factors.

jrowley 6y ago
Some companies actively solicit feedback after interactions with customer support, about the interaction. Those surveys link back directly to the agent. More generally there's also NPS.
- foxdev 6y ago
  I always give those the maximum number of stars/smiles/whatever and put the interaction in the best possible light no matter what. I always assume problems at the front line start somewhere further back.
  - vandahm 6y ago
    I do the same. The people I blame for bad service are always outside my reach.
lozaning 6y ago
When I used to work support in global escalations for a big multinational, my manager, nor his, ever knew what to do with me. I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else. I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls. Management could never come up with a purely zendesk based overall performance metric I wasn't near the bottom of. I never much cared because at least weekly a customer that I helped would try to convince me to quit and come work for them as a private consultant, making it incredibly hard for my manager to convince me I should change anything at all about what I was doing. I left after 3 years and shortly after the whole thing got outsourced to an Alorica call center. So I guess management did figure it out, they'd rather have 4 people who's only qualification is the ability to fog a mirror, giving out near worthless support very quickly, than pay for 1 person like me.
- user5994461 6y ago
  I'm curious how come you didn't move to a customer if customers were offering to hire you every week?

gowld 6y ago

> Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues This is what caused service reps to waste everyone's time with elaborate fake displays of empathy and forced unwanted small talk. I'd prefer an efficient robot.

untog 6y ago
Everyone is different. What you’d prefer is not what others would prefer. Hopefully a customer service agent is going to be able to pick up on someone who dislikes small talk and just get the job done.
- danielheath 6y ago
  If I’m calling CS for a problem a robot could fix, engineering have really screwed up.

steve_adams_86 6y ago

I really believe customer service this effective is worth its weight in gold. I worked on a SaaS product that was essentially a booking engine. Vacations, rentals, tours, b&bs; etc. Their product was complete shit and it was so stressful to work on. Nearly a decade of terrible choices and the wrong technologies stacked up like a card house. The only thing that kept the customers there was the insanely talented and competent customer service. They knew the app inside and out and were able to smooth out the insane number of rough edges for new and old customers alike. When gifts were sent to the company, they were typically sent to customer service. Everyone in CS was paid terribly. It really bothered me. The software team was doing a Bad Job and getting paid well for it, and CS was really saving everyone’s asses. Since then I look at the customer support team a lot differently.

Dramatize 6y ago

Also in Australia. That's exactly the same strategy I used growing the initial version of 99 Bikes ecommerce store. CDBaby was also a big influence.

jacquesm 6y ago
That site looks great.
SyneRyder 6y ago
+1 for the CD Baby reference. Derek's book Anything You Want is maybe my all-time favorite business book. I still remind myself to "Treat every customer like Mick Jagger" when replying to customer emails.

tjr225 6y ago

> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now. This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person. I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to do so. Almost all of my customers speak to me in a rude tone. I have no incentive to pretend to have an interest in their issues. I don’t think the issue is with customer support, but general attitudes among IT professionals. On top of this, customer success is treated as a second class to engineering even if our problems are harder and more stressful. Imagine finding a bug and being blamed for the bug not being fixed while at the same time engineering is mad at you for wanting it fixed. Gross. Anyway- support; never again.

CarbyAu 6y ago
For me the biggest issue was authority/power on the Service Desk. The worse cases are when the Customer Rep gets a problem from a customer they have little power to resolve. When you are: - logging tickets to a black hole of "higher tier" support with no communication back to you. - "chasing them up for the customer" aka by putting notes in a ticket ...you feel powerless. Then when the next call comes in from the customer you begin to think "Why am I even here. I can't do anything..." Customer Support need to see their efforts make a difference, just like most people, in order to be motivated to do it again.
- Gracana 6y ago
  As a customer, it's a painful experience when you realize the support people are in this position. I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. At a certain point (around the third three hour phone call, in my experience) it feels like they're mocking you with their saccharine lies, and I begin to loathe the company they represent. I suppose if I was an entrepreneurial type, I'd try to disrupt industries like that by creating a company that charges extra to provide service that doesn't make customers want to spit in your face. Surely there's a market for that...

cafard 6y ago

In his In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery, Wilfrid Sheed wrote that a guaranteed route to success for any company would be to put its intelligent people on the phones and hide the morons in management where they can do only limited damage. I wish I could remember the context.

saagarjha 6y ago
I thought the morons were already in management. That’s why they don’t invest in customer support, right?