Having to contact customer service can suck. But customers can make this experience easier on themselves! Take it from the folks who are manning the service lines: these rules will help ensure you get your issues answered quickly and accurately.

0. Check the company FAQ/knowledgebase/help guide

Do you really want to wait for your issue to get solved? No, you want it solved now. Most companies have put many hours into their documentation, so take a glance at it and see if you can’t find an immediate answer. It’s less obnoxious than sitting on the phone with them.

1. Explain your issue in as much detail as possible

It may seem obvious to you what’s going on, but the person helping you may deal with many different issues per day. Walk through exactly what you did, what happened, and what you wanted to happen instead.

2. Include all pertinent data

Especially with the web, there are so many different things that can affect a product. Give your support rep full context: what system you’re on, what browser, what version of their product you’re using, what your account number is, etc…any information that they might need. Again, you’re saving yourself time in the end here.

3. Include a screenshot if possible

If you’re dealing with an online product, try to include a screenshot of the issue you’re seeing. Humans are very visual, and sometimes a screenshot can jog your rep’s memory and lead them directly to the problem and solution.

4. Make your level of expertise clear

Customer support reps deal with a wide range of people each day, from Mensa members to folks who are using their CD drive as a cupholder. They will often assume the worst of you, so make it clear how much you know. Are you a beginning, intermediate, or advanced user of their product? Have you tried troubleshooting and reading their help guides, or did you contact them the moment you experienced an issue? All of this will help them give you better suggestions.

5. Be nice!

It’s incredibly frustrating to have something stop working, and many companies have terrible customer service. Try to take a deep breath and be nice, and you’ll probably get better support.

Tried all of the above and still getting a frustrating experience? Then it's very possible the company you're speaking to simply gives terrible customer support. Complain to the manager, write a negative review online, or tell them to start reading this blog!

Cartoon courtesy of Francisco Martinez.
Photo courtesy of voteprime.

We’re very passionate about what we do. And we’re passionate about what we don’t do. Some people seem to think that UserVoice’s feedback forums are a tool for customer-powered support, where your customers theoretically answer each other’s questions. This is not what UserVoice is designed for. UserVoice’s feedback forums are designed to allow you to easily collect prioritized ideas from your community to inform your roadmap.

UserVoice feedback forums never have and never will be designed for customer-powered support. Why? Because we don’t believe customer-powered support works.

We think the power of the crowd is tremendous when used right, but using it for support is blatantly harmful for most companies. The money you theoretically save on support staff is eclipsed by the money you lose in the degradation of your product and relationship with your customers.

Here’s why customer-powered support doesn’t work:

Very few of your customers are going to participate. A tiny percentage of your customers are willing to spend time helping each other – they have more important things to do! You’re going to end up doing a lot of the work yourself, no matter what. Would you want to mow the neighbor’s yard because he won’t?

It creates distance between you and your customer. Your customers are trusting you with their money and/or time. If they think you don’t care, they’re going to jump ship to your competitor. If you called a customer support line and they transferred you to another customer, would you be happy?

You’re not learning what’s wrong with your products! By interacting with the customers who are having issues with your products you can figure out what you need to improve and build a better product. If you’re not talking to them directly, it’s a lot harder to get a clear picture of what needs improvement. Do you figure out how to improve your product by waiting until the bad reviews come out?

Most support issues need to be private. We believe in transparency (see <a>our values</a>), but we also think that the majority of support issues don’t belong in public. Certainly anything including a customer’s login or credit card info has to stay behind closed doors – and with customer-powered support, you have to hope your customers realize they’re posting publicly. Not to mention some customers just plain won’t post their issues at all if they’re going to be seen by the public, and instead will just stop using your product. Do you really want jakejake225 seeing that you ran into a bug when you were visiting wart-removal.com?

It requires the customers to have an intimate knowledge of the product. With a rapidly-evolving web product, that’s very unlikely. Do you know how to find recently shared Google Docs? Oops, too late, they just changed it.

Don’t get us wrong – customer-powered support works fine for some large companies with stable products. If you have millions and millions of active customers, there’ll be a few in the bunch who want to answer community questions. If you have a lot of customers using a legacy product that you no longer support, crowdsourced support is a good way for customers to get assistance with those products. But for the majority of companies who are trying to grow a happy customer base, crowdsourced support isn’t just impractical, it’s a bad decision. You need to provide fantastic, direct, one-on-one support for your customers.

