When I asked some cloud software companies about doing All Hands Support recently, ZenPayroll gave by far the most enthusiastic response. It was clear their whole team eagerly participated in talking to customers. Everyone wanted to talk about it.
From Steffi Wu, Jaleh Rezaei, and Erin Colbert, we heard:
We do support at ZenPayroll to stay connected to our customers and to improve our product.
Our support team reports into the product organization because support is such a critical part of our overall product strategy. Our product motto is to help customers do what they need as quickly as possible and make it hard to make mistakes. Monitoring support calls is how we learn what areas within the app/UI need product attention. If customers are consistently calling in and asking for clarification on how to complete a specific task, it means the UI is not clear enough.
All new employees spend a few days in support during the training and onboarding process. and all employees rotate through support on an ongoing basis. On average, each of us spends one day per month in support.
We just started using Olark a few months back and it was invaluable to us during our peak season in December and January. Our support volume increased over 7x! We were definitely all hands on deck.
We also heard from some other great companies who incorporate All Hands Support in their company culture.
Chris Nagele, founder of Wildbit shared:
We all share support on Postmark and Beanstalk. For most of the cases it comes through to two people, but we also have support hours for the team so they can learn customer needs and issues. We use Olark, so we also transfer chats to developers, systems engineers and designers when needed.
Brett Owens, CEO of Chrometa said:
We are proud Olark users and I man the chat window myself during California biz hours :) Our CTO is based in Brussels and he handles Olark for the European and East Coast day.
We love Olark - it's helped us drastically streamline our support. We used to get a lot more email and phone call inbound support--now we're able to handle most of it on the spot!
