3 Key Elements in Moving from Customer Service to Customer Success

You’ve had that horrible experience of calling the cable company right?

“Your wait time is approximately 28 minutes,” you hear the computer voice say before launching into the Actual Worst Hold Music On The Planet™.

So you wait (because you NEED your cable to work, obvi) and then you finally get someone on the phone and they have not one iota of a clue how to help. The conversations are circular, the “support” is laughable (that is, if you felt like laughing at this point), and… well. I don’t need to go on, right?

Customer service doesn’t exactly have a great reputation thanks to our friends at Big Cable.

But here at ConvertKit, we’re focusing on putting customers first and shifting your mindset (and the mindsets of support teams around the world) from Customer Service to Customer Success. In fact, we’re regularly adding screenshots into our #support Slack channel with love from our customers like:

and my personal favorite….

Ba dum ching!

So I suppose our focus on success is working. Of course, there’s always room for improvement. And while there’s no one right way to do things (and no one way will make absolutely everyone happy), there are some best practices on our end.

A few principles we’ve landed on as a team include:

• Remember people generally send in support tickets because they’re frustrated. Keep an awareness of that mindset and be gentle when responding.
• Teach everything you know. Don’t just fix it for them, show/tell them how they can fix it themselves too. Link to a knowledgebase article, make a screencast, or walk them through it.
• Use humor whenever possible. Make your job (and theirs) more fun.
• Pull in another team member asap if the problem is beyond your scope of understanding.
• Share your experience with the rest of the team. If you go through a tricky ticket or support situation, or learn something new, tell the other support people about it, so they can learn it too.

One of the biggest challenges of moving from a Service to a Success mindset is the sheer volume of tickets that come in on a daily basis. And this problem isn’t exclusive to us here at ConvertKit. In talking with a number of Customer Success teams, “volume of tickets” is a driving factor behind defaulting back to simple service.

In an effort to follow our tenet of “Teach Everything You Know”, I asked a few of those CS pros to share how customers can make their job easier. Essentially, how can someone write the perfect email/message to a support team that gets them 1) the answer they need 2) love from the support team and 3) more Success than just Service? Here’s what they said:

As someone who has seen more than 25,000 customers come through the door there are absolutely things I look for in the perfect support ticket.

The first would be a clear explanation of what they’re trying to do. So, instead of “my Aweber account isn’t working” something along the lines of “the list I just created in Aweber is not showing up in Leadpages” would be a huge boon my ability to help (and my mood).

The second would be what they’ve tried, if anything. So to use the example above, mentioning what articles they’ve viewed and steps they’ve tried on their own: “I read your knowledgebase article, and tried disconnecting and reconnecting the Aweber integration in Leadpages, to no avail.”

The third would be, and this is really just like a cherry on top, to include what they’re trying to achieve in accomplishing this task. Specifically the high-level goal, like “once I get this set up I’m launching my brand new webinar campaign, so I’m excited to see it work.” While this may not necessarily help me solve the problem any more effectively, it will help me deliver a targeted extra mile. A targeted extra mile, in this example, might be recommending our most popular webinar template or the perfect lead magnet for her industry.

The most important thing to us is seeing the behavior in action. Because Zapier is a middleman between other apps, we don’t have the luxury of seeing what the user sees in those apps. So a clearly articulated example of the problem (I added item X and saw behavior Y) gives us the best head start to troubleshoot on our end.

The other thing that goes a long way is humility, by which I mean not assuming that a problem is a bug on the Zapier side that we need to fix. We return the favor by proposing solutions in the same terms (e.g. ‘can you try X to see if that helps?’ compared to ‘Doing X will fix that problem’), which has the result of elevating the tone of the conversation and preventing irritation on both ends.

The perfect support ticket includes:

-your name. I really want to address you personally, and most times your account has your business information, not your actual name!

-specific, detailed, even minutia information (preferably with line breaks if it’s long :D). When someone lists out every step they took to get them to where they are, I am wowed. When someone names the exact form, sequence and email they are stuck on, I can usually identify the issue right away. Vague and hypothetical questions are much harder. I will do my best to piece it together, but it make take a couple back and forth messages before we get to the bottom of it.

-a healthy curiosity. I like solving problems, but I love to teach. When a customer wants to know the reason something happened, in addition to a fix, I love to share! Often those conversations teach me something new, too.

I love answering emails from users that have taken the time to play with the product and read the docs. Then we’re really just augmenting their thinking or providing value by showing them something above and beyond their own research.

On the flip-side my least favourite type of ticket is users that ask lots of basic questions without taking any time to familiarise themselves with the product. These users I call the “hand-holders” end up eat up the majority of support resources and usually get the least amount of value from the product.

I’m just happy when a ticket is written in English, includes punctuation, and has spaces. A clear question is a bonus most of the time. A wall of rambling text without questions can get skipped over during the busy times until we have enough time to divine what you’re saying.

Tickets that warm the cockles of my heart are concise, clearly separate questions if there are more than one, and include specific examples inside of their account or even screenshots. Separating out questions makes sure we expand on each point you’re looking for, and concrete examples from you can cut down replies incredibly. Bonus points for showing that you tried to search through help already.

Our support tools are phenomenal, so if you just say “the button doesn’t work” we can usually figure out what you mean — but it’ll take longer than if you point out the exact one, and what you were expecting to happen.

I love seeing tickets where the user is at the stage that I can really help — with most tickets, we first have to go through all the standard troubleshooting. Doing all that first (logging in/logging out, restarting the browser, trying on another device) solves the issue nine times out of ten and saves everyone time.

Do you see the common denominators here? In case you missed them, the key points everyone mentioned are:

• Details. Tell ’em the specifics so you can avoid more back and forth and they can dive right into helping you.
• Clarity. Break up the questions into numbers or bullet points. One giant paragraph is hard to read and will most likely be skipped over in favor of an easy-on-the-eyes ticket.
• Backup. Customer Success teams don’t like to be Human Google. Show them that you’ve tried Googling, searching their knowledgebase or forums, or any other measures you worked on to solve it yourself.

Details. Clarity. Backup. Come to think of it, those are three things we add in on our end to create a strong environment of Customer Success. So before you write your next support email to anyone, add those three elements in and see if it happens to shift from plain old Service into Success. I’m excited to hear what happens.