Customer Support and Service Articles

Earlier this year, MSN Money and Zogby International performed their yearly customer service survey. And the results weren’t exactly surprising – companies like Amazon and Apple made the top 10, along with other stalwarts like Trader Joe’s and Publix. Each of these companies revels in something unique when it comes to their customer service.

In anticipation of  the holidays this year, we thought we would highlight some of these businesses and see what they’re doing right. Because when it comes to customer service, you want to emulate the best!

Amazon

If you search around the Internet long enough, especially where shoppers congregate, you’ll undoubtedly run into Amazon customer service success stories. And for good reason; they are consistently proving they know what it takes to satisfy every one of their customers.

For one, if you have an issue, they go way out of their way to solve it. There are many stories of online shoppers receiving damaged or late goods and getting an entirely new product. I’ve even seen one shopper say he ordered the wrong item (entirely his fault) and Amazon STILL sent him the right product for FREE.

Another thing Amazon does so well is to make their contact info readily available. If you search for “Amazon customer service” on Google you’ll get pages upon pages of their contact info. They’ve used SEO for good to make sure their customers know how to get them on the horn when they need them.

Netflix

Um… let’s skip them for now.

Apple

Apple is in the unique position of having an extremely dedicated fanbase. To maintain this air of commonality, they’ve rebranded most of their business model to be inclusive. For instance, you don’t go to a help desk at an Apple store, you go to a Genius Bar.

And while the Genius Bar agents are known for their quick thinking and helpfulness, their online customer service is just as noticeable. Their support page is evidence of this, as there are countless options for customers to choose. Want to do the repair yourself? Look at a manual, watch a video, or talk to other users for assistance. Too complicated for a self-fix? Give them a call, email them, or use one of the “express lanes” to get direct online help about a specific product.

FedEx/UPS

When you’re expecting a package, any delay can drive you crazy. What’s even worse is when you have no idea where your package is or where it may be headed. Luckily, both FedEx and UPS have set up tracking systems so you can easily determine where your precious cargo is.

On the FedEx customer support page, you can track a package by number, reference, or even from the FedEx Desktop. Importantly, just below these options is the FAQ section of the website. You may have a problem that goes beyond simple tracking needs. In that case, the answers to typical questions that come up at FedEx are right there at your disposal.

Of course, we don’t all have the budgets of Amazon, Apple or FedEx, but that doesn’t mean you can’t implement some of their customer service best practices by being personal, giving your customers plenty of ways to contact you, and making it right when an order goes wrong. A customer support tool can aid in helping your team provide exceptional customer service. TeamSupport aims to provide you an affordable method of managing your customer support process and keeping your customers informed and happy.

If you think you and your company can ignore Cyber Monday, think again. The biggest online shopping day of the year may not be as big as Black Friday, but it’s getting there, and more quickly than ever. More and more shoppers are heading online to buy their holiday gifts to avoid traffic, crowds and the headaches that accompany them.

So what does this mean for you and your customer support team? If you’re a product seller, it means both Cyber Monday and the days around it are going to be busy ones for everyone in your team. There are certain issues that arise again and again during these hectic times, so let’s go over them now before the madness begins!

Shipping Times

There are two things shoppers are primarily worried about during the holiday season: pricing (more on that later) and shipping. Namely, will the items they bought get to them in time for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza?

Last year, a friend of mine participated in Cyber Monday, thinking it would be great for business. As a promotion, he offered free shipping on all sales starting Cyber Monday through the middle of December. The promotion brought in quite a bit of business.

However, what my friend didn’t consider when posting this offer was the constant barrage of questions he would endure from guests wondering whether or not a certain item would be shipped on time. Just because it was free didn’t mean people wouldn’t have questions about it! In fact, people were more leery; they felt suspicious of the freebie. As a result of the promotion, he made some good money, but ended up with some late shipments and irate customers after the holidays. To mitigate this problem, offer a FAQ or simple shipping guarantee in an easily located place on your website or in the confirmation email you send your customers after they place an order.

Problems with Quantities

You can prepare your stock ahead of time, and it is definitely a good idea to do so. But the one thing you can expect during the holidays is the unexpected. You never know when one of the products you sell will take off like a rocket and suddenly become the hot ticket for the season. And all of sudden, you’re out of stock! Now what to do?

Your team absolutely has to have some form of backup plan ready. The answer to a customer simply can not be “We’re out, sorry, bye.” Once they hang up or close that support email, they will never come back again. You will have lost a customer for life.

