Excellent Customer Support Takes Two!
There are plenty of suggestions out there for providing great customer support, but there’s not much that we’ve seen on how to get great customer support. Part of being a great customer is the inevitable interaction with a customer support person when something goes wrong or when you have a question.
Being on the receiving end for thousands of support and customer service requests we’ve learned a thing or two about how you should go about putting a customer support request together. How you communicate has a lot to do with how your request is handled. Here are some tips:
Remember there’s a human on the other end.
It doesn’t matter where your customer support rep is, even if you are leaving him or her a voicemail or writing an email, your words will be heard or read and they are still human. Treat them with dignity and respect. Their sole purpose is to help you so be kind and thank them in advance for their assistance. The nicer you are the nicer they’ll be in response — this is simple human nature. You also have to remember how stressful and sometimes just difficult the customer/technical support line of work is. What might end up being a quick reply to your request (one liner email response) might have taken the tech an hour or two of tedious work to resolve your issue.
Don't assume that your problem is really a problem.
Let's say you call our customer support team about an issue - let's pretend your email isnt working (and you are upset). You immediately think the server is down and before the tech answers the phone you are already fired up. But with many issues, a safe estimate would be about 1/3 of our support tickets, are not even a server problem but a problem with your computer and/or internet connection. Now at this point, once we verify that "our side" of things are completely operational. We then begin troubleshooting "your side" (i.e. your computer and modem). I would say, out of these instances, 90% of them can be resolved immediately. Note that we are not a computer support company, that is what Geek Squad does, they come to your home or office and fix your computer. However in an attempt to provide exceptional customer support, our techs will try the steps to help you get functional once again. Be sure you realize that this tech just went way past his call of duty and saved you a $100 service call.
Don't get upset if the phone is not answered at the moment you call.
Leave a voicemail or simply visit http://www.ajtsupport.com/ and submit a ticket. Sometimes Clients get bent out of shape because they tried calling 3 times within 10 minutes and get the voicemail each time. Remember, the tech(s) on duty also have a responsibility of watching over the network and performing maintenance on all servers. They might also be working a really complicated issue. Regardless of the reason, realize that a voicemail electronically opens a ticket in our system and you will get a speedy reply. We did some "secret shopper" testing and compared our response time to that of some of our competitors on several occasions. In the few times we did reach the voicemail, the AJT tech had already replied while we were still on sitting patiently on-hold (in an seemingly endless queue) waiting to speak with a tech from the competition. Our PBX phone system has these queue capabilities, however it is so much nicer to not have to hold a burning phone to your ear for an hour.
Pick and choose your emergencies
If you have a legitimate emergency, the absolute fastest way to reach our team is to fill out a quick ticket here: http://ajtsupport.com/email-support.html and be sure to mark "High" or "Emergency" as doing so will set off audible alarms in our operations center as well as send SMS text messages to all managers and customer support representatives. You will get a reply within minutes. Legitimate emergencies include (but are not limited to); email down, website down, urgent change required - basically use your judgement, its not OUR place to tell you what an emergency is.
Don’t assume your request will be ignored.
I’m always surprised by the number of people who start or end their email with “No one will probably see this, but…” Don’t assume that. It devalues the request, starts the exchange off on a negative, and puts the support agent on the defensive.
Don’t start with a threat.
“Do this immediately or else…” or “If you don’t do this I’ll report you to the Better Business Bureau” or “If you don’t do that I’m going to report this to my bank and other authorities” or “If you don’t respond within 4 hours you’ll be hearing from my lawyer…” It’s not uncommon to hear this on 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 your cause. Given the choice to help two people, the customer service person is naturally going to help who appears easiest to help first. Plus, people will do more for others who are kind to them than they will for someone sounding bitter and dismissive right from the start.
Provide useful, descriptive, relevant information.
This can be a tough one since people don’t always know what’s relevant, but think it through before you send your support request. 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.
Don’t write overly detailed, wordy support requests.
The longer your email the more of a burden it puts on the customer support person. They have to read the entire thing (I’ve seen simple support requests balloon into two printed pages), sift through to find what’s meaningful, and spend more time figuring out exactly what’s wrong. Since they’re trying to help you, you want to reduce their burden. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. So, be clear, concise, and brief. More words often confuses instead of clarifies the issue. Save the wordiness for the thank you email once the problem has been solved.
