A Big List of Customer Support Resources

A growing collection of templates, tips, and guides for working with customers.

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

Management

Team Leadership

• Heads of Support Survey (supportdriven.com) — “Helps you answer questions about support budgets so you can make a case for requesting more resources or show how you’re effectively and efficiently working with the resources you have.”
• 2018 Heads of Support Report (supportdriven.com)
• A Beginner’s Guide to Giving Performance Reviews (medium.com) — “Advice for new managers on the most effective way to deliver feedback.”
• The Mindset Shift of a Manager (signalvnoise.com) — “Becoming a new manager isn’t merely a change in what you do — it’s a change in how you think.”
• A Nifty Little Management Guide for New Managers (medium.com) — “If you are a new manager or a fledgling startup founder, congratulations on taking this bold step of faith! The journey will not be easy, but I hope this guide will serve you well.”
• 9 Mistakes New Managers Make (knowyourteam.com) — “Don’t accidentally become a bad boss by overlooking these often imperceptible leadership mistakes.”
• 9 Lessons for the First-Time Manager (99u.adobe.com)
• Manager Tools podcast (manager-tools.com)
• 2019 Rise of the Experience Economy: 2019 CX Industry Report (usertesting.com)

Recommended Books

• The Effortless Experience by Matthew Dixon
• Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
• The Best Service Is No Service by Bill Price
• Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh — review and takeaways
• Hug Your Haters By Jay Baer — review and takeaways
• Start With Why by Simon Sinek — review and takeaways
• The Convenience Revolution by Shep Hyken
• Chief Customer Officer by Jeanne Bliss
• Resilient Management by Lara Hogan

Salaries and Titles

• Customer Support Salary Calculator (helpscout.com) — “A simple calculator based on an annual survey of customer support professionals across companies, industries, and locations around the world.”
• 2018 Customer Support Salary Study (helpscout.com)
• Titles for Support (github.com) — Basecamp’s support leveling
• Headcount Calculator (docs.google.com) — via Bill Bounds

Hiring

• Customer Support sample job descriptions (workable.com)
• 23 Interview Questions You Should Ask Every Customer Service Candidate (helpscout.com)

Firing

• How to Terminate an Employee without Breaking their Spirit (monster.com) — by Dick Grote, author of How to Be Good At Performance Appraisals: Simple, Effective, Done Right
• 5 Tips On How To Fire An Employee Gracefully (forbes.com) — by Mike Kappel
• How to offboard humans, like a human (linkedin.com) — by Charlotte Ward

Professional Development

• Learn User Support (supportdriven.com) — “A free online course to develop skills in supporting WordPress. The course includes 6 units over 6 weeks and covers the following topics: goals of great customer support, developing your own support philosophy, WordPress troubleshooting, managing challenging users, productivity tools, and support as a career.”

Metrics and Reporting

Customer Ops

3 Questions About Your Customer Support Effort (frame.ai)

A Playbook for Working With B2B Customers in Slack (frame.ai)

Industry-Standard Performance Benchmarks

• Zendesk
• Solvvy
• LiveChat
• Spoke

Metrics

• Customer Support Metrics: 29 Essential KPIs (blendo.co)
• Customer Service Agent Performance Measurement (helpscout.com)
• How to Improve Net Promoter Score / NPS (lumoa.me)
• NPS: What Your Promoter Score Isn’t Telling You (kayako.com)
• 5 Truths of NPS (supportdriven.com)
• Common Mistakes that Reduce CES (nicereply.com)
• “45 KPIs tracked by my BI team” by Sean Tanos

Voice of Customer

• The Essential Guide to the Voice of Customer (gainsight.com) — “Voice of Customer (‘VoC’) consists of initiatives designed to capture customer insights, close the loop on feedback, and prioritize improvements to produce happy and successful clients.”

Misc.

Voice & Tone

• Tone Guide Resources (support-guide.skyverge.com)
• Voice, Tone & Content Guides
• Mailchimp Voice and Tone (styleguide.mailchimp.com)
• School of Support: Taking the Right Tone (helpscout.com)
• Don’t Let Tone Ruin Your Support Interactions (helpscout.com)
• How to Talk to Your Customers (helpscout.com)
• Our tone of voice (monzo.com)

Improving Your Writing

• A Guide to Writing Better Email (helpscout.com)
• Easy Reading is Damn Hard Writing (helpscout.com)
• 6 Traits of a Great Customer Service Email (thewordfactory.com)
• A Writing Workbook for Customer Service Agents (ewriteonline.com)
• On Writing Well: the Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (Goodreads review)

Refunds

• Basecamp’s Refund Policy (github.com) — “We never want our customers to feel that way, so our refund policy is simple: If you’re ever unhappy with Basecamp, for any reason, just contact our support team and we’ll take care of you.”
• Should SaaS Companies Offer Refunds? (groovehq.com)
• How to Write a Win-Win Refund Policy (nicereply.com)

Incident Response

• Top 5 Incident Communication Tips (statuspage.io) — Includes a link at the bottom of that page “How to create an incident comms plan”.
• Automate your incident response communication (supportdriven.com) — how Olark uses custom internal automation and Statuspage to manage incidents and maintain a human touch.