A series of coincidences has me thinking about customer service today:
Joel Spolsky just wrote a nice article on what he calls the Seven steps to remarkable customer service. (For the most part, I agree with what he says, though trying to get a phone company to be able to anticipate and address customer problems seems pretty impossible.)
I’ve been taking care of the front line customer service for InqScribe over the last few weeks.
We were talking internally about how to handle customer service.
In any case, we’ve gotten a number of nice compliments recently on our customer service. Mostly it seems that people are simply pleasantly surprised when we respond within a day to their request. It’s certainly not always possible, but we try. Simply getting a quick response by a real person seems to be as important for a small software company like us as a mega corporation like Citibank.
Second, people seem surprised when we can actually help them solve the problem. Again, we’re not always successful, but if there isn’t a solution in the tool, we try to come up with a workaround. Which brings up another reason for us (as principals) to do customer service: user feedback.
Being a small company, we can’t quite afford to have a customer service department. But echoing some of Joel’s themes, to me rather than being a necessary evil, customer service is an opportunity for a conversation with our customers. It is feedback on trouble spots for the tool, as well as feedback on how they’re using the tool. By having our key design and development staff involved in customer service, we are essentially perpetually conducting user testing and focus groups, all of which inform the refinement of the tool.
posted February 19, 2007 by ben
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