How do you deal with customer support? Tell me everything you hate about it!
Hey hey!
I'm currently trying to understand how people handle their customer support, to see if what I have in mind is worth making 🥸
For now, my theory is that this is how people feel when it comes to customer support:
Looking to confirm or disprove this.
So, tell me, how do you handle your customer support and what do you hate about it? How much time does it takes you? What tools do you use?
P.S. You can also send me a DM on Twitter if you don't want to share infos here
P.P.S. Bonus: What's the most ridiculous request you received?
Edit: Seems like repetitive questions is a recurring problem from what I saw, which confirms my hypothesis!
If that's your case, I'm working on Galeby, an AI that can answer repetitive questions for you, looking for private testers if you're interested!
For a few years I ran an online business creating and selling premium website templates for the Weebly website builder.
It was good money but man the customer support aspect was so brutal and tiring. These were users without much technical knowledge, and Weebly constantly had these odd bugs that would come and go. My customers seemed to always find these weird edge cases that I didn’t account for in development (oops!) so 1 in every 3 tickets were an exercise in debugging and optimizing these templates for the client’s use case.
I’ve moved on to taking on client-work. If I’m going to spend hours debugging a product for a customer, I might as well just bill it as a custom project.
When I ran the weebly templates shop, 80% of my time went towards support.
Ah, indeed 😅
Wonder how websites like Wix and stuff do on a large scale tho, I guess at some point you can probably fix most of the edges cases?
I started to work for a customer care company when I was pretty young.
As much as I hated the job back then, it gave me a lot of insights and techniques.
I always had the highest scores and positive feedback from customers (they called on their own to tell my boss about me). I am happy about that, because I know I can handle it very well with customers and love to help them.
Now for my own product ERA - The Markdown Note-Taking Tool For Developers it is a blessing because I can turn conflicts and critical users pretty well into satisfied users.
Sure, we are small and there are not that many requests and customers who seek support, and at one point (I wish) it gets too much. But somehow customer care is very important for your image and satisfied customers. So, why should you hate it when it is a good communication base with interested or already paying users.
I totally understand your point. I used to have an eCommerce brand, and had a customer service assistant that played a huge part in the growth, people were leaving reviews saying the customer service was amazing haha
Now, the problem is when you do it yourself, and when you start to grow and have lots of messages, it can take the focus away from growing the brand.
Also lots of people get not-so-nice messages from user who are not-so-polite, and don't even take time to read the doc, so that's why I think lots of people don't like it
Sure, it will take a lot of time - but it will be worth it.
Who cares if they are not polite, if you try your best to make them happy, they will appreciate it. Even if you don't even care, as long as your attitude is right, he will be appreciating your way of talking/helping/writing.
If you have employees for that, and they know it's just a very basic job, and dont have the passion like you have (because its your business) your customer support and the impact of that will be very bad.
Most companies work like that: outsource customer care at the cheapest price. You can see the result on their band reputation.
I think people in the customer care area should be more appreciated, pay them more, give them the feeling of importance (because they are!) and you will have way better results.
Mhhm, you can still get amazing customer support by outsourcing for cheap, you just need to have a very good hiring process! (Source: 4.8/5 rating on a previous business I had, 100% outsourced)
I agree that the founder will always give the best support, but it’s unfortunately not scalable, if you want to make a real company, you’ll have to outsource it at some point or it’s going to take all your time
I know, it is not a scaleable solution, but would be good for the quality.
It annoys me when customers ask me about something that is very obvious - like "How to create X" when they can simply navigate to the sidebar and click on the button.
I have received a few live chat support requests from users who joined the app 2 minutes before and didn't spend time looking around, which is irritating.
Or when they ignore onboarding emails, onboarding steps inside the app and the knowledge base, then run straight to contacting support.
I only faced this issue with free trial users and a few of customers who aren't part of my ICP ... which explains it.
Yeah, so far it's the feedback I had, most users don't read the docs and they want to ask people to get an answer
But in your case, the paid users actually read the doc? Do they still give you requests tho?
Paid users read the doc and they spend time learning the patform with no issue, never got any request from them so far ... it only happens with free users and for some reason only with agency owners in India. (Agency owners are not part of my ICP but they're still coming)
Mhhm, interesting
Do non-paying users convert more if you reply to them?
It's time consuming. Most of my email replies address common issues or topics.
I would consider to use a tool that automates this and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Because my current app is non-profit app, I haven't search for such solution seriously. But for a project that I make money from, definitely would buy such tool.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard so far, mainly repetitive questions
When you says a tools that cost an arm and a leg, are you referring to a particular one?
No, in general. Haven’t searched for such tools and don’t know at what price they come.
I would consider a tool that semi-automates the process with max price of $5/m. (For my non-profit app)
Higher price may justify for products with revenue and high load of support emails.
Maybe different price tiers so it fits different users.
I see, thanks a lot for the details 😁
Going from the other side, as a customer it really annoys me when a CS person asks me for information they should be able to determine themselves. Sometimes I can't find a support page so I just message the company on Twitter, and they'll reply with "please write this into our CS portal." It annoys me that they don't just do it themselves.
Interesting, so you use twitter for support?
"Looking to confirm or disprove this."
I don't feel that way when I receive a customer support request. I've found that if I can handle the problem the customer has, they're very likely to convert into a paying user. I actually enjoy getting customer support requests.
"What do you hate about it?"
Sometimes it takes a while to understand what they're talking about. For some reason users often provide very little details to customer support. I've received messages like "It not work!"
Another problem is when I receive messages while I'm busy or asleep. I've lost a few sales because of this.
"What's the most ridiculous request you received?"
Hahaha, a lot of users just send me an email/Crisp Chat message with "Hi"
Ah, yeah the famous no context message, also got lose of those in ecommerce lol
Do you have an example of a situation you lose a sale because you couldn't reply right away?
I hate that customers ask questions that repeat, but ...
Often questions are caused by a UX mistake in a product or confusing product docs.
However, everybody in a startup cares about new features and researching new market opportunities.
By fixing a bug by design, you can get rid of hundreds of threads in the future, which saves money and time.
On the other hand, agents can use automation tools or assistants to stimulate the problem. We build one: onetone.ai. It helps to save keystrokes.
People often skip the docs from the feedback I heard so far, not sure if a good design can fix that 😅
And yep, I agree, A.I definitely is a solution to handle that