If you find yourself in the position of running out of product, figure out what your options are ahead of time. Can you redirect them to another, similar product? Perhaps give them an estimated time when you will have more stock in? At the very least, if you’ve run out of stock when someone places an order, offer them a discount on other items in the store for the inconvenience. Whatever you do, don’t let them go away mad!

Pricing

Like we mentioned prior, aside from shipping, pricing is most important to your customers.  Because of the fierce competition between stores on Black Friday and the weeks leading up to Christmas, shoppers are more or less used to getting coupons and discounts. So when there isn’t one they can find or one they consider big enough, they will often inquire in an effort to score a better deal.

Therefore, it’s very important your team and the rest of the company knows where it stands on pricing. The worst thing you can do is tell a customer you’re offering a discount when you have no means to actually give this to them. Imagine getting back on the phone for THAT conversation!

Since it’s Cyber Monday, your company will undoubtedly offer some form of discount to bring in customers. In this case, most of the questions you’ll receive will be about how the discount works; how long does it last, what all is it good for, et cetera. Again, make sure your team has the particulars down, as any lapses or miscommunication can be costly.

There’s a lot of money to be made on Cyber Monday, and often customer service is right on the front lines of this business effort. Make sure to prepare your team ahead of time so you’ll be ready for the unexpected this holiday season!

Read our latest compilation of Customer Support and Customer Service Advice, Articles, Tips and Tricks in our November customer support newsletter.

We are happy to announce a few new features that we believe will make your days brighter and following up easier!

Reminders
We have added a terrific reminder feature to TeamSupport.  You can now add reminders to tickets, customer accounts and specific contacts.  Simply set a reminder and TeamSupport will email you when it is due.  Want to follow up on a ticket later on, or maybe remind a customer it is time to renew a service contract?  With our added reminders feature, this is now not only possible, but incredibly simple.  Want to see what reminders you have coming due or outstanding? You can very easily see a list of your reminders by going to “My Tickets” and clicking on the “Reminders” tab.

We’ve written up this help document that shows you exactly how to use this feature.  We have no doubt this feature will get put to great use!

Customize Email Template Subject Lines
You will be happy to know you can now customize the subject line of any email template in your account.  Account Admins just need to go to Admin->Email tab and scroll towards the bottom where the templates are located.  For those templates that involve tickets, we highly suggest you leave the ticket number on the subject line so that when customers or co-workers reply to these emails, the correct ticket is updated.

We have also added templates for the SLA emails as well.  They are called “SLA – Violation” and “SLA – Warning”.

Minor UI Change to Navigation
You may notice we have moved the ticket type listing on the main left navigation.  This change allows you to minimize the list of tickets, but still see “My Tickets” and “All Tickets”.  This is useful for those customers that may have a lot of ticket types defined but no need to see them all the time.

It’s been a number of years since the Internet wasn’t around during the holidays. But ever since that first electronic season, commerce has never been the same. What has been the same, though, are some of the customer service issues that arise. They are seen year after year, sometimes repeatedly from the same company! Now is the chance to make certain yours is not “that” company. There are still weeks to go before the season fully kicks into gear.

Last year I had an online ordering debacle. Instead of ordering 6 items, I ordered 6 sets of six items, billing my credit card for 36 glass olive oil decanters. What a disaster! In a panic, I both emailed customer support and called the store’s customer service number. Unfortunately, I received two completely different responses to my inquiries. Though my issue was eventually resolved (and I’m not now sitting in a warehouse full of olive oil decanters), it was pretty clear that the customer service reps were not fully prepared for the holiday season. As much as I love this online store, I’ll be thinking twice before ordering from them again this year.

During the holidays with all the promotions, sales and pressure, it is often the business with the best customer service that wins. Take the following tips into consideration to help make sure the winner is your business.

1. Training

A manager or team leader can train all the live long day, but when it comes down to the wire, the average employee is what counts. If even one customer service agent is behind the times, then you stand to lose sales and alienate potential clients. Consider upping your training time before the holiday season really kicks into gear. Just an hour extra a week can improve clarity on policies and lower time spent answering questions.

You don’t want to just blindly train on whatever comes up, though – it’s good to have a focus. So what should you focus on? During the holidays, people are concerned mainly with two things: speed and specials. In other words, how cheap can they get it and how fast can it get to their house so they can wrap it. Concentrate your efforts on these two topics and you should have a leg up on the competition.

2. To Holiday or Not to Holiday

This may seem like nothing but semantics, but some take it very seriously. I’m talking about whether to say “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas” in emails and on the phone.

