Supporting customers gives CEOs a reality check

http://www.ceoonsupport.com/

by sandeepmzr • 12 years ago

54 33 12 years ago

taurath• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

gonehome• 12 years ago

I'd argue a big reason people probably don't stay very long are because they're working somewhere that's forcing them to use a script.

iwwr• 12 years ago

Scripts and checklists can scale better if the support staff and client base is large.

pbiggar• 12 years ago

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.

aspensmonster• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.'

taspeotis• 12 years ago

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

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

karterk• 12 years ago

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.

Aaronontheweb• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

brey2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

emhart2• 12 years ago

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

brey2• 12 years ago

not really that they lack good judgement, more that it's risky exposing them to a non-representative sample.

hackuser• 12 years ago

I think you either have the wrong CEO or are vastly underestimating his/her decision-making skills.

Unfortunately the demand for the 'right' CEO far exceeds supply. Then add the criteria of treating employees with respect, motivational ability, and integrity, and you can see why people stay in their current jobs.

(And if you ever find a CEO like that, then they will be lured away to greener pastures.)

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

Agreed in that listening to your customers is great, giving them what they want is really great, getting lost in all the projects of giving everyone everything is a real problem. Too many 'feature' projects can really damage a product.

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

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.

vidarh• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

kitd• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

jrochkind1• 12 years ago

why you break me scrolling with the arrow keys?

greenwalls• 12 years ago

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

laurex• 12 years ago

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.

instakill• 12 years ago

If you're a CEO, your company is smallish and like this idea, please consider using 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 ;)

Supporting customers gives CEOs a reality check

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