A Framework for your Customer Support: Turn your nightmare into a growth engine
This is the summary of a talk I delivered at WordCamp Europe in Berlin, on June 22nd, 2019. Instead of sharing tools or specific strategies, I helped the audience to create their own framework(s) which will allow each entrepreneur/business to create the customer support structure that works for them. This framework can then be a starting point for continuous improvement.
You can find the slides at the end of this post, and the talk in this video:
Customer support is often an afterthought when starting a business. It is often added somehow haphazardly, without structure or strategy. As a result, you end up either dreading those requests, or sinking disproportionate amounts of time into all kind of requests.
Remember, though: your customer pay you real money, and more often than not you actually have the answer for them. It’s time to make some baseline decisions.
Three decisions around customer support that will make your life easier
Choose two or three ways your customers can contact you, and focus your attention on these channels. Be intentional about these choices: are your customer by default on Facebook or in Slack communities? Which medium have they chosen so far to contact you? Do you want to continue to support them there, or do you prefer to move them to another medium, e.g. from WhatsApp message to a structured contact form?
Set clear expectations about what and how you are offering customer support. It is entirely your choice to decide whether you want to offer support on weekends, or stick to a weekday schedule. If you are upfront about when and where you’ll be available, and how quickly they can expect an answer, your customers won’t feel ignored.
Define the scope of what you can offer. Some requests are obviously important: bug reports, refund requests or usability feedback. How do you manage questions around basic configurations, edge cases, customization requests etc.? Having clear guidelines can make your life a lot easier.
Three ways to set your clients up for success
Self-support. Most customers do not want to contact you. They just want to get a solution to their problem and go their merry way. If you can offer documentation, email courses, searchable forums you can take yourself out of the equation. That makes for faster customer support that does not require your presence.
Standardized support. It’s amazing that you want to lovingly hand-craft all those refund confirmations. It would be even more amazing though if you had that time to improve the product so you get fewer refunds to start with. Create templates, snippets, macros that use your voice, yet allow you to speed up those frequent questions.
Personalized support. This should be only for those cases where self-support and standard questions are no enough. And you might not even offer this support yourself, and instead, refer your clients to another developer. Expectations here are key.
Three steps towards your strategy
Accept reality. You’ve had support requests in the past, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. Take an hour, log into your email/plugin support page and make a list of everything that you were asked in the past three months. What are the recurring themes? Which of these things could be perfectly well answered on your FAQ page?
Design your vision. Based on your previous decisions about which kind of support you want to offer, how can you systematize those requests? Create a framework and the necessary processes to get to a more coherent state of support.
Guide your customer. Once you know what you can offer when and how, make sure to clearly communicate this to existing and new customers. You might have to re-design your contact page, including links to documentation, asking the right questions in your contact form and stating your response times.
And then - iterate.
In a nutshell: Allow your client to find the help they need within the boundaries that you’ve defined.
Valentina Thörner
Customer Support: Turning your Nightmare into a Growth Engine from Valentina Thörner