Don’t think it’s important? Let’s travel back to 2005 and look at Wal-Mart and Target stores. Both mega-chain superstores decided to downplay the “Merry Christmas” angle and went with more secular “Happy Holidays” themed advertisements.

To their dismay, several groups balked and protested, even threatening boycotts. The following year, both stores went back to using “Christmas” in their advertisements. Best Buy has gone with the more secular “Happy Holidays” greetings, and they have stuck with it over the years despite protests.

So it can obviously be a big deal! And either way you go, you’re bound to run into someone who would prefer the other phrase or none at all. Take your customer base into account when choosing which version of the greeting to go with – if your audience is predominantly Christian, you may prefer to use Merry Christmas. If you’re undecided, take heart – this USNews poll from 2009 indicates half of Americans frankly don’t care either way.

3. Check and Update Information

Can your customers reach you? You don’t check your listed contact information every day, but this sometimes goes out of date without realization. All it takes is for one number to be off and suddenly irritated customers are talking to an even more irritated Starbucks manager down the street from your store!

Take a moment to double check your website, business cards, email information, and your voicemail message to make sure everything’s current. It’s easier to do this now while you still have a second. Imagine once the rush starts realizing your info was wrong? Between scrambling to redirect phone calls and updating emails, you could be out quite a few sales – both current and future!

The holidays can be like the Wild West for an online business – every man for himself and anything goes! Being prepared prior will help prevent your customer service from suffering in the pursuit of big holiday sales.

We recently made some great changes to the way agents view tickets – both when creating new tickets and viewing existing ones.

I’ve used a handful of ticketing systems in my time and most of them focus on properties of a ticket and seem to do their best to avoid what the customer has to say.  While these properties such as severity, type/category, assignment, sla, etc are very important, they come second to customer comments in my opinion.

We thought long and hard about how to give our customers the best of both worlds and we believe we found the magic combination.  We list the comments in a vertical news feed within the ticket, then we show the other important properties to the right – where it is very simple to see who owns the ticket, severity, and so on.

We also made it simple to make changes to the tickets with a single click.  You can visually see your changes being saved with a “save” icon that fades in and out.

Finally, we found a nice quiet spot to indicate the source of the ticket in the upper right.  At a glance, you can see if the ticket came from an agent, chat, web, facebook, and so on.  We also show these icons in the ticket grid view as well.

As I said earlier, I’ve used a handful of ticketing systems in my time.  It’s a lot of fun to be able to omit the bad ideas and incorporate the good ones.

With “ticket reminders” coming up very soon, TeamSupport will further extend and differentiate itself as a leader in customer support solutions.  We are working super hard to be “powerfully simple” for our customer base and we enjoy every minute of it!

Here are a few quick views of tickets:

(new ticket creation view)

(existing ticket view)

It was the best of customer service; it was the worst of customer service. The other day, I was presented with a unique opportunity. My cat needed grooming, but there was no way I was going to take her out somewhere. First of all, it was cold. Secondly, she’s nuts and would probably maul me to death if I tried putting her into a carrier.

So I decided to see what my options were for a house visit. A “to-go special”, as it were. Did such a thing even exist? After a few phone calls to some local vets and groomers, I find out to my joy that yes, in fact, it does exist.  I then call up two of the people referred, neither of whom answers the phone, so I wind up leaving messages.

“Aha!” I think, “Now it’s a race to get my business!” I’ll admit, I was way more excited about this than I should have been. But when customer service is your thing, that’s what gets your motor running. Soon one of the groomers called me back, and after some discussion she said she could come to my area.

Not much later, the other groomer called. Turns out, she was much closer to me, and it would’ve been way more convenient. Dang! However, she was a bit more expensive, so maybe it was for the best. I still took her information down for the future, just in case.

Good thing I did! About an hour before my scheduled appointment, the first groomer calls me back. “I’ll need to push back your appointment,” she says. “There’s another person in your area and I’m going to go to her first. It’s just easier that way. How’s 2:30?” “Um, sure,” I stammered. After we hung up, it finally hit me that I had just been bumped. This woman had just pushed my appointment back because someone else had called her and she didn’t want to inconvenience herself. Wow.

The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. I called the second groomer back and asked if she was still available. The extra money would be worth it if I didn’t have to put up with any excuses. She said she was still available, so I called to cancel the first appointment. Lo and behold, the first groomer replies, “Well, I’m almost there now.” What?!

