Understanding Your Customers

Our Best Stuff

• Introducing the Customer Service Scaling Timeline

  in Scaling Customer Service

• The Science of Customer Service: 40% of your customer service emails could be answered by your FAQ

  in Data

• The Numbers Zappos Looks At

  in Champions of Understanding

• 5 reasons why you shouldn’t have your intern do support

  in Scaling Customer Service

• Don’t hire a social media expert (hire a community manager)

  in Champions of Understanding

• Launchrock gains one million signups during beta by saying no to customers

  in Champions of Understanding, Scaling Customer Service

• Why Customer Feedback is Important, How to Collect it, and How to Convince Your Boss it’s Important

  in For The To Do List

• Case Study: LazyMeter survives their 10,000-visitor launch with UserVoice Full Service

  in Case Studies

• How to launch a new interface without upsetting your customers

  in For The To Do List

• I’m a CEO, and I’m on the support team

  in Editorial

• Why Doing Customer Support Sucks, and 5 Ways to Make it Better

  in For The To Do List

• The Science of Customer Service: Data Proves Faster Response Means Happier Customers

  in Data

All Posts

Champions of Understanding View all »

• Free Nokia Lumia 900’s for everyone: PR or great customer service?
• How Airbnb scaled to 24/7 support in one month
• How to give a #@%! about your customers before you launch
• Renaming Tiger Bread: empowered customer service in action
• Our favorite SXSW 2012 session: Your customers are your marketing
• Missed our SXSW talks? We’ve got you covered.
• Launchrock gains one million signups during beta by saying no to customers
• Don’t hire a social media expert (hire a community manager)
• Customer Support Models: Pre-emptive support with MSW@USC
• Are canned responses humane?
• Our Favorite Session at Web 2.0: Why badges don’t matter but games do
• Favorite SXSW Panel: Stop Listening to Your Customers
• You’ll make more money if you send your customers to your competitors
• Great customer service isn’t done by rockstars, it’s done by humans
• You Can’t Buy Evangelism, But You Can Pay For It (Part 2)
• You Can’t Buy Evangelism, But You Can Pay For It (Part 1)
• Understand That Your Customers Are Strapped for Time
• Say Sorry Before Your Customers Can Say WTF
• The Numbers Zappos Looks At
• Say No To One Hundred Thousand Dollars

Customer Feedback View all »

• Why customer feedback shouldn’t be an afterthought
• 7 ways to avoid annoying customers with surveys and feedback

Customer Support Models View all »

• Customer Support Models: Klout doesn’t use Klout for support (they use the development team)
• Customer Support Models: TurnSocial gives out their email address (but gets less email)
• Customer Support Models: Miso and AFAR scale support before it’s too late
• Customer Support Models: Pre-emptive support with MSW@USC

Failure to Understand View all »

• Free Nokia Lumia 900’s for everyone: PR or great customer service?
• 7 ways my ISP could have avoided losing my business through better customer service
• How RIM made the Blackberry outage even worse, and what we can learn from it
• Altimeter says: failing to make customers happy is the #1 cause of social media crises
• Your great social media support is useless (a Hurricane Irene story)
• First Call Resolution & Other Uselessness: Stop Relying on a Single Metric
• How a single customer can mortally wound your business, featuring Urban Outfitters
• Are canned responses humane?
• Make your damn contact info available!
• Getting Customer Feedback Is Not a Right
• Vendor!... leave those customers alone
• Blockbuster Wasn’t Killed By Netflix

For The To Do List View all »

• 7 ways to avoid annoying customers with surveys and feedback
• Why talking about your outages and issues might MAKE you money
• Don’t be scared of using video in customer service
• How to prepare your customer service for SXSW (or any conference) in 30m
• We’re speaking at SXSW and we want to meet you
• Community Manager Appreciation Day cards
• Where is customer service going in 2012? Join our panel to find out.
• More vacation = better work?
• Join us at Failcon next week with this 20% discount
• Why Customer Feedback is Important, How to Collect it, and How to Convince Your Boss it’s Important
• Why you shouldn’t use any tool (including ours) too early
• How to launch a new interface without upsetting your customers
• Are you looking for feedback in the right place?
• Being a jerk is more work
• How do you avoid customer support burnout?
• Why Doing Customer Support Sucks, and 5 Ways to Make it Better
• Why most companies will fail to stand out at SXSW (and how you can avoid their fate)
• Launch your product now
• Can you make a big company be nice?
• Why Community Managers Won’t Exist in 5 Years (and why that’s a good thing)
• We’re speaking at Social Media Week San Francisco
• Stop being a jerk, and start making money with your support team
• The Top 10 Ways to Celebrate Community Manager Appreciation Day
• The battle of the community manager is over. What’s next?
• CLS West is the best place to share notes on understanding your customers
• What Are Your Customers Thankful For?
• If You Isolate the Person Who Talks to Customers, You’re Ignoring Your Customers

