

Supporting customers gives CEOs a reality check - sandeepmzr
http://www.ceoonsupport.com/

======
vidarh
I think it's a fantastic idea.

I've justed received a package from DHL. After more than two weeks of trying
to get help from DHL support, I gave up. That is, I gave up on their support,
not on getting my package. The initial problem was my fault: I'd supported a
Kickstarter campaign ages ago, and the result (two Parallella computers...)
finally shipped. To my old office address, where it was rejected, and returned
to DHLs depot.

DHL support insisted the local courier still had it, despite the fact the
local courier had a signature that said otherwise. Then they went quiet. They
stopped replying to e-mail entirely.

So I made DHL execs provide support.

I signed up for LinkedIn Premium, and spent half an hour scouring LinkedIn for
the highest ranking DHL execs I could find (no easy job - the number of SVP's
they have is staggering), and mailed 3 of them with my gripe.

I didn't really expect much help, but two of them grabbed the opportunity to
defuse the situation and find out more about what had gone wrong, and fix it.
Between them they got the right people looking into the matter, and assorted
customer care people both at DHLs headquarters in Germany, and their local (to
me) team in the UK were told that a certain SVP wanted to know what was going
on and be kept informed. 4 business days from I bypassed their entire support
organization and about 5 levels of management (at a guess) the package finally
arrived at my desk.

It's great that they cared. But I went this route because I found _no other
way_ to get hold of anyone. When support first ignored me, I e-mailed their
press contacts, their sales teams, and every other address I could easily find
on their site. Nothing. Total silence. My frustration was intense, and I'm
sure other customers must have fallen through the cracks too.

If said execs, which did include a person in charge for a large division of
their support team, had spent any time "on the floor" answering support
requests, I suspect they'd have a very different picture of their
organisation, and maybe my rather unusual approach wouldn't have been
necessary.

(so I'm going to take this approach whenever I get inadequate support from now
on...)

~~~
ddeck
_> so I'm going to take this approach whenever I get inadequate support from
now on_

I've used a similar approach twice, both times with positive results. Once
with Lenovo for an overdue laptop and once with Cathay Pacific (airline) after
having a rusty fish hook embedded in my gums after one of their meals.

I emailed the CEO and head of marketing/sales and in both cases had responses
within 24 hours.

------
pbiggar
Everyone technical at CircleCI does support, including the CEO, CTO, designers
and every engineer. When we were 6 people we alternated and I did support on
Mondays. Now we're more people and we do support for a full week, every 5 or 6
weeks.

Its amazing: you learn so much about the problems your customers have using
the product. You're used to seeing the great customers, the ones who figured
it all out, the ones who love your product. In support, you see the poor
messaging, confusing pricing, the bugs. It can be a little bit harrowing.

But you also see the people who love everything you do. People write in to say
how much they love your product and how much they rely on it, and how much
they tell people about it.

Anyway, I recommend it to all, and I plan to keep doing it for years.

------
brey
I'd add a caveat - I've seen this done before, but with unintended
consequences.

exposing a CEO directly to your users is a great idea for all the reasons
given, but it can be distracting if they seize on a randomly chosen user's
idea as the Next Big Thing which Must Be Implemented Now because it resonates
for some reason.

users' ideas and suggestions are great in aggregate, but any given one can be
totally the wrong thing to adopt just because the CEO searchlight happens to
pause on it and it's given disproportionate attention.

~~~
seunosewa
If you feel your CEO lacks good judgment to the extent that you are afraid to
expose him/her to customers lest he/she latches on to an issue that is not so
important just because the customer he/she was exposed to happened to have
that problem, then I think you either have the wrong CEO or are vastly
underestimating his/her decision-making skills.

~~~
emhart
Having the "wrong CEO" is a hard problem to solve as an employee.

~~~
jason_tko
Really? I view that as a very straight-forward problem to solve. Leave the
company.

~~~
emhart
I can speak from immediate experience that it is frequently not that easy.
There are a lot of places with very few jobs, and plenty of people tied down
geographically for other reasons. I'm not saying you can't change your
employment situation, but we shouldn't hand wave that away as easy. As I said,
it can be a hard problem to solve, that doesn't mean the solution can't be
straightforward.

------
taurath
One extra thing to add - if your company support line uses a script, the CEO
has to use it and see how incredibly frustrating it is for both customer and
support personnel. Its well past time to let people be human beings to each
other again.

~~~
ekianjo
Scripts are useful to get people with little experience or knowledge get on
board to provide basic support. That's because people doing support usually
don't stay very long in their jobs.