Irritated, I call the second groomer back and inform her of the now-incoming appointment. I apologize for the cancellation. She laughs and says she understands, and I tell her next time my sweet crazy kitten needs a grooming that she can bet that I will be calling her instead. The first groomer shows up and honestly, does a good job, including giving my cat a bandana. Clean kitty and all, I’m still a little peeved about the hassle.

What’s to Be Learned?

Honestly, the big mistake Groomer #1 made was that thoughtless phone call indirectly telling me she valued her own and another customer’s time over mine. I suspect she knew this too, since when I called her back to cancel she was already on her way to the house. But instead of saying sorry, or employing any other kind of customer service, she just decided to get to my house as soon as she could.

The lesson here is that one should never prioritize customers by one’s own convenience. It may have been that the other customer was more “important” somehow; a long term customer or one that had 1,000 cats. Either way, she’s lost my future business because of the mess.

Groomer #2, however, played her cards right. She was always cordial, up front, and even upon canceling, took the whole thing in stride. Her prices are a little more expensive, but in my opinion, that extra cost will be worth it to avoid this kind of stress in the future. Of course, we’ll see how that appointment actually goes next time, but so far she’s proven her service is more valuable to me… and my now neckerchiefed kitty!

TeamSupport.com (http://www.TeamSupport.com) – a popular provider of web-based customer support and help desk software solutions – has announced a beneficial partnership with Tech Wildcatters (http://www.TechWildcatters.com), a seed accelerator funding B2B web, mobile, and software startups.

Every spring and fall, the Dallas-based mentoring group invites up to ten technology startups, from among hundreds of applicants, to take part in a 12 week “Boot Camp” designed to elevate them to the next level of successful growth. At the end of each session, Tech Wildcatters hosts a “Pitch Day,” an opportunity for the participating startups to promote their businesses to leading Venture Capital and Angel investors.

TeamSupport will provide a free year’s subscription to their SaaS-based customer service and help desk management suite for each company enrolled or graduated from the Tech Wildcatters program. This will give early stage companies access to a powerful customer-focused toolkit, including an end-user portal, live chat and full email integration, plus a comprehensive software engine to drive efficiency in the support workflow.

“While it’s hard to think of ourselves as a startup anymore, we remember the early days well and want to give back a little to the Dallas business ecosystem,” said Robert C. Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport.com. “Tech Wildcatters is a wonderful program that gives young companies a great set of resources to facilitate their growth and success; we are proud to play a role in helping these companies provide world class customer support.” Johnson also serves as a mentor in the program and will be offering guidance based on his own entrepreneurial experiences.

“We’re excited that TeamSupport is making their product available to our startups,” said Gabriella Draney, Managing Partner for Tech Wildcatters. “Most of our companies are small and expanding rapidly; having access to tools like TeamSupport to manage customer interactions is critical to successfully accelerating their growth.”

Employed by customer support and corporate help desks worldwide, TeamSupport is easily configured and customized; the application is offered in several reasonably priced, upgradeable versions. TeamSupport is scalable from a simple help-desk application to a 100+ seat enterprise-wide customer support and product defect tracking system.

About TeamSupport
TeamSupport.com is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dallas, TX-based Muroc Systems, Inc. (http://www.MurocSystems.com), a holding company focused on developing productivity enhancing software products delivered via the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

About Tech Wildcatters
Tech Wildcatters is a mentorship-driven microseed fund and startup accelerator. The organization runs 12-week accelerator “Boot Camp” every spring and fall in Dallas. For further information please visit www.TechWildcatters.com

Read up on some Customer Support and Customer Service Advice, Articles, Tips and Tricks in our October customer support newsletter.

It is a scene that has played out hundreds of times in the movies. A woman goes to her overflowing closet and exclaims:  “I have nothing to wear!” Obviously she does, there are tons of tops and bottoms to choose from, just nothing that seems appropriate for this moment.

In the workplace, there can be numerous tools at a team member’s disposal. But perhaps none that really get the job done. Like our closets, often there are tools and processes in place that have become outdated or ill fitting. Every so often the tools, much like a wardrobe, need to be pulled out, re-examined and in the worst cases some pieces replaced.

Customer support and the help desk is changing every day. There are now so many different ways of interacting with customers, innovative tools being introduced, and new practices being suggested all the time. The way a company provided customer service for years simply might not be the most efficient way of serving the customer today.

Maybe what worked yesterday just is not cutting it today. Take a look every so often and make sure that what tools are in place are actually doing your team good, make sure they still fit. If you find they don’t, consider revamping with a new tool. You may find your team much more excited about their jobs when they are dressed for success.