We hope this is helpful. Just as customer support folks need to learn to provide great customer support, customers need to learn how to be great customers.
Being on the receiving end for thousands of support and customer service requests we’ve learned a thing or two about how you should go about putting a customer support request together. How you communicate has a lot to do with how your request is handled. Here are some tips:
Remember there’s a human on the other end.
It doesn’t matter where your customer support rep is, even if you are leaving him or her a voicemail or writing an email, your words will be heard or read and they are still human. Treat them with dignity and respect. Their sole purpose is to help you so be kind and thank them in advance for their assistance. The nicer you are the nicer they’ll be in response — this is simple human nature. You also have to remember how stressful and sometimes just difficult the customer/technical support line of work is. What might end up being a quick reply to your request (one liner email response) might have taken the tech an hour or two of tedious work to resolve your issue.
Don't assume that your problem is really a problem.
Let's say you call our customer support team about an issue - let's pretend your email isnt working (and you are upset). You immediately think the server is down and before the tech answers the phone you are already fired up. But with many issues, a safe estimate would be about 1/3 of our support tickets, are not even a server problem but a problem with your computer and/or internet connection. Now at this point, once we verify that "our side" of things are completely operational. We then begin troubleshooting "your side" (i.e. your computer and modem). I would say, out of these instances, 90% of them can be resolved immediately. Note that we are not a computer support company, that is what Geek Squad does, they come to your home or office and fix your computer. However in an attempt to provide exceptional customer support, our techs will try the steps to help you get functional once again. Be sure you realize that this tech just went way past his call of duty and saved you a $100 service call.
Don't get upset if the phone is not answered at the moment you call.
Leave a voicemail or simply visit http://www.ajtsupport.com/ and submit a ticket. Sometimes Clients get bent out of shape because they tried calling 3 times within 10 minutes and get the voicemail each time. Remember, the tech(s) on duty also have a responsibility of watching over the network and performing maintenance on all servers. They might also be working a really complicated issue. Regardless of the reason, realize that a voicemail electronically opens a ticket in our system and you will get a speedy reply. We did some "secret shopper" testing and compared our response time to that of some of our competitors on several occasions. In the few times we did reach the voicemail, the AJT tech had already replied while we were still on sitting patiently on-hold (in an seemingly endless queue) waiting to speak with a tech from the competition. Our PBX phone system has these queue capabilities, however it is so much nicer to not have to hold a burning phone to your ear for an hour.
Pick and choose your emergencies
If you have a legitimate emergency, the absolute fastest way to reach our team is to fill out a quick ticket here: http://ajtsupport.com/email-support.html and be sure to mark "High" or "Emergency" as doing so will set off audible alarms in our operations center as well as send SMS text messages to all managers and customer support representatives. You will get a reply within minutes. Legitimate emergencies include (but are not limited to); email down, website down, urgent change required - basically use your judgement, its not OUR place to tell you what an emergency is.
Don’t assume your request will be ignored.
I’m always surprised by the number of people who start or end their email with “No one will probably see this, but…” Don’t assume that. It devalues the request, starts the exchange off on a negative, and puts the support agent on the defensive.
Don’t start with a threat.
“Do this immediately or else…” or “If you don’t do this I’ll report you to the Better Business Bureau” or “If you don’t do that I’m going to report this to my bank and other authorities” or “If you don’t respond within 4 hours you’ll be hearing from my lawyer…” It’s not uncommon to hear this on 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 your cause. Given the choice to help two people, the customer service person is naturally going to help who appears easiest to help first. Plus, people will do more for others who are kind to them than they will for someone sounding bitter and dismissive right from the start.
Provide useful, descriptive, relevant information.
This can be a tough one since people don’t always know what’s relevant, but think it through before you send your support request. 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.
Don’t write overly detailed, wordy support requests.
The longer your email the more of a burden it puts on the customer support person. They have to read the entire thing (I’ve seen simple support requests balloon into two printed pages), sift through to find what’s meaningful, and spend more time figuring out exactly what’s wrong. Since they’re trying to help you, you want to reduce their burden. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. So, be clear, concise, and brief. More words often confuses instead of clarifies the issue. Save the wordiness for the thank you email once the problem has been solved.
We hope this is helpful. Just as customer support folks need to learn to provide great customer support, customers need to learn how to be great customers.
posted by The Team @ 9:12 AM
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