Scaling Customer Service View all »

• Why customer feedback shouldn’t be an afterthought
• How Airbnb scaled to 24/7 support in one month
• Empower your customer service representatives, win like Zappos
• When you DO need to implement a customer-powered support community
• Building scalable training practices for your customer service team
• Customer Service Scaling Stage Six: Guiding a Force Beyond Your Control
• If the same product area keeps causing pain, get a customer service specialist (not painkillers)
• Training your customer service representative (in 5 steps)
• 5 reasons to be excited about customer service (even if you miss the holidays)
• Customer Service Scaling Stage Five: Letting Go While Ensuring Quality
• How to hire your first customer service representative
• Our off-hours critical issue escalation process
• When to hire more support agents? Scale quality, not quantity.
• Metrics for hiring new support staff - from an ex-employee of Dell
• 5 reasons why you shouldn’t have your intern do support
• How to get your support team and development team to work well together
• Why Someone Has to Own your Support Queue - or - How We Left Customer Emails Waiting for 48 Hours
• Customer Service Scaling Stage Four: Processes Will Save You
• RapidBuyr has a clear vision for scaling customer service
• Customer Service Scaling Stage Three: Systems are Your Friend
• To live chat or not to live chat?
• How Argyle Takes Care of Customers From Alpha, to Beta, & Beyond
• Customer Service Scaling Stage Two: Capture Hearts, Not Minds
• Why you shouldn’t use any tool (including ours) too early
• Launchrock gains one million signups during beta by saying no to customers
• Crowdbooster uses customer service to grow a huge audience - while still in beta
• Customer Service Scaling Stage One: Finding Where Customer Happiness Lives
• What is scaling anyway?
• Introducing the Customer Service Scaling Timeline

New Features

• Translation Mania! French (Canada), German (Austria, Switzerland), Portuguese, & Serbian (Latin)
• Hipchat service hook: customer feedback and support right where your team lives
• Inspector for UserVoice Feedback: learn more about who is giving you feedback
• Get UserVoice feedback in front of your team with our Yammer service hook
• Introducing our SugarCRM service hook: push UserVoice activity into your CRM in real-time
• Inspector: get to know who’s on the other end of your support tickets
• New feature: required custom fields for Helpdesk
• UserVoice Knowledge Base articles now have a rich editor and support embedded photos & videos!
• We just killed no-reply, and we have no regrets
• You can now make your Helpdesk private
• Introducing: auto-save for UserVoice tickets
• New Feature: Custom Statuses (and 5 ways to use them)
• New features: idea attachments, idea-to-ticket, & front-end idea organization
• Improvements to the UserVoice sidebar
• Introducing our new analytics features
• New header in the Admin Console
• UserVoice widget now mobile-optimized
• Minor changes to the Admin Console
• Tuesday is a great day for three new translations: Slovenian, Chinese (Taiwan), and French (Canada)
• Introducing Manual Ticket Creation
• Two new languages now available: Slovak and Czech
• Introducing Collision Detection for UserVoice Helpdesk
• UserVoice Admin Console now iPad-optimized
• Introducing Google Analytics integration for UserVoice
• Happy Monday: five new UserVoice translations
• Introducing the brand new, interactive UserVoice Feedback widget
• Introducing the new Admin Console
• Instant Answers: Saving Everyone Time
• Introducing UserVoice Helpdesk, a support tool that doesn’t suck
• translate.uservoice.com - Crowdsourcing That Works
• Get UserVoice in 3 more flavors: Facebook, iPhone, or API
• New Sign-in System is Live
• Preview: New UserVoice Sign-In System
• New: Merged Ideas in History Tab, Unlimited Votes
• New: Karma, custom link colors, enhanced crowdsourced moderation and more
• New: Contact Form with Multiple Subjects
• UserVoice Now Available Through Google Apps Marketplace
• New Admin Console!
• UserVoice removes usage limits on its plans!
• July Updates to UserVoice
• New Translations, Improved Admin Features, Notifications and More
• New Google OpenID API Implemented Via JanRain’s RPX
• Added Brazilian Portuguese To UserVoice
• New Service Plan & Features
• OpenID, FriendlyURLs, and Widget Changes

