set_trace # timfreund's blog on dev, ops, and other work stuff

customer-service

Sun, 05 Jan 2014

We Reserve The Right to Refuse Service

Posted: Sun, 05 Jan 2014

I made the mistake of reading blog comments while finding a link to Ramit Sethi’s briefcase technique video and other Earn1K introductory material. In the original version of the post Ramit advertised a one night only first come first served webinar.

Two commenters showed how seemingly arbitrary rules can help filter out the people that will just waste your time and theirs: Alfonso asked for a recording because the live event was at 4AM in his part of the world. Ramit said “no”, and Alfonso decided to set his alarm to make the event.

Meanwhile, check out Adam’s response.

Damn, Adam. Walk down the block to Osco Drug and purchase a VHS cassette to record Lost since DVR technology is a foreign concept for you. Or just stop watching Lost and get on with your life — you’re on a personal finance blogger and entrepreneur’s site inquiring about ways to earn more money. Step one is to stop watching television on television’s schedule. Step two is to learn a desirable skill or trade. Step three is to produce some real work. Ramit’s scheduling barrier meant that he didn’t need to listen to Adam whining later.

Along the same vein, Merlin mentioned email as a way of weeding out customers that were out of his league on an old episode of Back to Work

If somebody wants to hire me to talk about productivity stuff, and they can’t schedule a phone call, then they may need more help than I can give them.

I recently had a repeat encounter with a help vampire, and it made me wonder if I was too easy to approach with problems. Maybe I can be too eager to help at times? I like being helpful, and I try not to be a jerk even though I am some of the time. Here’s the rub: being too helpful can do just as much long term damage as shunning all requests for help. Helpful people everywhere want to grow their community and nurture novices into journeymen and seasoned experts. Coddling stunts growth and encourages new community members to turn into help vampires. Spoon feeding answers to full grown professionals is a little like feeding chicken to Mogwai after midnight.

Refreshers for people on both sides of the help equation:

Be helpful. Be pleasant. Know that refusing to help can be the most helpful solution of all.

We Reserve The Right to Refuse Service

customer-service

Sat, 23 Nov 2013

Customize Your Customer Service

Posted: Sat, 23 Nov 2013

Have you considered purchasing over seven hundred customer service numbers? Twilio rents toll numbers for a single dollar a month, and toll-free numbers only cost a single dollar more. Twilio’s great, but they aren’t even the lowest cost provider. At those prices, can you afford to not own seven hundred customer service numbers?

That’s what the developers at Hotels.com did to help customer service agents quickly identify why a customer was calling and what they could do to help:

The company even created separate phone numbers (more than seven hundred in total) that dynamically appeared based on the page and how the customer got to it, so that when customers called a certain number, it would be obvious where they encountered problems.
Analytics at Work, chapter 8, page 142

A casual inspection of the site shows that this program was successful, because it’s still in use:

You can check it out yourself by watching the number in the upper left corner of the screen change as you first visit the site, search for a hotel, and click on a hotel for additional details.

How can you use data to customize customer service?

Anonymously collecting and aggregating it is a good first step. If you aren’t tracking usage of your sites and applications, you’re ignoring valuable data. There is a major US based website that was localized for countries across the globe, and their Japanese site had conversion rates significantly lower than any other location. Were there cultural differences at play? Analytics reports for their multi-page sales form showed that 90% of their customers bounced between two specific steps. Analysts found that the bounce inducing page was never translated from English to Japanese.

You may know about the DRY principle. Some programmers live and die by this one single acronym: don’t repeat yourself. Don’t make your customers repeat themselves, either. Ask for confirmation that the number on their account is the number their calling from, ending in 1234, rather than making them punch in the whole thing.

Allow users to opt-in to deeper data collection. If something goes wrong, don’t just show them an error page and apologize.Allow them to file a support request from the error page and automatically associate it with their account and bundle a log of the activities they were trying to accomplish with the ticket.

Just don’t be creepy. You probably remember Target taking all of this a little too far when it announced a teen daughter’s pregnancy before she did.

Customize Your Customer Service