That’s not to say that traditional one-on-one support is always great. In fact, it’s often bad. Which is why we’ll be spending our next few months on this blog addressing how to provide great support. We don’t and won’t provide crowdsourced support, but perhaps we can still help you provide amazing support and make your customers happy.

Swing by our Understanding Your Customers blog for the first part of our series on support. Today’s topic? Stop being a jerk and start making money with your support team. Spoiler: it’s not about customer-powered support.

-Update: How to know when you are the exception that needs and can pull off customer-powered support-

Sending people away from your product or marketing isn't a sin. In fact, it might get you more customers.

There's an irrational fear in older companies (or those run by people with older sensibilities) of “other websites”. Those of this mindset feel that everything is a potential distraction, and you must keep people laser-focused on giving you money.

Wake up. Your potential customers already know that there are other sites on the web. They probably know about your competitors. They know that there's a new episode of 30 Rock three clicks away on Hulu that is more entertaining than your offering. Stop worrying about trapping them and start thinking about delighting them.

Let's look at MailChimp (oops, I just linked off of our site!), one of my favorite companies. They provide a simple, powerful mailing list tool aimed at small businesses. They've got a very defined, fun brand – after all, their mascot is a smiling monkey.

Considering all the competition in this field (I know, I've had to research them in a previous position), certainly MailChimp should try to avoid letting their customers go anywhere else on the web. No links on the homepage that aren't to sales pages, no links in the application that go off-site, and if they've finished their task in the app, give them another one so they don't leave.

MailChimp calmly ignores this.

The aforementioned monkey mascot sits in the upper right of every page, providing some bit of wisdom. One day it might be “How much mail could a MailChimp chimp if a MailChimp could chimp mail?”, the next a link to this video:

Even when you're in the midst of working with the app, they provide opportunities for fun, such as when I completed sending an email. They offered a few further app options, but they also offered me this:

(here's the paper toy pdf link if you want to make your own)

Has MailChimp ever distracted someone from their app before they even got it set up? Yes – they distracted me with a video of a monkey on a segway when I first started setting up my mailing list. But I came back, even more enthused about the service, because they made me smile.

Don't be afraid to link off your site, as long as it's relevant and rewarding. If you're truly offering a great product, people will appreciate your link generosity and come back to your page even more excited to try out your product.

As community managers, startup founders, product managers, support staff and the like, we hear about it when we screw up. In fact, we probably hear about it more than we hear about our success. That’s healthy – we need to always be checking ourselves to make sure we’re doing our best to serve our customers.

Most of the time when we find out that we screwed up, it’s relatively easy to fix. Reboot a down server, accept a returned item, clarify some confusing instructions…these are all low effort for us to solve. Sometimes we screw up big, though. This is the true test of our commitment to our customers.

This week customer service legend Zappos experienced a technical glitch that left all of the shoes on 6pm.com, one of their sister sites, only $49.95. People really like cheap shoes, and Zappos lost $1.6 Million in sales in the 6 hours before they caught the bug. Oh boy.

This is where Zappos once again proved they have the guts to take responsibility for their own mistakes.

Instead of taking it out on the customer (who has done nothing wrong) by DENYING the transactions, Zappos took the $1.6m hit and let the customers keep their cheap shoes. Why? Because Zappos made the mistake, and they know that it’s better to lose $1.6m in revenue than potentially lose some of those ~32,000 customers.

“It was our mistake. We will be honoring all purchases that took place on 6pm.com during our mess up. We apologize to anyone that was confused and/or frustrated during out little hiccup and thank you all for being such great customers. We hope you continue to Shop. Save. Smile. at 6pm.com.“ -Aaron Magness, Zappos Director of Brand Marketing & Business Development

Marketing luminary Seth Godin recently touched on this type of prioritization when he blogged about circles of communication. He emphasizes that we must focus on our true fans first and strangers last, because strangers are “expensive to reach. And the hardest problem is that we’re running out of strangers.”

“One true fan is worth perhaps 10,000 times as much as a stranger. And yet if you’re in search of strangers, odds are you’re going to mistreat a true fan in order to seduce yet another stranger who probably won’t reward you much.”

Sure, it’s easier to talk about an ad campaign (for strangers) than about apologizing, but in the end if we listen to and respect our customers (true fans), we will come out on top.

Those that don’t will eventually get a bad enough reputation that all the ad dollars in the world won’t save them.

Kudos to Zappos, may we all have the strength of character to be like them.

Zappos photo courtesy of Erica Joy