Joel Liu's List: customer service

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?
• I think the key to support is to be lightening quick. If its taken over 4 hours you're failing

• 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.

• 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.
• No, customer service is part of marketing.
• Wrote them a message yesterday -- got a polite and helpful response in under an hour. Great CS....

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• This is an example of the difference between "Good" and "Great".
• 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.
• You bring up a good point. Right now, we're still small so everyone has a support day and talks to users almost daily. At this size, we all appreciate the close communication with the people using our product and we write those cards out of free will (not just a job description). Chris wrote more about it here:

  http://particletree.com/notebook/the-4-12-day-workweek/

  Now, as the company grows, this may have to be adjusted. The cards did not start as some marketing stunt, and we never want that message to be sent to our users. When cards from developer X don't feel personal enough, we'll have to brainstorm some more creative ways to thank our users.

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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.