EDIT: and it's also better to provide a consistent support experience, without
huge variations from one individual to another.

~~~
nodata
But it's normally consistently bad (unless you try shibboleet)

------
taspeotis
Can I talk to that William fellow? He was so helpful [1].

[1]
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/11/23/99270...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/11/23/9927055.aspx)

------
karterk
Depending on the kind of market you deal with, you will quickly realize that
the bar for customer support is really low. People often sound surprised when
they get a response to their email within 12 hours. Responding personally to
their questions and building a community really has a positive effect on your
company's brand. I have seen good customer support experience translate to
non-trivial number of referrals and word of mouth sales.

------
aspensmonster
_> An hour at the helpdesk can help you discover great product ideas, feedback
and suggestions - a gold mine when you're chasing product-market fit._

An hour with your front line support --or bothering to read through or even
solicit their thoughts-- can do just as much for you, multiplied by however
many support members you have. If anyone knows the flaws of your product, it's
the guys and gals on the front lines that have to make excuses for it every
day.

 _> A support rep can only go so far. Support agents often don't have the
visibility in an organization to go back and fix bigger process problems. Only
you can._

Speaking as someone who has done support before, and will likely continue to
do so in the future in one way or another: you've got this all backwards. If
anyone knows how screwed up a process is in your organization, or how broken
your product is, it's the poor saps like us that are tasked with carrying
those processes out and supporting those crappy products. Support agents don't
lack "visibility." They lack authority and autonomy to handle issues on their
own without fear of reprisal for not using the proper openers and closers and
not keeping all calls under 12 minutes so they hit that magic 5 calls and 10
chats an hour marker. For all the talk of "horizontal" and "flat"
organizations, most support shops have a very clearly defined hierarchy and
strict control over lateral movement that blows up the very "gold mine" you're
chasing after.

 _> When employees see their CEO on Support, they realize it's absolutely
essential for them to go above and beyond call of duty to make sure their
customers are more than just satisfied._

If you want "above and beyond," be prepared to compensate for it: more-than-
COL raises, PTO, TOIL, year-end bonuses, above-average salaries/wages. You're
the CEO. You'll go above and beyond because at the end of the day your
compensation is tied directly to how well the business does financially. Front
line support? We get paid the same amount no matter how easy or rough the day
was, no matter how "above and beyond" we went. If anything, going "above and
beyond" just means "this call will take me an hour," which means "my metrics
are totally fucked for the rest of the day and possibly the week." And that
could mean losing your job. Or it could just be justification for denying a
raise or promotion.

===================================

Overall, I don't think you'll really get the experience you're looking for as
a CEO. Unless you insist that your support manager treat you like any other
front-line support tech, with all of the same metrics, and expectations, and
"rough" customers, and "in-house" problems, and hours, and compensation, and
fear of reprisal, you're going to miss things by simple virtue of the fact
that what you're experiencing simply isn't what actually occurs on a day-to-
day basis.

~~~
goldenkey
Exactly. It's easy to tout this CEO on support as new age profundity but it
has no basis except in dinky startup a where the CEO is most likely doing a
lot of other tasks because the funds are tight or employees few. In a
reasonable company, not a little hipster startup, the CEO is not going to
waste time on tech support calls when they can survey their tech support
workers and see an overview.

Look tech world, it's a sorry thing but a startup is just a 'small business.'

------
laurex
Wow, super synchronicity. At Olark, all this month we are teaching teams how
to follow this model, essentially. Check out Olark.com/allhands for info.
We're doing a whole day of training April 24th.

We've found that for ourselves, we are able to create a better product when
our whole team has a real connection with customers and what their needs are-
and our culture is better when we understand that we're all there to make
things work for the customer.

------
kitd
Not just CEOs. Software designers and developers need to spend as much time in
support as is practicable. Too much software gets written in insulated little
boxes IME.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
We had software engineers help 1 hour a day on support, myself included. It
started out of necessity (tiny startup), but survived many years. Gave people
great perspective.

Google has (had?) "20% time". This was more like "12% time".

Although developers' time is valuable, they're not "in the zone" all day; this
came out of that not-in-the-zone time.

------
Aaronontheweb
I'm the CEO and I think I've handled 280 / 282 support tickets we had since we
started using UserVoice. It's my primary feedback channel for figuring out
where our documentation / product / policies are frustrating customers and is
one of the last things I'd ever want to delegate.

~~~
becomevocal
You're in a great place as Founder / CEO / Developer of you're product to
react to customers. Especially since your marketing to other developers.

Over time you may see your support landscape change.

10x (or even 2x, really) the support load and you'll find yourself unable to
respond to everyone in a timely and considerate manner. Responses become
quicker and you naturally don't spend as much time thinking about each
request.

Eventually full-time support team members are brought into place and they
become your conduit more often than not. That is unless you, as an dev +
founder, stop developing the product at all and have a team to take over all
those responsibilities.

But let's be honest, you like developing product! At the very least you will
be involved deeply in it's evolution and market growth. Support becomes more
of a top-of-the-funnel ordeal.

That said, I think if any CEO completely loses touch with the support channel
it can be devastating to the company. For myself, I try and keep an open line
between support (if you feel it is important, let me know) and setup personal
calls with customers that have feature requests or intense feedback.

------
nemesisj
I dip in and out of support tickets pretty often, and I read support tickets a
lot. It's really helpful and provides a lot of teachable moments, and it is a
big destressor when you see that everything is going really well, just like
you'd handle it.

The corollary to helping out with support every now and then is to work every
job within the company every now and then.

I attend trade shows with sales and work the booth. I write blog posts and
design email campaigns. I use our product every day. These things really
matter.

They matter even more when you start to scale. When I'm in the midst of a
horrific customer support incident with another company, I often wonder how
often their CEO has used their product, or dealt with their own support.

------
instakill
If you're a CEO, your company is smallish and like this idea, please consider
using [http://www.mybema.com/mybema-for-brands](http://www.mybema.com/mybema-
for-brands) for this.

This is my project that I'm working at to try to get companies to improve
their customer service offering, while at the same time try to help consumers
by providing them with a platform for recommendations and issue resolution.

To the HN negativity contingent: I know it's not as beautiful, or feature-rich
as the competitors, but I'm just a one man team ;)

------
dredmorbius
While he's not the CEO, Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, still claims to
do a considerable amount of end-user support for the site.

------
greenwalls
What CEO doesn't review customer support? It seems strange not to.

------
jrochkind1
why you break me scrolling with the arrow keys?

