We are very passionate about understanding our customers. And the #1 piece of feedback we’ve been getting has been “your feedback system is great, but I want you guys to provide a support system as well”.
This obviously wasn't the original focus of UserVoice. But we kept hearing that the existing support tools aren't good enough. And we had to agree: we’ve tried many of them, and been satisfied with none. So we spent the last year speaking to over 70 of our customers on the phone, and working directly with over 40 of them. This work has all led to today's announcement.
Today we’re incredibly thrilled to announce the launch of UserVoice Helpdesk.
UserVoice Helpdesk is a customer support system. UserVoice Helpdesk provides a place for your customers to submit issues privately and for you to receive, track, and respond to them. UserVoice Helpdesk is fully integrated with the UserVoice Feedback tool as part of our new UserVoice Full Service package.
But features aren’t really important. What’s important is what this actually changes for you.
This is our manifesto:
Support shouldn’t suck for the customer
You will lose if you do not focus on customer happiness. You will make (maybe lots of) money if you do. Helpdesk makes it easy for your customers to get assistance. Helpdesk encourages responding within an hour (because it makes people happier). Helpdesk isn’t just a way to shut your customers up, it’s a way to delight them.
Support shouldn’t suck for the employee
Why do we accept ugly interfaces for providing support? No more. Helpdesk has a friendly, simple interface...or you can reply to support tickets via your email inbox. Whatever you prefer, we’re here for you. Our built-in game mechanics make doing good support a positive experience, and encourage friendly competition with your coworkers. Because work should be at least a little bit fun.
Support should scale
You shouldn’t have to answer the same thing over and over. Instant Answers helps your customers before they fire off an email to you, and canned responses allow you to quickly answer frequently asked questions. Rockstars don’t scale. Good tools do.
Feedback and support belong together
UserVoice Feedback has always provided a way to understand your customers’ requests without exhausting yourself. UserVoice Helpdesk provides a way to help your customers with your issues without losing sleep. Two great tastes that taste great together.
We’re really, really proud of what we’ve done here, and we can’t wait for you to try it. We can’t wait for it to make your lives easier. And we can’t wait to improve it based on your feedback. Because delighting you is our passion. That, and girl scout cookies.
At my Social Media Week talk a few weeks ago, I declared that Community Managers (or really, Chief Happiness Officers) should be the 3rd employee at a company, because it’s “hard to change an organization after it’s set in its ways”.
I got a lot of (rightly deserved) flak for this from people who work at consultancies or enterprise companies: “So we can't make a difference?” I honestly didn’t have an answer. I live in startup land, and I am a little scared of the seemingly immovable values of big companies.
We’re all susceptible to getting frustrated with customers, but if your ...
Not every customer, of course. But the ones that aren’t right for your product offering? Send them away.
We’ll call them a wrong-fit customer. They have an edge case you can’t support, your product isn’t set up to handle traffic of their size, or they actually need a different type of product. We all know these customers don’t belong with us yet we try to convince them to stay with our product.
It’s a natural instinct: keep the customer at all cost! That’s money! My CFO likes money!
The thing is, you can actually make more money by sending a potential ...
Last Thursday I gave this presentation as part of Social Media Week. A lot of people came to the event skeptical, or a little angry. What I hope became clear to them is that I’m not announcing our extinction or irrelevance in 5 years, but rather a need to mature into a larger role. Yes, there will always be a need for people to manage online communities. But if we are taking our goal of creating happy customers seriously, we need to step up and move beyond our social support.
Why? Check out the presentation:
So, what do you think?
Where will YOU be in 5 years? Do you think Chief Happiness Officer is the correct role, or a bunch of hooey? This is only my opinion, so I want to hear yours!
This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), which means you should feel free to share it, use parts of it, and remix it as long as a) you’re not using it for commercial privileges and b) whatever you’re creating is licensed the same way. Because sharing is awesome.
A few weeks ago we stated that customer-powered support doesn’t work. And while we believe that specific form of crowdsourcing is deeply flawed, we do think that crowdsourcing absolutely can be a powerful tool (in case you hadn’t noticed, UserVoice is a tool for crowdsourcing feedback).
We’ve taken our experience in crowdsourcing to heart with our latest step in translating UserVoice. We already offer a number of translations our product: currently 15. But - and we’re very flattered that this is the case - we are constantly being asked to translate our product into someone else’s mother tongue. Sadly, we don’t always have the bandwidth internally to do this. The people who ask for this often offer to do it themselves, but sending non-developers into our code is inhumane for both parties involved.
We’re proud to introduce translate.uservoice.com - a tool for the crowd to collaborate on translating UserVoice into whatever languages they choose.
Choose the language you’d like to translate (or add a new one!)
Choose the part of UserVoice you’d like to translate (front-end, Admin Console, etc)
Translate as much or as little as you’d like, or review existing changes
Submit your translations!
It’s easy to do contribute a little or a lot, and the wisdom of the crowd ensures that the quality stays high (if you don’t like how something is translated, you can change it).
So why does this sort of crowdsourcing work?
