Customer Care
The Environment of Business Development vs Sales
Sales are the ultimate panacea. We’ve heard it before and in many ways it’s true: “Sales cures all ills.” Since recently moving into a primarily business development role, this point has been more clear to me than ever. Not only does it keep the lights on, but it also allows hard work to be rewarded, investors to keep capital flowing liquidly, and the limits of innovation to be pushed forward. But is it really the sale that creates that environment?
Although sales enables this to happen, it is business development that creates the environment. There are some great posts out there about the difference between business development and sales. Blog posts by Seth Godin and Andrew Dumont are a good place to start. What I am saying here is nothing new, and a recent opportunity I had to make some smart business development choices highlighted the difference.
With an opportunity to help a prospect cross the finish line and become a customer, I was naturally happy to close. Typically I wouldn’t be involved in a client making a payment, but they had a few last minute questions about our terms and I was pulled in before payments were processed. In this particular case, the environment in which this sale was happening was built with the help of a partner who we work with regularly. Suddenly I was faced with pushing the sale through, or taking a step back and considering what kind of environment that would promote. Had we built the confidence we champion with this customer? Were we serving our partner well by simply stepping aside and letting their customer enter our system without that trust? I held back, and, instead of passing them on to our billing department, I had a few long conversations with our new (soon-to-be) customer to build trust.
Focusing on making a sale would not have created an environment of success. Sales provides some very powerful medicine, effective against most business ailments. Without a long view, however, there are side effects and complications. Business development is that long view towards creating an environment in which the business can be successful outside and in.
Customers will come and go, but a strategic view along with strong partners help create an environment of more than sales enablement. This environment supports the long-term health of a company, and strengthens customer retention. A good sale is like a blip on the radar, but business development will create more blips, bigger blips and an environment where a business can thrive, create a strong team and push innovation forward.
Bugs and Sales: Why everyone should know how to report a bug
When you deal with customers on a day to day basis, there are a few reasons why being able to understand a bug and put together an effective a bug report can be very helpful. I’m not going to explain how to write a bug report (perhaps in a future post), but rather why knowing how is so important. It will help you close your sale, give your customers a better experience once they become users, and ultimately it will save your company valuable time and money.
For starters, in a sales role you’ll have plenty of opportunity to think on your feet. Sometimes this means coming across a bug when you’re on a demo and it’s very possible that a customer will be watching over your shoulder. When this happens, you’ll probably find the need to immediately explain what you were expecting to happen (and what should/will happen when they perform the action). If that sounds familiar it’s because that’s basically the core of what a bug report is - what happened in relation to what should have happened. Communicate how the current behavior is different than what’s expected and you’ll be turning the script back to the product and it’s functionality so your customers will understand how the feature will work when they use your product.
Besides being able to close the sale, showing your customer how to react to a bug can turn a sticky situation into a teachable moment. These things happen in software and let’s be honest, it’s possible there are more bugs in your live environment. With a calm approach and good communication, hopefully your customer will understand how they should approach, and ultimately report, a bug when they ever encounter one. If they are equipped to deal with it effectively then they will be more understanding when it happens and, more importantly, their feedback will help you get a fix into the works as soon as possible.
What this all translates to is helping your developers develop. No matter what bug reporting tools and process you’re company uses, at some point in the life of each bug someone is going to have to figure out what is actually wrong. Wouldn’t it be good to get that at the onset of the bug’s discovery? Whether the bug is discovered in the sales process or reported by a customer through support, the sooner a proper report of the issue is on paper, the more time (money) you’ll save. And after all, what we’re really striving for here is that everyone on the team should possess a complete and comprehensive understanding of the product and it’s functionality - truly understand your product and you’ll be better prepared for this and many other situations.
Breaking the Fourth Wall: When customers enter your support space
Before joining the tech community, I spent many years at a local bike shop. Customers would come in all the time looking for help with their equipment, and eager to learn how to get the most out of their experience. We sold much more than just cycling products, we enabled a lifestyle and supported an entire community of users that sought us out for guidance. Because they could come into the store, look us in the eye, and start the conversation face-to-face, there was an inherent confidence on the part of the customer that they were in the right place and going to find a solution. In the tech industry, we can take lessons from this experience to make our modern support just as charming and effective for the user.
When a customer comes into your space, not only have they broken that fourth wall, but they are doing so because they expect a favorable outcome. That is certainly the case for a main street shop, but is it so clear when submitting a support ticket remotely? The answer is that it needs to be, and we must make it so.
Most of us, no matter what side of the consumer-producer equation we are on, are unfortunately familiar with contacting support and never hearing anything back, or having a stock reply that doesn’t instill much confidence that the experience is going to yield a solution. This has two effects on users’ attitudes. Sometimes this diminished sense efficacy makes users reluctant to contact support in the first place. Other times users will shoot from the hip as soon as they are confronted by challenge without a completely obvious solution because, well it’s just an email after all.
When the expectations are so low, it’s easy to meet them. We should be doing much more than that, however, as this paradigm is shifting. Consumers now make purchase decisions based on the support they hope to receive. If your company can build a strong reputation for taking an interest in individual user, then you will do better selling your product and enjoy stronger customer retention. This is especially significant if you rely on a renewable subscription to keep the lights on.
