Customer service involves a lot of answering reasonable questions and getting legitimate bugs fixed by the engineering team. That won’t change; bug-free products are about as common as flying porcupines.

But there’s a whole realm of problems and questions that are not actually bugs – they’re just the result of bad product messaging. And these items are draining time, money, and customers.

Want an example? Apparently a bunch of Square users currently think that the mobile payment service is “down”. It’s not. But the error message they’re getting is so vague, they assume it is:

This is a perfect example of a false customer service issue created by product messaging. One that could seriously deter customers from using the product. One that is costing money to respond to in their support queue. And one that could be avoided.

How does a company avoid these issues?

Little details can easily slip through the cracks, so the best way to fight them is multiple points of review. The UX folks on your Product team should always be designing for error situations as well as a properly-working product. QA should certainly be testing all potential error situations and catching anything odd.

But frankly, customer service has the strongest opportunity to make a better product. They need to get to the root of these problems when they hit the support queue. Anecdotally or through analytics (we have some, if you’d like to check them out), you need to catch problem areas and dig into the WHY. Why are people saying our app is down? Oh, the error message is unclear. Why do people send 2x more tickets about the photo uploader? Oh, the buttons are badly labeled.

“‘I couldn’t figure out how to ______’ is a clear sign of bad messaging,” says Ted Choper, Head of Customer Support here at UserVoice. “Looking for areas causing confusion or vague tickets (‘Feature x isn’t working’) is a great way to find messaging or UI that can be improved.”

Additionally, a major step of any support ticket is to try to reproduce the problem – that’s a great opportunity to spot any sub-par messaging.

Make this a part of your company process and you’ll avoid wasting money answering issues (and potentially losing customers) over something that is 100% solvable. And more money = more ice cream sandwiches.

I was reading a post about social advocacy platforms yesterday. It’s a pretty dry read, except for this nugget:

“We’ve studied and asked customers why they recommend products,” Fuggetta said. “The number one answer is they had a great experience and want to help others — over 50 percent of those surveyed said that. They want their friends to enjoy it.”

Fuggetta said only one percent of the respondents said they shared because they would get a coupon or a deal. “In our definition, they are not advocates,” he explained.

Let’s add to this another stat, from eMarketer:

“A December 2009 MarketingSherpa survey indicated that learning about specials and sales was the top motivation of those who friended or followed a brand online, supporting the results of earlier surveys.”

Here’s how that math works out: the majority of your fans are following you to learn about specials which won’t cause them to recommend your product. Meaning that the majority of your Facebook fans could be useless to your brand.

Building real relationships with your customers (via Facebook or otherwise) is always going to give a far greater return on investment than attracting them through deals. True fans make an impact, paid “fans” don’t.

I recently wrote a positive post about my local bakery, La Boulange, so I suppose it’s only fair that I write a negative one!

One day last month I was in a hurry. I was headed to The Startup Conference so I could give airbrush tattoos at the UserVoice booth. I had to grab a car in about 10 minutes, but I was dying of hunger. I decided to head to my standby, La Boulange, for their amazing breakfast sandwich.

The issue with the breakfast sandwich is that it comes with a side, which must be eaten with a fork. In addition to being more calories than I really want to eat, it’s not convenient when your window for eating breakfast is the walk from the bakery to your Zipcar.

So I asked: “Can I get the breakfast sandwich, but with no side? It’s ok, you can still charge me the same amount.”

The guy at the register frowned, and responded: “Yeah, unfortunately our system literally can’t do that. You have to get a side.”

Sigh.

Listen, I understand. I remember cash registers. I still use a lot of inflexible systems that can’t do what I want them to. It drives me crazy. But you have to realize that I am asking you to help me out, and you’re failing. I know the system can’t do it. But you are 5 feet away from the people making my breakfast. Can’t you just tell them, verbally, not to include a side? [As Chris clarified in the comments, this is likely because the employee isn't empowered to break policy...which is exaclty the point.]

I see companies put themselves/their employees in this position far too often. The system won’t do something, so they shrug and say “sorry”.

“Sorry, our system can’t do partial refunds.”
“Sorry, we can’t get that item to you in time.”
“Sorry, our game doesn’t work on that system.”

