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How to provide good customer service.
Updated on 2009-08-21
Created on 2009-03-24
Category: Business & Finance
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Your Product is Free Because You’re Lazy and Scared (Ian Landsman’s Weblog v2.0)
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Of course, I agree with charging people for a quality product. I make my living doing it. However, I think there’s a point he’s missing in there. It’s a point that people often put aside as not the primary reason, but I think it’s a much more prominent factor than people think. What’s changed in the past few years is that many startups are founded by programmers and programmers are inherently lazy.
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In some ways of course they’re not wrong. It does take an incredible amount of time to answer all those emails. On the other hand, if you have more emails than you can handle that’s probably a good sign. Also, those people who take the time to email in often end up being your best customers and biggest spokespeople. They have more than just time invested, they have hard cash invested and that’s a big difference. They want you to succeed, they’re loyal and they are in many ways a new companies biggest asset.
David obviously has a business focused mind and 37 started out as a customer focused company, which is why it seems logical to them to charge for things you create. I think this is very much the exception these days so it’ll be interesting to see if David is correct and this starts to swing the other way. - 1 more annotations...
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Don't Neglect Your Customers : Spencer Fry
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From day one I instituted two mantras: (1) everyone would be treated equally whether they were a paying customer (Wooh!) or a free customers (Meh) -- Wooh! and Meh are our two plans. (2) E-mails would be answered whenever I was awake (so not just your typical 9-5) and no e-mail would be left unanswered when I went to sleep at night. And along with that, I'd clear out all e-mails when I woke up in the morning as well.
The reasoning behind (2) is quite simple: the more quickly you respond to e-mails the happier your customers will be. The reasoning behind (1) is what so many startups fail to consider. Any customer that is signed up for your free plan is potentially a paying customer and therefore just as important. Not only that, but free customers are often your biggest advocates. Maybe they can't afford to upgrade, so in turn are extremely grateful for the free service you provide them and will spread their joy to everyone they know. It's a lot easier and less expensive to market to your free customers than to market to people who haven’t used your service yet and startups forget this all the time. Good customer service is the most effective marketing plan.
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OPEN Forum by American Express OPEN | The Art of Customer Service
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The irony of customer service is that at an intuitive level, most people know that it largely determines a company’s reputation, but companies spend less money on it than sales and marketing. The double irony of customer service is that nothing I’ve listed is particularly expensive. Now you know what to do, how to do it, and how cheap it is to do, so you have absolutely no excuses for poor customer service.
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Hacker News | Ask HN: What kind of support do you offer for your web app?
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What I want to know is what kind of direct support do you offer your customers (i.e. email, phone, chat) and what kind of self-service support do you offer?
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I think the key to support is to be lightening quick. If its taken over 4 hours you're failing
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Hacker News | Ask YC: Is a particular methodology of customer service advocated at YC?
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To us, Wufoo is the model for customer service. So the one sentence version is: do whatever Wufoo does.
The most conspicuous thing they do is to respond very rapidly. Meaning in minutes. But they are not just fast. They listen to their users, and understanding what they need guides their future development.
That's probably the most important thing to know about customer service. It's not just something to make users feel better. It's an incomparably valuable source of information. One of the reasons we advocate launching quickly is to get access to this information quickly.
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Hacker News | Wufoo customer service
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The Wufoo guys seem great all around - business approach, design, technology (their PHP profiler from today), and customer service.
I egotistically wish their main product was different, because I want to use what they make, yet I don't need HTML forms.
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No, customer service is part of marketing.
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Hacker News | Wufoo's Secret to Customer Happiness? Googly Eyes
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This is an example of the difference between "Good" and "Great".
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Wufoo in general is a good simple success story. Its a story of polish. Polish in concept, site design, feature set, attention to detail, hand written thank you for using our service notes and more. They are a good envious benchmark for you want to be.
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DIARY OF A WEBSITE :: DESIGN BY CAFFEINE » Blog Archive » Wufoo and the art of customer service
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Going beyond expectations
My usual expectation of a service is that it works, plain and simply anything above that I usually don’t bother to wish would happen as often it’s just not worth it. We’d all like to feel we’re a valued customer but in this faceless day and age that doesn’t happen very much. Just like everyone else I usually settle for the service billing me correctly and not breaking down. It’s like we’ve all become desensitised to bad customer service. Even when things do break the margin we ‘grin and bear’ things about is just plain huge. The glee that I felt from this card from wufoo really only goes to show that in business if you do bother to go the extra mile you stand out a mile.
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