Behind The Scenes of LALAFO or Who Replies to the Questions from our Customers
That’s the question that every LALAFO user probably has. It’s a well-hidden secret Truly an enigma worthy of its own Dan Brown book, you might think.
Well, no… Not really) Anastasia Streletskaya, Chief Customer Support Officer at LALAFO, will tell us all about it.
Anastasia, please tell us about the structure of customer support at LALAFO. What makes your support structure unique?
The main feature of our customer support service is our team — that’s what makes it so special. There’s not a single person who is indifferent to your concerns on the team.
Every team member understands their responsibility to the customers and is ready to step up to do everything to help.
There are multiple communication channels available at LALAFO today: email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Play Market. Each operator has a specific channel assigned to them. In most cases, the operator can provide help on the spot, but if it so happens that the operator does not have all the information about the issue or an error reported, our QA and development teams join the conversation.
Is there a process to assess the quality of customer support provided?
Of course! We’re constantly measuring the effectiveness of our team. They say that if you cannot assess the effectiveness of your work, you cannot manage your work. As for the indexes, we usually pay the most attention to the following:
Response time — we’re striving to address all requests within an first hour.
Number of enquiries made before the solution. This index is to determine how many people the operator had to involve before the solution was found. An ideal situation would be the operator providing the solution in the initial reply with no people from other teams involved.
Customer satisfaction after the request has been processed. For example, around 85% of users in Kyrgyzstan have confirmed that they’re happy with the customer support they received.
All of this is measured using special software. Once the request is received, a ticket is created for it. The ticket system is a tool for request processing. In a nutshell, it’s the customer’s record that keeps information about all their requests. 100% of requests are automatically structured, tagged, sorted by type and assigned to operators.
Such a level of automation! However, can the customers influence the speed at which their requests are processed?
Absolutely! If the user cannot perform a specific action, our operator will request information about the error, platform and version of the application. The customer can also provide this information in the initial request making the process of handling the request much faster.
Here are two examples to illustrate my point:
Hello! It’s not working.
Greetings. Can you please specify what exactly is not working?
Well, your app-thingy is not working.
Can you please specify if you’re using an iOS or Android device? What version of the app is installed on your device? And if there’s an error message, please provide its text.
I have an Android. The app version is 134. The filters are working fine for my friends, but I don’t even have access to filters.
Thank you for the details. I’d recommend updating the app. New filters have been released in latest release. Once the app is updated, you will be able to implement the filters.
And here’s the second example:
Greetings. For some reason, the filters are not displayed in my app. I can see them being available on my friend’s phone, but not on mine. I have an Android device and the app version is 134. How can I fix it?
Greetings! Thank you for such detailed information. The issue can be fixed by simply updating the app. The filters were introduced in the latest version of the app.
Initial information makes all the difference in troubleshooting.
Were there any funny customer requests that you can share with us?
We do get those from time to time, as a matter of fact. For example, our users may contact us with requests that are far from the features our service has. Sometimes they even ask for relationship advice. Once we had a request from customer that recently broke up with his girlfriend. The name of the operator was the same as the name of his ex which seems to have caused a wave of nostalgia to roll over the customer. The operator did her best to keep his spirits up and in the end she was able to persuade the guy that not all women are mean.
Sometimes our operators have to prove that they are not robots but are indeed real-life people. We also have customers that picked their ‘favorite’ operators and each time they contact us they ask for a specific person to talk to them. I must admit, this flatters our operators quite a bit since recognition and gratitude from customers is the best feedback they can receive.
This approach along with the ticket system provides our operators with access to all the necessary information about the customer and requests they sent before. This kind of automated process greatly influences the speed and quality of our replies. No longer does the operator need to dig through multiple email chains to figure out the whole situation.
Just recently, LALAFO released an update for their app. Can you tell us about the results of the update? How did the customers react to it?
There were tons of responses. The few weeks after the update were the most active. Our support workload tripled. We received both positive reactions and suggestions on ways to improve the functionality of the app.
The most important thing is that we were able to make our product better thanks to our customers.
The most prominent feature that was introduced in this update is geolocation. After the update, we gathered the feedback and the development team made this feature more convenient and user-friendly based on suggestions from our users. We can surely say that the geolocation feature the way it is now, was created by a team of developers, customer support and users.
How many operators are working on customer requests?
There are two people in Kyrgyzstan at the moment. I myself also try to work with requests from customers as much as I can. Additionally, even founders of LALAFO sometimes reply to support requests. We’re trying to stay informed in this field.
What’s the most requests you received in a day?
The busiest day brought us 3500 requests. On that day, some of the operators started working at 4AM instead of the usual 8AM.
What are the best and the worst aspects of working in customer support?
The best aspect is, of course, that feeling you get when you’ve really helped a person. Every day I talk to our operators and it’s hard to put in words how happy they are to receive genuine gratitude from users.
It’s so inspiring!
As for the least pleasant aspects, there may be the cases when the customer is not ready to accept assistance. Sounds strange, but sometimes it’s like that. When troubleshooting takes more time than we initially thought — support operators are the ones receiving all the questions and follow-up requests.
What personal qualities should a successful LALAFO customer support operator possess?
Well, the ability to read minds over the Internet would help a lot ;)
To be serious though, it’s first and foremost a great sense of responsibility, attention, inquiring mind and the ability to notice details. Aside from that, some of the key features a LALAFO support operator should have are the desire to grow professionally and not wanting to settle for where they are. There’s no place for laziness and mediocrity at LALAFO.
How do you deal with complaints from customers? Who responds to angry clients?
The first thing we do is try to understand a user’s point of view and see the situation with their eyes. A complaint is what happens when things do not go as you wanted them to go. Not all complaints we receive resulted from problems in the service. There are cases when the user does not understand the workflow. Such requests are completely logical — when you open an app or a website, the last thing you want is to spend a lot of time figuring out how it works. We take such requests into account while working on the application as our users must be comfortable in using our product from the very beginning. As for who deals with such requests, it’s usually the customer support operators. In rare cases when the operator is unable to assist the customer, the request is handled by me or my colleagues.