Guess what: your customer doesn’t care how your system works. No, really. They don’t care one bit. They want what they want, and if you can’t deliver it, they’ll find someone who CAN do it.

Take the time to help your customers, even if it means circumventing your system. Walk the 3 feet to talk to the chef. Send someone a check if your system can’t do refunds. Give someone another game if it turns out your games only work on PC.

It’ll take you an extra couple of minutes, sure. But it might mean the difference between a lifelong customer or someone who flames you on Twitter (or worse, on a big blog like The Consumerist). That’s maybe $0.25 for the La Boulange employee to go out of their way versus $728 I might spend in a year. Seems like a pretty clear decision to me.

Photo courtesy of vnoel.

Last year, I decided that I was finally cancelling my home internet service with my big-name ISP.

I’ve been with this ISP for home internet for awhile, really for no specific reason. I initially got set up with them years ago and haven’t bothered to switch.

However, five months ago my connection started failing every 20 minutes. This being unacceptable, I called them. Two months later, I’d been on the phone with them at least 5 times (usually for 20 minutes or more), stayed at my house for a whole day waiting for a repairman who never showed, and finally got dropped off my call when threatening to cancel my service. That was the last straw, and I switched to Sonic.net happily.

How could the ISP have done better? It wasn’t just about being nice. It’s about how they failed to scale their customer support, and now they’re stuck in a mire of bad support that they can’t hire their way out of.

• They should have recorded my contact info when I first called in. Being asked for my secondary contact number every time is a waste of their time and mine.
• They should have used customer service guidelines to educate everyone the same way. Why did the 4th person suggest moving the modem from my carpet to a table, but not the first person?
• They should have used their CRM. The second person I spoke to should not have been performing tests that had already been completed and logged in the CRM by the first person.
• They should have had specialized customer service representatives. As soon as the agent I spoke to realized that my problem was complicated and that I was tech-savvy, they should have transferred me to someone who could dive in deep with me and solved things quicker.
• They should have had better scheduling structure. “Between 9a and 5p” is not a timeframe, it’s a day, and it’s hard for the average person to be around for that period of time on a weekday.
• They should have empowered their representatives to make things right. I told the agent that I would cancel if nobody came out today and instead she tried to schedule a time for the next day, because she had no power to do anything. She had to transfer me. If she had the power to delight the customer she would have gotten someone to come out that day, or given me a free month of service, and appeased me.
• Frankly, they just should have made an effort. I got dropped from the call with them and they never called me back…even though they had a callback number and it was clear that I was very very distressed. That’s just not caring.

I have sympathy for this ISP. It’s very hard to scale quality customer service as your company grows, and they have a hell of a lot of customers. They also probably think that they're so big that some bad service here or there can't hurt them (they're wrong). Here’s hoping they read this article and put some better structures in place…or, at the very least, you learn from their mistakes.

Photo courtesy of vlima.com.

Blackberry users are angry. RIM’s Blackberry data network was out for three days. And instead of focusing on their customers, they focused on their image.

Where'd they go wrong?

1. It took them several days to give any insight into what was actually going on.

People like transparency. They hate being in the dark.

Instead, RIM should have provided info as soon as they had it (barring, of course, any way that would have made them vulnerable to attack) and been clear that they didn’t know how long the issue might occur.

2. They focused on slickness instead of humanity.

Their video apology had nice words, but the level of quality was too good. The words were too rehearsed. It sounded like a guy trying to save his job, not actually trying to inform his customers. Pro tip: if you say “can’t” in real life, don’t say “cannot” in your video.

Instead, RIM should have done quick, unscripted videos with team members in their work environment. These would have provided more insight and shown the actual emotion of the staff regarding the issue…which, honestly, probably was sincere.

3. They turned it into a transactional relationship.

Blackberry users are clearly very loyal, as seen in the tweets above. They have plenty of more popular options, but they stick with RIM. But instead of treating these loyal customers like family – cementing that emotional relationship – RIM’s apology was decidedly transactional: “a selection of premium apps worth a total value of more than US $100 will be offered free of charge to subscribers as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions”.  This language tells people that their three days of outage were worth $100 in crappy apps. That's not going to breed loyalty.

