How We Supported Our Customers During a Pandemic
The current COVID-19 pandemic has been somewhat, if not the most, challenging and uncertain time for most of us. While we are a business here at ScreenCloud, “behind the screens” we are a group of people, just like our customers and wanted to support them as much as we possibly could.
Since I joined ScreenCloud in 2017, I’ve been responsible for managing and scaling our Customer Support team. The Founders and I have always placed a high value on great customer service. But like most companies, having been impacted by the recent pandemic, we needed to find a way to balance the business’ needs while supporting our customers in the best way we felt possible.
The purpose of this article is to share my experience of how we came up with a process to help support our customers during this time. I’d love to use this as an opportunity to open a discussion with other people working in support during these uncertain times. Did you make mistakes? Maybe you got it right the first time around, hey maybe you still don’t feel like you’ve got it right now. There’s no right or wrong approach, but here’s the route we took.
The Announcement
On the 18th of March 2020, our CEO, Mark, made the following announcement to all ScreenCloud Customers. We were going to take the following actions:
- Immediate credit for customers who have been radically affected
- Full ScreenCloud service as normal
- Example health and safety content for your screens
- A new solution for connecting employees
We only had a few days to come up with a process to ensure our customers continued to be credited for as long as their facilities and spaces were closed. We all had to think fast and act effectively. Here’s how we responded to this transition:
The Process
Putting in a credit system in a short period of time isn’t easy. To add to this, the process needs to be scalable and communicated internally to all the teams involved. After the announcement went public we received over 1,000 requests from our customers wanting to claim their credits.
That’s a lot of requests for a smallish team to handle. Bearing in mind, all these customers were in different countries, business sectors, employee sizes, different subscription renewal dates and eventually, different reopening dates. (Gulp).
1. Credits (extend a helping hand)
The email requests came flooding in which meant that the support team and I went to work manually applying monthly credits to our customers’ accounts so they wouldn’t have to pay for March/April or for however long their facilities were closed.
We knew that these credits would be rolling so we needed to figure out a way to scale our support line, we did so by thinking of the following:
- Which customer has been credited?
- How much has a customer been credited?
- When is the customer renewal date?
2. Track and Trace (keep track of who in our community needs our support)
As a company we swear by automation. We’ve automated everything from our Sales to HR processes, and again, our friend automation would play a key role in aiding us in applying credits for our customers.
We needed a way to know who and how much a customer has been credited and find a way for that data to live somewhere. Therefore we decided to type “COVID-19” in the notes section for every credit we applied to our customers’ accounts; it acted as a stamp and the start of the automation process.
We then created an API callout searching for the term “COVID-19” which would update the customer information on a Google Sheet automatically and allow us to see the name, amount and renewal date of the customer and cross-reference with the email requests we received from our customers.
3. Rinse and Repeat (monthly follow-ups and check-ins)
Once credits had been applied, we needed to reassure the customer that they’re being taken care of. The last thing we wanted was for customers to worry about their screens as well as everything else that was/is happening in the world right now.
We didn’t and still don’t know how long our customers will be needing credits for their account, so we needed to make sure that we checked in from time to time. How did we do it? The magic trio: Triggers, Tags and Templates.
Zendesk is the support ticketing tool which we use. We’ve used it since the company was founded in 2015. We knew that every email or phone call needed to be tracked so we set up a few macros. A macro is an automation which modifies the response of a ticket and allows for better tracking.
When all the emails came flooding in asking for credit, we created a 1st credit — COVID-19 macro which would do the following:
- Templated but personalised email
- Tag the ticket/support enquiry (COVID-19 1st Credit)
- Trigger to reopen the ticket in 1 month to reopen
We ended up creating three or four of these macros depending on the length of time a customer has received credit from us.
4. Time to walk again
This is the stage which a portion of our customers are in now. Considering our customers are global, we support different countries, sectors and employee sizes which all may be going “back to work” at different times. So we needed to be careful with how and when we send our follow ups to check in on them or ask when they’re likely to reopen (if at all).
Therefore we created a reactivation response which can be tracked within Zendesk. This would then allow us to add internal notes within the ticketing system for tentative dates on when they were going to be “potentially” reopening. We can then credit to the point of when they’re most likely going to reopen which then allows us to refer back to our automated spreadsheet in order to cross off. (Success)
All Together
My biggest takeaway from this is that the process needs to be collaborative and done together, both internally and externally.
Here at ScreenCloud, we wanted to make sure that our customers felt supported as much as possible because, without support from our customers, ScreenCloud wouldn’t exist today.
Additionally, without support from across other departments and teams, we would not have been able to support our customers during this uncertain and difficult time.
If you can automate tasks like follow-ups and reminders, it’ll help ensure customers don’t slip through the net and will create a level of consistency. Using macros to help reduce repetitive admin tasks like rewriting templates is a game changer.
However, with all the best automation in the world, the key learning is that being human is what will keep your customers and your company sane. With flexibility, sensitivity and putting people before profit, the world will (hopefully) come out of lockdown a much improved place.
What Support process did you use during COVID-19 to take care of your customers? I’d love to hear, you can connect with me on LinkedIn.
