Creating Customer Delight (Part 1)
Carlo Beckman is the Director of Global Support at Feedzai. He has over 18 years of experience in Customer Support, Customer Success and Customer Experience. Carlo has evenly split his time between enterprise companies, mid-size companies and most recently, start ups. Carlo has supported relatively simple products in the SaaS space in addition to more complex products that are housed “on-prem” at a customer’s location. He is familiar with both B2B and B2C business models. Carlo has a B.A. in Management and an M.A. in Leadership, from Saint Mary’s College of California. He is currently pursuing an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership, also at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Think back to the last time you felt delight. Many things can create delight and I won’t try to list them here. Instead, I want to focus on the feeling itself. As one might surmise, Delight creates a positive feeling or reaction, and leads to a feeling of happiness or joy. If you look at my LinkedIn profile, you will find a tagline that includes the phrase “Creates Customer Delight”. My passion in life is to try and create, as much as possible, that feeling of Delight for every customer interaction at the company I work for. Here are a few ways that I’ve found to consistently provide Delight during my career along with some of the things we are doing at Feedzai to cultivate a culture of Customer Delight.
Provide Support where your Customers want it
This may seem self-explanatory, however, the “where” will change depending on your product and your industry. For example, when I was in the video game industry, many of our interactions needed to happen within the game itself or on forums. Social Media was also another area that we heavily invested a support presence into. In the B2B Enterprise space, this takes a different turn. Instead of focusing on social media or direct interactions, many Enterprise customers want to be able to self-heal. This includes having great documentation, contextual in-product help, and for complex issues, a capable Support team.
Luckily, there are many tools out there that allow teams like mine to provide “omni-channel” support and still be able to track those interactions in a way that allows Support to categorize and learn from those interactions. At Feedzai, the preferred customer interaction is with a Support Engineer, usually via email. One important aspect when providing email support is to ensure that you are giving that channel the same attention that you would a phone call, chat or Twitter post. While the interactions are asynchronous when compared to some other “live” channels, customers still expect expedient responses. At Feedzai, our time to first response is measured in minutes, not hours, and I constantly hear from our customers that this is one of the things they appreciate most about their interactions with us.
Be Empathetic, Consistent and Concise
I mentioned earlier that the preferred contact method by our customers at Feedzai is a direct interaction. As technology continues to advance, the more mundane and simple customer service tasks are able to be handled via IVR, Self-Service Kiosks and Chatbots. What this means is that the contacts that a company receives from its customers are becoming more and more complex and will require human intervention. In my experience, the Support Engineers that do the best job in solving customer issues in a way that creates Delight are those that are empathetic, consistent and concise. This combination of skills sounds like a tall order, so let’s tackle each trait individually.
Be Empathetic
At Feedzai, we provide 24/7 Production Support to Enterprise grade companies. This means that some of the issues that we receive are very pressing and require a Support Engineer to be understanding of the customer’s situation. This also means being able to work through the issue in a way that makes the customer feel heard and understood by ascertaining the full scope and severity that the issue has on the customer’s business and working toward resolution. At Feedzai, part of our Support onboarding focuses on role-play scenarios to help agents identify ways that they can be empathetic during customer interactions. In addition, Senior Support Engineers also coach and work with newer employees to help hone these skills.
Be Consistent
The last thing a customer wants when they contact Support is to have an inconsistent experience between different Support Engineers. In order to ensure consistency at Feedzai, we have several product knowledge sessions between Support and Delivery before a customer goes live. In addition, we have our Senior Support Engineers continually working with and coaching our new agents to teach them best practices in working with customers. There are times when an issue exceeds the knowledge of our front-line Support Engineers, and at Feedzai, we have a seamless escalation path in-place to ensure we stay on a path to resolution. We then document these escalated interactions so that we can improve our front-line support going forward.
In addition, we classify every customer interaction, for two important reasons. First, this allows us to spot any patterns and work with our product team to get them addressed. Second, it allows the Support team to use these cases in training exercises. One thing that I want to stress is that being consistent doesn’t mean treating each customer the same and being inflexible. The consistency lies in providing the same quality of support to each customer, while utilizing the solutions and responses that make sense to their particular issue. These are some of the things we do at Feedzai to ensure a consistent and Delightful experience.
Be Concise
Earlier I mentioned that customers love our quick response times at Feedzai. The only thing that they seem to love even more is our ability to resolve their issues quickly and efficiently. This lies at the heart of what I mean by “be concise”. One of the ways that we empower this at Feedzai is by giving our Support Engineers the latitude to “direct the conversation”. We don’t really have any PFRs (Pre-Formatted Responses) in our Support team, and for good reason; they usually cause more grief than Delight. Instead, we provide our Support Engineers (this includes all of our levels of Support) in-depth product knowledge so that they feel confident with the customer enough to help drive the conversation to get the information needed to identify a fix or workaround. This is especially important at Feedzai, where many of our customers have the Feedzai product on-premise and rely on our expertise to help guide them to the right solution. While the first two traits are important, I have found this last point of being concise and resolving the issue to be the one that drives the highest levels of customer Delight.
In Part 2, we will finish up this topic by covering the following items:
- Hire (and retain) The Right People
- Gather (and execute on) Customer Feedback
Did you find this article interesting? Do you have experience supporting a technical product? Are you looking to join a company with a great culture, cool products and fun people to work with? If so, we are currently hiring. Come join the team!
