How to achieve more with great Customer Support?

Insights & kind thoughts from our Happiness Heroes

Delivering happiness is not just a way of speaking (or writing) like Hemingway or any other famous author. For us, it means to get the job done and get it flawless. By flawless we don’t necessarily mean without struggles or other imminent challenges — it’s part of the game, but with a sense of fulfillment and gratitude.

Even though a lot of people treat customer support as an automatic process that doesn’t require too much soul, we completely disavow with this kind of approach. That’s why the support crew members are called Happiness Heroes. And yes, they manage to do some magic for a bunch of great people all over the world. And to get this out of the way, yes, we sometimes screw up. We are only human.

We like that each Happiness Hero has a catchy vision about customer support. This way, we keep an accelerated rhythm and learn a lot from each other. As Malcolm Gladwell would say — We’re the sum of the five people we spend most time with.

Let’s find out who are our witty Happiness Heroes and what keeps them motivated to wake up & help awesome digital makers from the other corner
of the world.

If I manage to empathize with the customer, then everything is changed.

Alin

When I think about customer support three words come to my mind — patience, knowledge and communication. The customer comes to you with a problem and you have to be patient to correctly understand his complaint, then making proof of a good knowledge of your product, to communicate clearly what he has to do in order to solve it. It’s that simple!

But, when I think about great customer support, I’m convinced there’s more than that. In my opinion, the key element here is empathy. Some clients will have a lot of questions, others will be annoyed and others will be just friendly. Your commitment is to handle all of them and provide the same level of support every time.

If I manage to empathize with the customer, then everything is changed. I can understand his needs, I can imagine how important is that for him and I’m able to have the right attitude. This is happening only when I put myself in the customer’s shoes for a moment. And with this comes the motivation to do the best in helping him. That’s what I think a great customer support is all about.

You need to make the user understand why that button is the perfect solution for him.

Radu

The first time that I heard about this job I was so excited because the interaction with the customers is important…and interesting too. It’s so good to hear what the customer needs and to know that you have a solution for him or her. This way you can evolve.
It’s not hard to create a robot (I guess) or to give a complete answer to one client or another. But this is just “covering the hole in the wall” and we aim for more. We want to find a way to learn from our mistakes and to keep improving.

As you may know, WordPress is a platform that tried to be easy to understand for basic users. Sometimes, it’s hard to interact even with simple requests. This is the moment where a good customer support shows up. The main point is not to just say “Hey, mate! Just click that button and everything will be alright”. You need to make the user understand why that button is the perfect solution for him.

We all need to grow here: we, by understanding the needs of the user (and, sometimes, the problems that he has with our product’s structure) and the user, by understanding how he can combine the options from the main platform (WordPress) and our products, even if, sometimes, we have to explain how the platform works, a part that is not related to us. A simple response is seldom enough.

At the end of the day people’s impressions is something we all learn from.

Robert

In my opinion, a good customer support focuses on customer’s needs and tries to “solve” a case by any means. Fortunately, a great customer support is not only about that. It strives to understand the people’s needs and desires, apart from numbers and what the market looks like at that point.

It is our responsibility to connect with the people and help them out while keeping a friendly, yet professional vibe. This creates a channel between them and the rest of our crew, where problems, impressions, and suggestions get filtered in a creative manner.

I believe that attention to details is one of the defining characteristics of our team and that rises the customer support effort to a different level — we called it Happiness Heroes.

At the end of the day people’s impressions are something we all learn from, but mostly for me, it just keeps my wheels spinning.

They’ll be more than happy to return.

Alex

Being a Happiness Engineer means growth of Intelligence… Sorry, I meant the next level of Intelligence — EQ or Emotional Intelligence, where our mindset and mindfulness is needed for each and every customer. In order to understand the customer needs, you must firstly understand yourself, in a deeper way. They see us as a persona where they can get their voices heard in such a way that when they’ll finish the conversation and got their problems solved, they’ll be more than happy to return and seek for guidance or for another fine-ass theme.

Not an easy thing to do, neither to think of. Diving deep once again, Customer Support represents more than skilled agents that solve tickets and tasks. We are the advocates of success inside a business. Guess who is informing the Devs when something is broken? Who reports the “almighty bugs”? Who is working side by side with the Devs on a theme update? Thought that support means only lots of tickets and emails? Think twice. :)

How things work out for you? We would love to hear your thoughts on this because only from this kind of healthy ping-pong we can raise the bar and draw meaningful lessons for everyone involved.

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