Growing your team can make your customers more loyal and increase your sales --- if you do it right.
When you add new people to your team, consider two important factors. You want to quickly get your whole team ready to talk to customers effectively, with a set of best practices to follow. And you want to make sure your system is optimized to take advantage of features that can make your team work better.
At Zapier everyone does support as part of support driven development. As the CEO, I still spend at least 10% of my time each week doing support.
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:
In the early days of Olark, we took a very traditional approach to customer support. We did what most companies do and hired someone smart to handle it. Andrew did such an amazing job of handling issues that we hardly heard from our customers.
In the Fall of 2009, Andrew decided to go back to college and finish his degree. So we had to change things up a bit.
It's not the average day that your company blows up their pricing for a month. On April 24, All Hands Support Day, we're offering all our paying accounts unlimited free operators for a month.
This may be a great idea, it may be a terrible idea, but it is definitely a principled idea. Not to mention, an awesome idea--one we've been practicing ourselves since Olark began!
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.
My everyday goal is to have each visitor who comes to Olark.com with a question leave with a sense of amazement at the quality of the support they receive. I want them to feel like they received personal service like they might get when walking into their neighborhood barbershop.
At Olark, we dedicate ourselves to building great software and also to using it every day of the week to help our customers with billing, upgrade, product queries and more.
As first engineer, I've been at Olark for a while (three years this March!), and support has been one of my roles since the beginning. When it was just the five of us (and the odd intern here and there), that just made sense--nobody wanted to burn out on our support volume. It helps that all of us were, to some degree, "people who like people," but as time went on and the team grew and grew, it stopped being something we had to do, and started being a part of our culture.
San Francisco, CA, March 31, 2014 - Building on its culture of All Hands Support, in which everyone in the company participates in customer service, Olark (www.olark.com) today introduced 'All Hands Support Month (www.olark.com/allhands).' Throughout the month of April, Olark will share lessons in getting the whole company involved with customer service, as well as best practices and case studies on how leading companies use All Hands Support to build cultures of customer insight and customer service.
It’s well known that live chat can increase conversions and sales.
We wondered why some of our customers can sell better than others. I spoke with some of the most effective users of Olark on Shopify to find out what they do, and the answer is is incredibly simple: be human.