When a customer breaks that fourth wall, contacting support, they are coming into your space. Just like when a customer walks through the door of a shop on main street, this is an incredible opportunity. If the user is the type who comes through the door with low expectations for their support experience, then you have someone that you can really make an impression on. If the user is the type who shoots from the hip for their support question, then you’ll get them familiar with the level of support they can expect. This will help mold their behavior when contacting support, and will smooth out the support process for them by setting expectations.
What you do with that process is yours to decide, but always keep in mind the incredible opportunity posed by a user contacting support. They have broken down the barrier between user and service. They want to learn. They want to use your product. What more could you ask for?
Customer Care Essentials: Building on success
Laying the Customer Care Groundwork — This is the final part of a three post series explaining the essentials of starting out on the right foot with customer service. You can find the first post here and the second here.
BUILDING ON SUCCESS
Now that you have established your procedures, and then ensured that your entire team is capable of executing them, you’ll want to get the most out of the work you’ve done. Follow up with customers, especially if they contact support a lot. Make sure that you answered their questions, find our if your solution worked. This will do two things: help with market research and foster evangelist customers.
When you follow the solutions your customer care staff responds with, you’ll be able to understand whether or not the customer was successful after they contacted support. This will tell you a bit about your support process, but also should grant insight into the original issue itself. Why did the customer have a hard time finding that setting under their preferences? Maybe there is something unique about that user’s behavior that will help inform a future change. Perhaps everyone struggles with a certain feature, but you’ve never been able to figure out why. Getting in a customer’s shoes is essential here, and once they’ve broken the fourth wall by engaging your support staff, they’ll be much more eager to open up than a randomly selected population of customers would be.
Having a support inquiry answered effectively and getting your user on the road to success with your product will change the relationship that user has with your company forever. Ensuring that this process is both pleasant and effective will ultimately yield customer evangelists. These are customers who will go out and spread the good word for you. We all know that a bad review can be devastating, but some good word of mouth and a true believer out there working for you can pay dividends. When this happens, you have a lot to be proud of. You converted a moment of struggle for your user, into a positive experience that will retain that customer and help attract new ones. Best thing of all? It’s free.
THE END GOAL
This is going to be different for every company, but it usually involves enriching the lives of your customers in some way. Whatever goal you have, it will drive your product, and your company, forward. Good customer care is essential. There’s a lot more to say on the topic, but these are some good ideas to start out with. After all, your end user is what it’s all about.
Customer Care Essentials: Communicating with your team
Laying the Customer Care Groundwork — This is part two of a three post series explaining the essentials of starting out on the right foot with customer service. You can find there first post here and the third here.
COMMUNICATING WITH YOUR TEAM
Time is money, right? In fact, the time of some members of your team is potentially worth quite a lot of money. It might seem silly to include an engineer in a conversation about customer care standards, but situations do arrise where you’ll be glad you did. With that in mind, though, it’s important that everyone understands the fundamental customer care goals of the company. This will help every layer of your organization package their work with the customer in mind.
When features are delivered to your sales and customer support teams (often one and the same), even if it’s just an improvement to a back-end process, your staff on the front-lines should be able to answer the question “How will the make my customer’s lives better?”. When all levels of the organization have this in the back of their minds, the information that is delivered down into the trenches of customer care will be much more valuable to your end-users.
You might even find yourself in a situation, as I recently did, where a developer or engineer will interact directly with one of your customers. Whether it’s scoping a new feature with input from a power-user, or getting feedback from an early adopter, these situations do happen - especially in small organizations. You’ll be glad that your entire team already shares your company-wide philosophy towards customer care. Fostering an environment where your customers can be part of the process can be very effective for both providing good support and building customer evangelists.
Customer Care Essentials: Setting Standards
Laying the Customer Care Groundwork — This is part one of a three post series explaining the essentials of starting out on the right foot with customer service. You can find there second post here and the third here.
OVERVIEW
Your current customers are gold. Having your existing users psyched about your product, and company, is key. Setting standards of customer care - and then living by them - is essential. Good relationships will give you valuable market insight, maintain long-time customers, and help you acquire new users. Whether you have are in the process of bringing a product to market, or are already established, you have to consider how you will build on your user-base.
FIRST SET STANDARDS
You’ll never be able to build on your success if you don’t understand how you got there, and that means setting your standard operating procedure (sounds dry, I know - I used to work in government, sorry). Now, I don’t mean that you need to have a SOP manual approved by some ad-hoc committee commissioned with that sole purpose, but simply put, if everyone is to be on the same page, that page has to be first established. That means setting standards for language - for example, making sure everyone on your team uses the same terms to describe each feature of your product.
It’s also important to make sure that everyone on your team understands how to speak to customers. This may seem obvious, but unfortunately it’s often taken for granted. Most of us in the tech industry wont ever make face-to-face contant with the vast majority of our users. Despite this, the lessons learned in my past life in retail certainly apply. When a user contacts you, they are coming into your space, your environment, and you need to make them feel comfortable. Think about your experiences with customer service, and spend some time working with your team to bring out everyone’s feelings on the topic. Listening to eachother speak about real experiences on both sides of the coin desk will help your team get in the right mindset and get on the same page in a more general sense.
The logistics of answering support inquiries is also importan to establish. What kind of response times will you expect from your team? Will you provide your support 24/7? If so, how will you determine who is on call? These are some of the questions you should be asking yourself. Having a good support infrastructure will help a great deal when all of these situations start to play out. We use Zendesk, which should come as no surprise since the widely popular services is used by more than 20,000 companies.