Case Studies

• I can haz feedback? How Cheezburger found their customer voice
• Qualifacts builds customer feedback into every step with their healthcare tool
• Diamond Candles wins the SPIKE Award for innovation with UserVoice Feedback
• Case Study: Zibbet scales a 3-person team with customer-powered support
• Case Study: LazyMeter survives their 10,000-visitor launch with UserVoice Full Service
• Case Study: Tellfi gets fewer support messages because of UserVoice
• Case Study: About.me uses UserVoice Full Service to measure customer happiness
• Case Study: Mixpanel loves that UserVoice Helpdesk makes customer support easier
• Case Study: USICH Makes the Old-School Public Comment Period Digital and Effective
• Case Study: Free Range Studios’ “Youtopia” Contest Helps Nonprofits And Generates New Clients
• Case Study: Phonebooth Actively Solicits Feedback and Gets Clear, Actionable Results
• Case Study: Bad Ideas Are Just Insufficiently Explained Ideas for PagerDuty
• Case Study: Xomba Knows that Listening to Ideas Honestly Means Declining Many
• Case Study: Ideas4Oregon Uses Custom Design to Create Vote-less Forum
• Case Study: Passpack Exemplifies How to Make the Move to a UserVoice Forum
• Santa Cruz brings collaboration to Gov 2.0

Data

• Inspector takes 1.5 minutes less time to give you customer context
• The Science of Customer Service: 40% of your customer service emails could be answered by your FAQ
• UserVoice Stats: We’re even MORE effective than your mailing list
• The Science of Customer Service: Data Proves Faster Response Means Happier Customers

Editorial

• We just killed no-reply, and we have no regrets
• Get 40% off UserVoice and help us fight SOPA
• Help us spread the word about Instant Answers
• The growing importance of customer facing communication tools in action: congrats to Assistly
• Join a startup instead of going to business school - my time at UserVoice
• Why we aim to respond to customers within an hour: it makes them happier (and we have proof)
• Sharing the load means everyone wins (so don’t lock your support guy in the supply closet)
• I’m a CEO, and I’m on the support team
• Customer-powered Support Doesn’t Work

Notices

• Site briefly unavailable for maintenance - Update: now back online
• Update on outages this week
• You’ve got a month to get free access to our iPhone SDK
• Hotness Algorithm Re-Enabled
• Hotness Algorithm Temporarily Disabled
• Email Notifications Back Online
• Routine Maintenance – Friday, April 23, 2010.
• [RESOLVED] We’re currently experiencing database trouble
• Emergency Site Maintenance
• Hosting Service Emergency System Repair
• Scheduled Maintenance
• Services working normally

News

• Welcome to three new hires in Raleigh and SF!
• It’s UserVoice’s 4th birthday, but we’re the ones giving the gifts!
• One Million Tickets
• Please welcome our new developer and designer hires
• Seesmic Desktop now supports UserVoice
• The Knowledge Base Challenge has a winner
• Two familiar faces take on new positions at UserVoice
• Welcome to our 4 (four!?) new hires
• We just raised $1 million in funding
• Join us in the Knowledge Base Challenge, win a free month of UserVoice
• Happy Halloween from the UserVoice Customer Happiness Team!
• UserVoice gives $3000 to two charities by losing at dodgeball
• Introducing our new analytics features
• Something exciting coming - join our Fireside Chat to find out!
• UserVoice now available in Macedonian and Korean
• Two new languages: Vietnamese and Hungarian
• Welcome to our new front-end folks!
• Please Help Us Speak at SXSW
• UserVoice now Safe Harbor Compliant, Privacy Policy and Terms of Service updated
• Ted Choper joins UserVoice as Support Engineer
• UserVoice now available in 4 more languages, Helpdesk now translation-ready
• Latest Addition to the UserVoice Crew
• Helpdesk in videos
• Ride the UserVoice Challenge Cab at SXSW for free (and win cool stuff)
• Introducing UserVoice Helpdesk, a support tool that doesn’t suck
• translate.uservoice.com - Crowdsourcing That Works
• We’re speaking at Social Media Week San Francisco. Join us!
• Customer-powered Support Doesn’t Work
• Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day - Have 75% Off!
• Introducing the UserVoice Developer site
• Get UserVoice in 3 more flavors: Facebook, iPhone, or API
• UserVoice Stats: We’re More Effective Than Your Mailing List
• What about UserVoice are you thankful for?
• Loic Le Meur Says You Should Set Up a UserVoice Forum

Tips & Tricks

• Tips & Tricks: See recent tweets about your company in Inspector
• Tips & Tricks: Filtering the activity stream in the dashboard
• Tips & Tricks: Use categories instead of multiple forums
• Tips & Tricks: Reply to tickets via email
• Tips & Tricks: Using notes to communicate with your team
• Tips & Tricks: Full Service customers can make a widget that is just ideas or just helpdesk
• Tips & Tricks: Create a Knowledge Base article from a ticket reply
• How UserVoice Helpdesk is like a saber-toothed tiger
• Tips & Tricks: How to change ownership of an account
• Tips & Tricks: How to change the question in your forum
• Tips & Tricks: How to Edit the Company Name on Your “Go to” Link