Un-breaking Customer Service
This is the final installment of a 4-part series about what is wrong with the customer service software industry and what we can do about it.
In the first three parts of this blog post series, we talked about why and how customer service software is fundamentally broken. The tl;dr is that it’s hard to navigate the fine line between the best interest of the consumer and features that require help from the company.
I’ve been one of the brave souls walking that fine line for the past 6 years as co-founder and CTO at GetHuman. I would never claim that GetHuman is the ultimate answer (yet 😉), but our years of experimentation and exploration have lead me to believe that the following 6 characteristics are essential for any software that aims to dominate the industry and un-break customer service.
1. Consumer Technology
It should go without saying that the solution is going to have to be on the consumer side. Commercial software vendors will never work against the best interest of companies.
Sure, commercial vendors could try and convince companies that certain changes are in their best interest despite their reservations, but no salesman in their right mind is going to push that type of “controversial” conversation very far.
2. Valuable Independent Behavior
The consumer software needs to have features that are extremely valuable to consumer and which do not require any direct relationship with companies. This will ensure interests are aligned with the consumer.
For example, this could include high quality information about the company and/or their products curated from knowledgeable experts in the community.
3. Leverage Over Companies
The consumer software product needs to eventually gain some form of leverage over companies which will allow for more powerful features and services without any strings attached. More specifically, there needs to be a situation where there is huge upside for the company to interact with the product and no downside for the consumer software to NOT interact with the company. In other words:
You need me. I don’t need you.
The obvious example here is if a significant portion of a company’s customers was using a particular consumer customer service product. In that situation, the consumer product would have the power to make a significant positive or negative impact to the underlying company.
4. High Growth Business Model
Now, before you say “well, duh”, you should realize that most consumer software for customer service gets this wrong. Typically, one of two critical mistakes is made with their business model:
- Just focus on user growth and don’t worry about making money until later. This works with some consumer software, but I’ve never seen it work in the customer service space. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for the party.
- Focus on low hanging fruit revenue with no clear path to high growth. This is VERY common and again doesn’t usually work with consumer customer service software. The typical result of this strategy is enough revenue for a lifestyle business, but nothing that could rapidly grow to capture the entire market and change the world (which is what we are aiming to achieve).
The problem with both of these is that there is an assumption a high growth model can be “figured out later”. In reality, most high growth models require fundamental changes in the product that are really difficult to simply add on down the road.
An example of a more viable high growth business model for this situation is to have the customer service software also provide purchase suggestions (making money off referrals). This can be tricky to implement, but I believe if you’re able to earn the consumer’s trust dealing with customer service issues, you can parlay that trust into suggestions for net new purchases. Referrals make higher margins than ads right off the bat and your value per user should grow exponentially as you get more users and become more of a trusted source.
5. Organic Search + {{ somethingElse }}
Customer service is by nature a reactive experience. A problem happens (often seemingly out of nowhere) and people react to it by contacting customer service. They don’t plan for it and they often would rather not think about it if they didn’t have to.
The reactive nature of customer service makes product marketing VERY difficult.
Organic search is extremely useful as a customer acquisition channel since it fits in perfectly with a common process people use to resolve customer service issues (i.e. doing a Google search for their issue and/or contact information for the company). The only challenge with organic search as the only channel is that it is often unpredictable even for the most experienced SEO experts.
Organic search is table stakes, but it’s not enough.
In order to grow really big, really fast (i.e. exponential growth) and take over the industry, consumer software also needs a way to reliably acquire users on a more proactive basis. This could mean a second marketing channel such as using influencers or it could mean focusing on an acquisition loop like referral programs.
Regardless of what it is, the point is that you need to have more control over growth than provided by organic search. You need to know that if you pour money into marketing it will yield a positive result on a consistent basis.
6. Sticky
Customer service is by nature unpredictable, ephemeral and sporadic. Even if you build something that is able to find a consumer at the exact moment of a problem and you are able to successfully resolve that problem quickly, what are the chances that consumer will remember you the next time they have an issue?
Not bloody likely.
Well, at least not without some other reason for users to come back to your product on a regular basis. That’s why it’s critical to combine the core customer service resolution feature with at least one other high value retention loop feature (ex. a popular daily newsletter). Otherwise you would have to attract net new users every month and that is typically an unsustainable strategy.
End Game
Customer service is fundamentally broken because companies have a much greater influence on most of the software mediums used to facilitate communication and resolution. In order to un-break customer service, we need a new medium that is fully capable of resolving customer service issues while remaining largely independent from company influence.
Easier said than done.
There’s a graveyard of consumer startups out there that have tried and failed. Many of the ones I know failed because they were missing one or more of the 6 characteristics mentioned in this article. In my opinion (and from my experience), these characteristics are not just “nice to haves” but requirements for effectively resolving customer service issues in the best interest of the consumer at scale.
And THAT is the end game. Flip the script so the interest of the consumer is more valued and create an environment where companies are incentivized to do better. In other words, the consumer wins, the software vendor wins, and (in the long run) the companies with the best customer service win.
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Call to Action
We’re working hard at GetHuman to try and fulfill the vision outlined in this article. We want to un-break customer service.
The only thing is, we can’t do it alone.
I am a firm believer that competition is good. There are many different paths to success and the learnings from someone on one path can help others on the way to the same goal. Some of the content in this article comes from what I have learned watching hundreds of other consumer products in our space. My hope is that though this 4-part blog post series and future articles I will be able to help inspire and guide more entrepreneurs toward this same vision.
More than anything, I want this problem solved. I want better customer service. Join me and let’s venture down this path together.
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