

Superior Support - chrisleydon
http://www.gosquared.com/liquidicity/archives/2973

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justshipit
Rule #1: "The customer is always right: no exceptions".

This is absolutely flat-out wrong. Bad customers will chew up your support
time, engineering resources, and mental health.

The sooner it is recognized that some customers are simply toxic, the sooner
you can get rid of them. If you fail to even entertain the notion that
customers might be wrong, you're doing yourself and your employees a huge
disservice.

~~~
chrisleydon
I can understand where you're coming from. From a support mentality they have
to be viewed as being right, although admittedly there are some customers that
are probably worth losing in the long run.

The idea behind that point was more to push the team to get things right and
go that extra mile to help the customer. If they're rude though then the rule
doesn't apply.

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justshipit
From my perspective, customers should be viewed as having great value. This is
an entirely different thing from saying that the customer is always right
(which by the way contains the additional team-killing undercurrent of
suggestion that management will always back the customer over their own
employees).

Some customers will use vast amounts of your time and constantly expect you to
accommodate them. Especially in a small operation, the customers that cause
disproportionate expense are toxic. These are the ones that you need to
actively fire, and the assumption that every customer is a good customer (or
that every customer is right) quite simply precludes this option.

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vibrunazo
You're both right.

"Every model is wrong, but some are useful"

While it's technically correct that the customer is not always right. It is
useful to push this mindset on employees who directly interact with costumers.
Leaving to your employees to figure the gray areas by themselves my cause you
a larger net headache than telling them there's no exceptions, when it might
not always be true.

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slantyyz
#13 is a tricky one, but important:

Don't be too technical. Gauge the technical ability of who you're talking with
and match it.

I can't tell you how many times I've called customer support with a problem
that I've done all my homework for the support call and then get greeted by a
person who absolutely must follow a script.

You could tell them you restarted the server, restarted the process, etc.,
etc. but they don't care - they just force the script on you. I get that the
first line of support needs to triage the caller before escalation, but
annoying them right up front makes the experience very unpleasant.

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jen_h
Great advice, I live by this stuff, so it's neat to see it codified. ;)

One thing I would add - always strive to respond within 24 hours, but do NOT
respond in seconds/minutes.

Five minutes after sending, users are often still frustrated and a good number
won't read your response before firing back as their adrenaline is still up
(also, they think you're a robot because you're too fast and robots can't
possibly have the right answer!)--it'll take twice as many emails to solve the
problem.

~~~
benohear
I disagree, at least from the perspective of a customer. One hosting company I
like to work with used to answer competently within anything from 10 minutes
to an hour and this turned me into an evangelist. The prompt answers also made
me a lot more tolerant when the response wasn't correct and allowed another
iteration without waiting for another "within 24 hours".

~~~
jen_h
Depends on the use case. If someone's having a dire emergency (or something
that's hit a serious block), I answer them immediately.

However, if they, say, can't find a button on an interface, telling them where
the button is in 30 seconds or less will yield an immediate firing back: "I
already tried that, that doesn't work!!" 60% of the time.

Waiting 15 minutes to even up to four hours to answer the email will yield
"Awesome, that works, thanks and thanks for answering so quickly!" most of the
time, in my testing.

In fact, each and every time I deal with a difficult customer, when I go back
and look at the thread, der, I answered them in under 5 minutes. I like to
answer fast, but I have very much found that it hurts rather than helps so
very often.

Gotta wait for some of that frustration to dissipate so that they're calm and
able to read and follow instructions again. Frustration does not aid reading
comprehension - when you're frustrated, sometimes you don't even read the
response before firing back! I myself have been pretty guilty of this as a
customer.

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marginalboy
Whether or not the rule that the "customer is always right" applies is
context-dependent. In an educational environment, for example, we can't
embrace this principle; it is contrary to our mission to leave people with
misinformation that can affect their studies or research.

I think it can be reworded to be useful guiding principle in more environments
if you're willing to parse it more carefully. Perhaps something like "The
customer's perception is more important than yours."?

~~~
shanecleveland
Agreed. Context-dependent is an important distinction for this rule. Coming
from a manufacturing-based business of mostly customized products, if all of
our customers were always "right," then we would be loosing a losing a lot of
money on replacing/refunding products to customers who ordered wrong, used the
product incorrectly or are just trying to deceive us (which is rare). A good
approach, in my opinion, is to not make the customer think they are wrong and
find a way to amicably resolve the situation. My initial response is to gather
more information and say "let's see what we can do to make this work for you."
We find it is a good opportunity to show how accommodating we are, even when
the customer is wrong, which can make a reoccurring customer out of them and
educate them for future orders.

I am sure there are some types of business that would rather take the
customer-is-right approach, which may be easier and less costly. And there are
also probably times when letting certain customers take their business
elsewhere may actually be best.

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arethuza
"The customer is always right - no exceptions"

Well, if I am a customer and I am asking for something stupid I'd rather have
this pointed out politely and then let me make an informed decision. Indeed,
some of the best examples I've had of customer service is where the
salesperson politely pointed out that what I was wanting to buy might not be
such a great idea after all.

~~~
chrisleydon
That's true for certain feature requests, but we're targeting support problems
with this particular sheet. It's best not to assume that the customer is
'stupid' and instead see them on the same level as them, it's all about a
mindset. If you go in with the customer is always wrong you won't go that
extra step to try and help them, more dismiss them.

~~~
marginalboy
I've managed a high volume call center for 15 years and I agree with this very
much. In my experience, it can be easy to view customers with cynicism. But
answering an extreme principle with another extreme principle isn't useful,
either.

I think it could be reworded and be more useful (see my comment further down).

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benohear
One thing I'd add is: Once a problem is escalated, put the customer in direct
contact with the higher level support. Triage is fine, but not being able to
communicate with whoever is working on your problem is really frustrating.

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casca
[http://downloads.gosquared.com/help_sheets/12/helpsheet_supp...](http://downloads.gosquared.com/help_sheets/12/helpsheet_support_01.pdf)

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simon_tabor
Fantastic post, I recommend printing this out and putting it right next to
your monitor so it's always there to remind you.

~~~
mdunn
I saved the post instead. Go environment!

