Freshbooks has developed a rather legendary reputation for their obsessive attention to customer experience.
They are the winner of multiple Stevie Awards for Best Front-Line Customer Service Team and have generated countless customer tweets remarking on their astonishing support. Mark MacLeod, Chief Corporate Development Officer shared:
Here at Freshbooks, every team member spends their first month in support and goes back once a quarter after. We encourage customers to call (not email). If support can’t get the call within 3 rings, every phone in the office rings till the customer is served. We average 1.4 rings.
We all do support. It’s core to our culture and to our success so far.
Mitch Solway, VP Marketing at ClearFit learned these lessons well. A former Freshbooks employee, he’s now taking All Hands Support to his new company.
I lead both the Marketing and Customer Success teams here at ClearFit and we’ve just launched our Customer Success Academy which schedules everyone in the company for a 2 hour shift every month with one of our hiring coaches (our front line support team). It’s part of our efforts to create a deeper engagement with our customers for everyone here. Our support team is made up of Hiring Coaches. There are two main “kinds” of support. One is reaching out and assisting/coaching new customers. Our SMB customers are super busy and typically need to hire “right now”. So we reach out to most of our new customers to offer immediate assistance.
While this approach is “old hat” for me based on my past employment at FreshBooks, it never gets boring listening to people that have only done this for the first time and how their eyes open up wide as they get a real view into how people are actually engaging with our service. Our team learns:
- how much our existing customers love what we do (this never gets boring) and the very real impact we have on them personally and the company - this feeds our motivation to keep improving
- how much new customers need to learn about what we do (a great reminder of how new this is for folks)
- how much time our support people invest in helping and assisting customers
- an immediate new level of accountability to our customers by being on the front lines with them
- how much people appreciate good service and being helpful
For the Customer Success Team it helps connect them to others in the organization and they feel better knowing that more people understand their daily routines and challenges. For everyone else, sharing support creates a view into who our customers are, what their “real” concerns are, and embeds a real customer orientation to the work that we do.
