People love to get angry at you when you’re popular. The same goes for Klout. Their popular “online influence” tool regularly irritates customer service and community professionals. “You can’t choose whom to give good support to based on their influence! That’s wrong!”

The thing is, Klout agrees.

Great Support for All

I spoke to Megan Berry, Marketing Manager at Klout, about how their team does support, and one of the first things she said was: “We give we give equal support to everyone regardless of score. Everyone has Klout.” Megan explained that while Klout is great for getting your message out to top influencers or even choosing when to go the extra mile, they believe everyone deserves an answer (to the extent such a thing is possible). Megan and her teammates respond to any user question that comes up, usually within 24 hours. Klout score regardless.

In fact, Klout has a remarkably proactive attitude towards support. Megan says their goal is to answer every question, even if they don’t know the answer (for example, when they might be adding MySpace integration). It’s better for a customer to know Klout cares, even if they can’t help.

Support Through Development

The most unique way in which Klout does support is actually through development. “If we’re getting a lot of complaints around a specific feature, we’ll actually make it better.” Sounds obvious, but most support teams are expected to grit their teeth and face the backlash created by the development team. By keeping close tabs on these issues and coordinating with the product team, many of the frequently asked questions for Klout become moot as updates address those pain points.

So, Can I Do This Too?

This model is applicable to most companies. What’s key here is the measurement – Megan keeps track of the number of questions, complaints, and bugs around a specific area of the product. When she comes to the product team, her feedback isn’t vague – it’s specific and measurable. And by improving that area of the product she not only lowers the amount of time and money spent on answering questions over and over, she also ends up with a better product.

“Communication between departments can be hard,” Megan admits. “But it means a better experience for our users and less time answering the same questions about the same thing that has been broken for a year. It’s worth the effort.”

How does your support department work with the development team?

Communication photo courtesy of Elyce Feliz under the Creative Commons Attribution License..

TurnSocial is a free social toolbar for local business websites. It’s also a side project. Matt Hendrick, who also works at another startup based in San Francisco, spends his free time as CEO of TurnSocial. Considering he has a finite amount hours to spend on TurnSocial, one would expect that he’s limiting his interaction with customers as much as possible. In fact, the exact opposite is true.

Instead of trying to hide from support inquiries and feature requests, Matt makes himself incredibly available: every new customer gets a warm welcome email from him, and the reply-to goes directly to his inbox. Yes, sign up for TurnSocial and you immediately have the CEO’s email address.

More Access Means Less Junk

You may think that sounds all happy and huggy, but the logistical result of this is actually pretty impressive. “People aren't intimidated to ask for help if they need it, but they also don't needlessly fire off messages with no real purpose.” says Matt. “Having a direct line to the CEO makes people think twice before they hit the send button.” Yes, Matt actually gets fewer emails BECAUSE he gives out his email address.

Putting a Face to the Company

Matt also stresses the personal bond this builds between him and his customers, which is important for a tool like TurnSocial. “We’re asking people to put our tool directly on their website – their place of business – so we have a high degree of respect for their needs. We want them to know that we really do care – we succeed only if we help make their website even better.”

Matt regularly gets messages from customers saying how impressed they are that he makes himself so readily available. “It’s a very effective way to retain customers and win over those who could be on the fence. People are comfortable cancelling their account with a faceless corporation. But when they know exactly who they’re abandoning, they’re more likely to email you and try to work through their issues. And we do our best to help them.”

Are you hiding your contact info in the shadows? Try making it extremely available – it might actually result in fewer emails, and certainly will result in happier customers!

Junk photo courtesy of lady3jane.

This is part of our ongoing series on models of doing support. We hope this series will inform and inspire your support efforts, and show the myriad of ways that a company can provide great support.

Perhaps the phrase I hear most often from startups (Aside from “pivot”!) is “that’s a nice problem to have”. How are we going to handle the traffic load when we have 1MM users? That’s a nice problem to have. How are we going to answer all these customer issues when we get that New York Times article? That’s a nice problem to have.

Actually, it’s not.

Belatedly scaling anything (be it servers, support, or office space) can not only be hard work but actually do lasting damage to your business. I know far too many companies that have given up and accepted providing terrible customer service because they never figured out how to grow with the support load.

That’s why it’s refreshing to see new startups like Miso and AFAR planning their scaling after only a year.

Scaling Employees

Companies often wait to hire an additional support employee until they are utterly overwhelmed. This ends badly – they never get enough training, there’s no process for sharing support, and they are quickly overwhelmed too.

In contrast, Miso, a social TV app, hired an intern to help with support in their first year, and AFAR Connect, the social travel site, is currently hiring one. They’re certainly not yet overwhelmed by customer issues – but they know that as their userbase grows so will the number of customer issues, and they’re planning accordingly. Instead of just hiring extra muscle, both Miso and AFAR are implementing a buddy system. One employee is the first line of support, handling the majority of issues. When something involves more investigation, the issue is assigned to the other support employee.

This also happens to be a great way to introduce new employees to the process. Angie Bui of Miso started out as an intern getting assigned a few softball issues from supervisor Katie Smillie. This helped her ramp up to the harder questions, eventually taking over that first line of support from Katie. She’s now a full-time employee, riding the initial wave of customer issues and tossing the tough ones to Katie, who is now free to spend more time on larger projects.

Scaling Knowledge

AFAR’s Moran Hirsch will also be teaming with her intern. What happens if her intern moves on, as interns do? “The very first task I’ll be having them do is to start documenting solutions to frequently-occurring issues, both for internal and external use,” says Moran. “It’s something I don’t have time for but very much needs to be done”. Miso is doing the same with UserVoice, starting to build up a collection of FAQs and canned responses that will save them time as their support load grows and team members move on.

Is a year-old startup too young to start thinking about scaling customer support?

“Absolutely not. We had a major issue occur due to a foul-up by one of our distributors and we had dozens of customer emails rolling in,” says Katie. “If we hadn’t had a process, a team, and canned responses prepared, I would have been buried.”

So maybe scaling isn't a “good problem to have”. How do you plan to scale your support?

Scale photo courtesy of vividBreeze.
Woman photo courtesy of amburn.everett.