Support isn’t about Solving Problems
…it’s about getting what you want from your users.
At Repost we have gotten to the point in which hundreds of musicians apply every day to leverage our services to distribute their music into stores like Spotify, iTunes, and more. Repost then collects on those royalties and pays them out.
How did we create this word of mouth demand for our business? We obsessed over something that 99% of companies fail to obsess over. It’s the least sexy part about starting a business but I am confident it is the most important.
Support.
But beyond looking at Support chat or email as a sunk cost, we chose to look at it as an investment. Here are some thoughts:
Support is cheap marketing
Believe it or not, we have gotten to sizable demand having spent less than $5,000 in our company lifecycle on paid advertising / marketing. Repost is now paying out millions of dollars to artists and we’ve gotten there almost exclusively by looking at our website’s support live chat as our primary marketing initiative.
Support is a conduit to not only solve your client’s problem, but get them to buy into the larger vision of the business. The goal should be to get your existing users to spread your company gospel to create a network effect. Some companies try to do this through affiliate marketing programs, but it feels a bit souless doesn’t it? Share this trackable link and we’ll pay you? I have found that if you simply are a nice person through support, and go beyond just answering the question asked, people will recommend the service to the people they think need will need it. Regardless of compensation.
Above is an example in which one of our users screenshotted a conversation with his friend where he was evangelizing our product. He then gloated as he shared it with us via our support chat. Notice how one of his main value adds to our service was “live chat for assistance.”
Usually when someone comes through to support they are either confused or angry. If you can get them to leave your support chat, call, or email in a better mood than when they first started than you will get them to tell their friends about you. You want the above to happen as much as possible.
One KPI I require from all team members weekly is a support chat screengrab of positive feedback from a user. This can be a fun exercise in which employees compete to provide the best customer support!
Support de-risks product
Start Up lesson #1 is don’t make assumptions when it comes to product. Your product will ALWAYS take longer than expected to build, and if it doesn’t knock the ball out of the park once launched you might have a failure on your hands.
If your users love you, they will tell you what they want you to build and you will never have make product assumptions ever again. You just need to give them the pipeline to deliver that feedback. It’s why I’m so gung-ho about support chat.
Future product launches will be vastly more successful if you track user feedback and simply give them what they want. At Repost, we do not build or change anything with regards to our product unless it has explicitly been asked for by our users.
We even go as far as to catalogue each support request. In our weekly team meeting the lead support person at Repost will tell us what the most commonly asked questions or issues were.
As you can see above, this easily tells us what is at the forefront of our user’s minds and gives guidance on what operational adjustments we can make to create a better product experience! That means we should probably prioritize this SoundCloud Featured Profile Glitch!
Support helps beat the competition
Very regularly clients come to us from a competitor. When we ask why it’s usually for these reasons: “Company X, takes too long to respond” or “Company Y, didn’t get my problems fixed in time”
If you are in the early stages of your business, I would highly recommend sizing up your competition’s support processes and figuring out how you can more efficiently beat them to response time AND beat them on quality of responses. If the market you are entering has terrible support across the board, than you probably have a higher likelyhood of successfully disrupting that market.
The common factors are first “Time,” and then “Quality.” A speedy response is not always a good response. Quality and Speed need to be both equally addressed as people tend to not like having their support request outsourced anymore.
Your Support Voice & Mirroring
People like to talk to people who remind them of themselves. It might sound harsh but it’s true. You should use a tool called mirroring to better appeal and connect with your users.
Mirroring is a tactic in which you actually mirror the other person’s emotions, posture, rate of speech, etc. in a conversation to get them to like you more. I would highly recommend utilizing this strategy.
So, If someone is speaking tersely, respond back to them in a terse manner. If someone seems to be well educated, respond back to them in an educated well written manner. This will get people to like you more and connect.
But you should not risk your company’s voice to better connect with the user. Mirroring is merely a tool. The goal is still to get them to connect with your company, have a good experience regardless of if the problem gets solved or not, and then go tell all their friends about how awesome you are and what your company is all about.
At Repost, we actually came up with a support persona. We thought about what the actual person we wanted our users speaking to and what they were like. Since education in music is a big issue we have adopted the persona of “the older sibling who knows more than you do.” Someone who you trust, has your back, and is cool and might take you to the cool kid’s party if you’re lucky.
One for all or all for one?
So you’re starting out and you’ve gotten some traction. Support requests are ramping up and it’s starting to get overwhelming for you to handle. Do you 1) make a hire against support and have one or a few people do support exclusively? Or do you 2) have everyone at the company to pitch in and dedicate a % of time to support.
Anyone who works at a big company will think I’m crazy. I believe everyone should do support. Option #2 for me is the winner. Here’s why:
- Problems get solved by experts
- Faster response times / no bottle neck
- Department heads know what needs to be worked on
- Engineers will solve bugs faster
It’s not about answering people’s questions:
Support is a sunk cost until you can figure out how to get more out of it than your users do. It is the easiest way to stand out from your competition, de risks your product, markets your service, Oh, and I guess it also solves your users problems…
But if you do it right, who gains more? Your user or you? Repost has certainly gained more than our individual users collectively from our Support strategies. If you total up the amount of time spent by salaried employees in support chat to the amount of new signings / users to the business it absolutely has financially has made sense!
It’s not sexy, but if you invest into your support game, you will have a far greater chance of success. It is what everyone looks over, and it is a super cheap way to get ahead when you’re starting out!
