Last week I quietly launched a Free Audit page for Evergreen Support.
Evergreen Support is a productized customer support service. You can read more about the business in my earlier post Customer Service as a Service,
$7K revenue in 5 months.
Problem
My business partner, Ellis, and I realized that we were being hired and hopping into customer support inboxes on Day 1 not knowing what would even be in there.
It turns out founders are unreliable narratives when you ask them what is in their customer support inbox (surprise!).
"I spend hours a day doing customer support" and "I only get a couple of support requests a day" in the same breath. Plus other biased assumptions about their inbox.
Customer Support Day 1 without an audit
Solution
Get in the inbox first! Take a look around and then do a call with the business owner. Looking at three main areas of the inbox: quantity of support tickets, top support requests, areas for improvement.
By looking at the actual support tickets, I can provide significantly more actionable insights when discussing with the business owner. Plus I can evaluate if we would even be a good fit in the first place for their support needs.
Downside, it takes time to do a thorough audit and review all the information. But I feel like the payoff is worth it. Even if they aren't a good fit for Evergreen Support, each inbox I explore I learn something new. I've been in about 20 inboxes across all types of businesses in the past year. It is kinda fascinating to see a business from that side and learn about its internal workings.
Anyone else do free (or even paid) audits for your business? I'd love to see landing page examples of how you present it. Drop a link below!
Hi @efletch. This may not be a bad idea to generate leads, but I can see it taking up quite a bit of your time. I wonder if it's possible to build something to automate this audit process? A tool that crawls the inbox and is able to categorize/prioritize support request, and provide some insight into possible areas of improvement. Could save time while helping to generate leads.
Yea, I agree it does takes time to put together a quality audit. But it would also take a lot of time to automate the work.
I like to look at this chart when I think about writing tools for something: https://xkcd.com/1205/
Too many times I have fallen into the trap of "ooo if I just write this script I'll save so much time" -- end up using the script maybe once and waste a lot of time automating
Once I have leads knocking down my door for audits I'll def plan on automating (hopefully that day comes soon!)
I agree!