Customer Support Professional Blog

A couple of days ago Joel Spolsky wrote a very nice article about customer support in a small software development company. Once again it’s nicely written and has a lot of smart points. But what I want to talk about today is not the article itself but an interesting observation based on it and other related articles.

The observation is small companies pay more attention to customer support than big ones.

Why is it so? What prevents big corporations from providing remarkable customer service? I think there’s a number of reasons.

1. Too many people. Big company has many employees. It’s difficult to find or train one good customer service specialist. It’s much more difficult to repeat it several times and create a good customer service department.
2. Lack of motivation. In a small company everybody is passionate about product success as their personal success heavily depends on it. It’s not so in a big corporation where most people are just tiny wheels of a complex mechanism they don’t really understand and their salaries rarely depend on their performance.
3. Wrong attitude towards support. Big companies tend to think that customer support is an ineviatble evil and the only thing you can do about it is to cut corners. Small companies understand the importance of customer satisfaction.
4. Too much money. Big companies have much money. They can lose a client or two or even a dozen and still be just fine. Understanding that leads to problems. Fortunately enough small companies usually don’t have much money.
5. Owners are not involved. In a small business founders usually are involved in every aspect of business operation. It’s not so for corporations which are usually owned by other corporations or stock holders who know little about the business specifics and never pay attention to details.

The list above is by no means complete. But it gives a rough understanding of what happens and why. Are there any means to improve the situation with customer support in big companies? I hope so.

I don’t think I can add something here.

Just read a bad example.

And a good one.

Yesterday Ian Landsman, the founder of UserScape, Inc. independent software development vendor which stands behind help desk software product HelpSpot published a brilliant article 10 Ways to Convert Customer Service into Sales on his blog.

I couldn’t say the same things better. When I worked for a micro ISV myself we conducted customer service according to these rules and the success was tremendous. Customer support was really our sales force #1.

So, the bottom line is the article is really worth reading. It’s a must read for all startup founders.

It’s St. Valentine Day today. So I think we can get a little bit out of topic. 

Have a look at those support team members at http://www.servicewrap.net/. Aren’t they nice?

I welcome the idea of putting pretty girls on your web site. Especially if they’re not just cute faces but faces of people you communicate with.

And one more example: http://knightsbridge.net/faq/tech-supprt.htm. No comment.

Hope the girls are not just pretty but also are good customer support professionals.

There’s a great saying by a futurist William Knoke:

The consumer is not king anymore. He is dictator.

Unfortunately for most of us, it is not true. But fortunately enough it is not true.

I don’t think customers want to be dictators. Dictatorship is inefficient and unpleasant. And what a typical customer would prefer is a mixture of friendship, guidance and seniority. For a customer it’s great to see a humble intelligent servant in a salesman or serviceman, not a passive and obedient slave.

Exactly one month ago I wrote the very first article to this blog. So today this blog has a small but important event in its life: the first official annivesary.

It was a pleasure to post here for me and I hope next month I’ll have more time to write good articles and at least the same amount of passion.

Thank you for reading all this. Don’t hesitate to comment and express your opinions.

This is how you create loyalty folks. Time to step up the support efforts if you want to compete.

— Will Herman

How to tell a great customer support service from a mediocre one? That’s easy. Great is what goes beyond your expectations.

Will Herman shows the difference in companies attitude to customer support providing a very nice example of this.

Have you started using Google Alerts to learn when somebody says something about your company or products on the internet already? Not yet? It’s high time to do it.

Isn’t today a birthday of one of your clients? Or maybe a holiday in her country? Or is today a one year anniversary of your first meeting? Be creative. It’s not difficult to come up with a reason for celebration.

Congratulate your customers, wish them good luck, lots of money and happiness. Just say warm words and remind them of yourself. Why today? Hm… Why not?

Support over instant messengers is often used by small businesses. Typically those are one-man shops or companies having less then 10 employees where one person is responsible for supporting clients. Usually such companies decide on publishing this person’s preferred IM account name on the website. That’s nice but what if customers don’t use that particular IM protocol client? Would they sign up for a new account only to ask a question? I seriously doubt it.

The latest figures for the market shares on the Instant Messaging market look like this:

• AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) - 53 million active active users
• MSN (or Windows Live Messenger) - 29 million active users
• YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) - 21 million active users
• ICQ (owned by AOL but not interoperable with AIM) - 15 million active users

Note that we count active users only, not total amount of accounts registered. E.g. ICQ has approximately 400 million accounts overall but most of them are currently dead.

This is not to say that AOL still dominates. What I mean is that you should still support all four IM protocols if you want your customers to be comfortable contacting you via IM. This is not difficult as there’re a lot of multi-protocol instant messaging clients like GAIM, Trillian or Miranda. You can find even more alternatives in Wikipedia.

So good luck and be closer to your clients.

Sometimes it’s very interesting to look back into the past. Comparing what was available that time with the state of the art we can make inferences about future techology direction.

Back in 2000 Joseph Yue from the University of Colorado at Boulder wrote the article The Use Of ICQ In Providing Real Time Reference Services which is actually about providing customer support to students via ICQ. As Joseph says ICQ was chosen as a support tool because academic libraries were often short of funding and ICQ was free and easy to use. The article also highlights the shortcomings of such solution and is definitely worth reviewing in 2007, seven years after its birth.