Really good customer service — how it should work

I am 24 years old. My first real job, as a 13-year old kid, was at the (then) immensely popular swedish community Lunarstorm. I was a “security administrator”, a nice word for someone who accepted/denied profile pictures for the users. When I got a little older I started answering customer service emails. It was the usual way of handling user complaints. They used a form on the site, we answered. No hassle.

Later on, a while after high school, I started working with customer service on a relatively large internet company. I was in charge of a team consisting of 10 people who answered questions regarding payments, technical issues etc.. Again, it was the usual way of handling things. People asked, we responded. During my short tenure at the company (I went to university after 6 months) things usually went down the same way. It wasn’t bad service, but it definitely was’nt really good customer service. The kind of service that really wants you to come back.

At university I started coding. I learnt the basics about HTML/CSS first, then went on to PHP, SQL, basic Java, and JavaScript. Today I am one of those hipster-programmers who mostly work with front-end frameworks like AngularJS, combined with NodeJS and some noSQL-db like MongoDB.

This is only interesting because I had the pleasure of using the authentication service Auth0 last week. I was setting up an application and had some problems configuring the connection to my Windows Azure Active Directory application. After the first try I was thinking about mailing the customer support, but I gave it another try instead. No luck. Same problem. Frustrated, I was going through the documentation when a little pop-up told me: “Hi, I see you are having some problem setting up your application. How can I help?”. First I was perplexed, “Are they monitoring everything I do. How did they just know that?”. That feeling vanished quite quickly.

After a little chat with their customer support we narrowed down the problem to Microsoft. They had some problems on their side which caused the problems. The people in the customer service told me he had some contacts at the Mobile Services at Microsoft and promised to notify them of the problem.

Later that evening I received an email from the customer support at Auth0 again. They told me that Microsoft had resolved the problem and that I could try my application again. Sure, it worked!

The way customer service works today is broken.

Sure, you should always be able to use the traditional form to submit issues and ask questions. You should also send the traditional emails welcoming a user to your service and make sure they feel welcome. All that usual pro-active service should not be neglected. But usually you lose a people if they have to wait for an answer for even 1-2 hours. It’s too much time, they might just as well have moved on to try out your competitor which actually worked the first time.

Trying to understand exactly when and where in your flow a user needs help, and providing it as the problems occur, that is really good customer service. Service that make your customers want to come back. You should take the initiative to help your users when they are experiencing problems, not the other way around. If you can optimize your flow and find the bottlenecks where users usually encounter problems — and get notified as this happens in realtime — then your are in a good position to provide them with really good service.

I hope I will see more of this really good customer service in the future. It will at least make me a happy customer and result in more aspirins staying in their bottles.

For the record, I have nothing to do with Auth0 at all. Last week was the first time I heard their name, let alone used their service.