My experiences with customer service

Organising customer service was the subject after a board discussion in June 2012. The business was gaining customers, and we discussed how service could keep pace without simply putting more work on employees.

Organising customer service starts with the ambition

I thought you should first decide what service you wanted to provide. Phone and live chat could be good ways to offer personal help, but they also required someone to be ready when the customer got in touch.

With email, you could plan the work differently. I focused on setting realistic expectations about response times rather than promising something the business couldn’t deliver.

Standard replies and the right employee

I discussed templates and text shortcuts for recurring questions. Replies still needed to be relevant and friendly and not feel mechanical to the recipient.

In a larger organisation, an initial employee could clarify the question and pass it to the right person. Specialists didn’t need to spend time on every simple enquiry.

Find the causes of the questions

My main suggestion was to record enquiries and look for patterns. Were opening hours hard to find? Was the login help unclear? Was there a technical fault?

We’d worked that way at Jubii and Amino. It allowed us to prioritise problems by scale rather than just listening to whoever shouted loudest.

I wanted to make it easier for customers to help themselves while freeing time for more difficult cases. The video’s system names, salary examples and estimates of possible savings date from 2012 and aren’t guaranteed results or a current product overview.

Organising customer service as the business grows

We’d had an interesting discussion on a board I sat on. The business’s ambition was to have by far the best support in its industry in Denmark, and in my view it had already achieved that. But more and more customers were arriving, and employees were getting busier. So organising customer service became an important discussion even though customers already experienced good service.

The website directly encouraged customers to call. The products could be a little complex, and talking to a specialist made sense. The question was how to make that help work as enquiries increased. I didn’t have a complete formula, but some experiences and ideas.

The phone needs to suit the ambition and finances

First I’d ask: What do we actually want? If the ambition is a very low-cost business with few or no employees, the phone doesn’t necessarily fit. It rings, and someone has to answer. Voicemail and calling back later is an option, but many customers don’t experience that as particularly good service.

When we call, we want to speak to a friendly, competent person straight away. We don’t want engaged lines, waiting or lengthy automated phone menus. If you want to provide that service, you also need to do it properly. So think carefully about whether the phone should be central to the strategy. The same goes for live chat.

A clear phone number and a chat where you can get help straight away can build a good brand and loyalty. But having people ready is bloody expensive. A closed chat or an unanswered phone doesn’t deliver the experience you promised the customer.

Promise a response time you can meet

Email offers other possibilities. You can display the address prominently. One business I worked with even showed how long the queue was so customers could see when their email would be answered. A promise to reply within an hour, though, is a luxury level requiring both systems and staffing.

I thought saying you checked email several times a day and replied as quickly as possible was sensible if that was what you could actually deliver. It’s better than promising an impressive response time you can’t meet.

In a small business, you often have to handle enquiries yourself, perhaps from your smartphone. I mentioned support systems such as SupportFighter and Kayako as examples of the options back then. You could build standard replies so a question about opening hours was answered with a click and a friendly email with the customer’s name inserted.

You could also start cheaply with replies in a word processor, group them and copy them in. On Mac, there were text shortcut programs turning an abbreviation into a longer standard reply. That could save lots of time as long as the reply didn’t look mechanical or miss the customer’s question.

Let specialists handle questions that need them

In a larger organisation with products requiring extensive knowledge, an initial employee can clarify what the customer needs and pass the question on. A receptionist or junior support employee can help with simple things. I’d be cautious about replacing everything with an automated phone menu. I’d just been through a nightmare of one myself and it drove me mad. In the video, I initially named YouSee, but immediately corrected myself: It wasn’t them.

My example was an engineer earning DKK 35,000–40,000 a month answering questions about opening hours or explaining how to have a password sent out. I thought that wasted both money and the specialist’s time. Other employees could help there while harder questions went to whoever had the necessary knowledge.

Record the questions and fix the causes

The most important thing should actually come before all the rest: Log enquiries. I remembered how we did it at Jubii, where we had around 170 employees. Everyone recorded what phone calls and emails concerned in an Excel spreadsheet and counted repeats.

After a few days or a week, we could see patterns and rank problems by how many enquiries they generated. Then we could work with the technicians to identify what could be fixed. Was it a technical fault, poor communication or a service we needed to change or remove?

If lots of people ask about opening hours, perhaps they should be clearer on the website. If people can’t work out how to get their username and password, perhaps the function needs to be easier. We had lots of those questions at Amino until we improved the function and wrote help texts. Afterwards, they’d become a very small share of enquiries.

You can feel so insanely busy you have no time for the exercise. My view was that you couldn’t afford not to. Otherwise you keep answering the same questions.

The loudest voice isn’t necessarily the biggest problem

We tend to want to help those who shout loudest. Two very angry customers with the same problem can occupy more of your mind than ten polite customers who just need a new password. So I wanted to move away from feelings and work methodically with what we’d recorded.

I thought you’d often find ten big challenges and perhaps be able to solve eight. My rough estimate from experience was that a few days of focused work could remove 30–40 per cent of enquiries, in some cases after just a day or two. That was my assessment of the possibilities, not a promise of a particular result.

It frees time in support, especially from boring repetition. Customers also like helping themselves. If someone is sitting there at nine in the evening wanting to buy or log in, it’s much better to find help in an FAQ or never encounter the problem. If the customer first has to feel stupid, search for help and call, they may already be heading to a competitor.

Help the customer before suggesting anything more

At the end, I mentioned upselling. Once the customer has a good answer and is happy and satisfied, there may be an opportunity to ask if they need anything else. At a minimum, I suggested an email signature with current offers, changed regularly for all employees.

My experience was that customers who’d received good help could become more loyal than those we’d never been in contact with. But the order mattered: First help and make sure the customer is satisfied. Then they may be more receptive to a relevant offer or good advice. Also read Min vej som leder about my experiences of organising work and creating good customer experiences.

Also read about text shortcuts and other ways of replying.

Best wishes, Martin