Instead, RIM should have been overly generous and focused less on the monetary amount and more on what they’re doing to improve things, since that’s the most important.

What happened to RIM could happen to any company. The difference between a disaster and an outage? Those with an outage are transparent, honest, and put their customers – not “public relations” – above all else.

We’ve all seen the social media crisis and cringed, whether it be the Urban Outfitters boycott or the KISSmetrics undeletable cookie. These crises are increasing, according to Jeremiah Owyang’s report for Altimeter. And many of them are reaching mainstream media. The implication: you could be next.

What’s frustrating about this is how preventable it is. Says Owyang, “Currently, 66% of all companies do not have a process [using customer] feedback to fix root problems, [improve] products and services.”

But Jeremiah’s report suggests that the best way to avoid these issues is good social media practices and training. While I agree that these are important, I don’t think this isn’t about being good at social media – I think this is about being good at making customers happy.

Jeremiah’s data actually backs this up. He finds that the #1 cause of social media crises was “exposure of poor experience”.

Don’t solve this by training staff to deal with people when they’re already angry. Solve this by building a great experience for your customers.

Build a culture around great support. Treat support as a money-maker, not loss prevention. Create a positive environment for your support employees. Ask your customers for feedback when they're most likely to have it. Think about your customers when making major changes. Don't separate the folks who talk to customers from the folks who build your product. Don't force your customers to help each other because you're not there. Answer customers quickly.

The answers are all there (and we’re continuing to expand upon them as we cover our Customer Service Scaling Timeline) but it’s up to us to make this change happen. Start making changes!

Read Jeremiah's report here.

Disclaimer: I consider Jeremiah a friend, mentor, and super-smart gent. I think his report is fantastic – I just disagree about what to tackle first.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Last week I traveled to Boston for a wedding. And, as fate would have it, was scheduled to fly back right as Hurricane Irene hit.

As happened to many people on many airlines, my flight was cancelled. I sort of expected it, and I dutifully followed the email notification to the JetBlue website to try to get rebooked.

I called their phone line, got put on hold, and then finally got dropped from the line with the suggestion that I “call back later”.

I dug around for a contact form on their website and finally found one, after significant searching. I sent a message, but an autoresponse informed me that I missed this gem in tiny font in their sidebar:

7-10 days?! Alright, let’s get creative. A Google search uncovered people on some discussion boards were suggesting that you contact JetBlue via Twitter. I followed the JetBlue Twitter account and sent them a Direct Message with my flight confirmation code. 45 minutes later they DM’d me back to say that they’d rescheduled my flight to Wednesday afternoon. Wow, that was easy.

People are raving about how JetBlue provided fantastic social media support during this crisis. Here’s the thing:

Great customer support in one channel means jack squat if you provide terrible service in another official channel. You have to treat your customers well everywhere that you interact with them.

In talking to the JetBlue folks on Twitter they told me that they had 14 people full-time responding to tweets/DMs on Friday night and Saturday morning. Why didn’t they have this level of support on their phone lines? It’s not just an official channel, but the official channel they list on their website.

Some will argue that Twitter is a more visible, more viral medium and thus more important to do good support on. I call shenanigans. Just because I phone in doesn’t mean I don’t have a Twitter account. And just because someone doesn’t have a Twitter account doesn’t mean they can’t raise hell (it didn’t take a Twitter account or a big video blogger for this video to damage Comcast’s rep…just an angry customer leading many other angry customers).

Here’s a better recipe for success:

1. Make it easy to contact you. Hiding your contact form only shows that you don’t want to hear from me. That’s why we make the contact form easy to find on every UserVoice portal (even when companies request that we don’t).
2. Provide equal support on every channel. A customer scorned will hurt you, no matter how much clout they have.
3. Be prepared for disasters. Irene sucked for everyone. Train all your staff in support (like Zappos and UserVoice do) so that the guy who chooses movies for intercontinental flights could have been answering my call.
4. Apologize. Sometimes, you just can’t provide the level of support you'd like to provide. Try apologizing. We humans are a sympathetic bunch.

On the plus side, I got a lot of UserVoice work done while waiting for a new flight. That’s something, right?

-Richard White
CEO, UserVoice

Airport photo by Ben (Falcifer).
Flier photo by quinnums.