Crowdsourcing is about leveraging the wisdom of the crowd - their collective knowledge - to do something that would be challenging for a single person or small group. However, in our opinion, there is another element that must be present - crowdsourcing must help the group at large, not just one person or entity. “At the core of it all is trust and tapping into the ‘brain’ with the intention of producing things that benefit *everyone* --- NOT with the intention of using and misusing others”, as Maria Ogneva described it. That’s why customer-powered support fails - the benefits fall unfairly upon the company while the work and uncertainty fall on the customers.
Few software companies are expected or able to support more than the basic set of translations, and so people who speak languages outside of this “basic set” are often willing to contribute to the cause. But it’s unfair to expect them to dig around in code or translate the entirety of an interface. Allowing these people to easily donate small bits of their time and language expertise towards a complete translation means that everybody wins. They only do as much work as they want, they get a better-translated version of our product, and we appeal to more potential customers (plus we’ll be tracking our top contributors and sending them special gifts).
Especially in the world of software (especially especially in the world of FREE software), providing prompt support is treated like an impossibility. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not claiming anybody out there *doesn’t* want to answer their customers quickly. But we’re all busy, and answering questions requires focus, and we push it off a few hours. Or a day. Or (oops) 3 days.
We think this is OK, because we’re making the product better, which will make us more money. The thing is, if we answered emails faster we’d have happier customers, which equals retention and referrals, which equals more money.
How do I know? We have the numbers. We’ve done the math. Our customers thank us up to 115% more if we respond within the first hour, particularly when it’s our initial response to them (versus later replies in an ongoing conversation).
There’s two obvious reasons for this:
They need help, and it’s nice to get it!
They are trained to expect long wait times or even no response
We live in a world of terrible, delayed customer service. Breaking that mold doesn’t just satisfy people, it delights them. And that’s going to make you more loyal customers than spending another hour building that new widget while ignoring their emails.
We should all adopt “respond within an hour” as a policy. Not a “wish I could” or a “sure if I can find the time” but a “this is what we do”.
Am I perfect? Hell no. I’ve personally discovered that I forgot to email someone who emailed me 9 days ago! But this guideline, this goal, it gives me guilt. And I do better next time.
Our customers deserve this, and they'll reward us if we follow through.
-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice
PS: For those of you that will start yelling at me about needing to sleep: of course. Sleep. State your office hours. People understand that you need to sleep (they sleep too).
What do you think of when you think of a rock star? Two things come to mind for me:
Making crazy awesome over-the-top music...
...and being a huge pain in the butt.
(It’s ok, I’m allowed to diss rock stars, I sing in a rock’n’roll band.)
The thing is, we keep hearing about “rockstar community managers” and “rockstar support people”. That’s not what we need. We don’t need people to play crazy solos on the support guitar and then demand only brown M&Ms. Here’s what makes a good support person:
Last week our CEO, Richard White, wrote about how he thinks doing support is incredibly useful and important for any CEO. Of course, he has CEO stuff to do too (I imagine that it involves wearing a suit and a monocle and drinking champagne, but he claims it’s less glamorous than that), so the load is shared. In fact, it’s roughly evenly shared by three of us here at UserVoice, and the rest of the team occasionally does support as well. Why?
We feel that sharing the support load leads to better support and better product.
Awareness
The biggest issue with support being provided by one employee in the corner is that it’s his/her word against the assumptions of the rest of the team. Sure, your support guy got a ticket from someone saying that it’s hard to figure out where to change payment info. It was probably just one guy, not a problem with your user experience..
But when multiple people see an issue, it starts to sink in. A good support person establishes empathy with the person they’re helping, and that empathy means that customer frustrations become employee frustrations. Suddenly you’ve got 3 members of the team frustrated about a bug or bad user experience. Guess what? It gets fixed a lot faster.
This also helps when doing product planning. Instead of everyone bringing their own assumptions to the table, they bring real customer experiences. That can really only result in a better product.
Competition
We compare our support stats on a dashboard. By doing this, providing great support suddenly becomes a competition. Who can answer the most tickets within an hour? Who can get the most customer compliments? We trash talk each other when we do well, and we try harder when we fall behind. It makes things more fun and results in better support than one person working by themselves.
Sympathy
Perhaps this one is a little selfish, but getting non-support employees to do support gives them more respect for support staff and community managers. It tells them that support can be hard. It tells them that there is value in support. It tells them that it’s a big job keeping customers happy. Not only will they stop putting whoopee cushions filled with grape jelly in the support guy’s seat, they’ll respect their opinion a lot more - which means that your product will end up better.
How do you split up (or not split up) support duties? Let us know in the comments.
We like a healthy debate. It’s one of our values. We’ve made some bold claims on this blog, and we continue to preach about understanding your customers over at our (you guessed it) Understanding Your Customers blog.
This week, we’ll do it live.
If you’re in the Bay Area, please join us for one or both of the two Social Media Week San Francisco (SMWSF) events we’ll be participating in.
I’ll be giving a presentation and then holding a group discussion about the future of community managers. This is something every community manager, VP of marketing, and CEO should be aware of. The landscape is changing, and in 5 years things will be totally different. If you don’t keep up, it’ll be the bad type of different for you.
Free food and booze will be provided, so drop on by. If you’re not in the Bay Area, we’ll be streaming on justin.tv/uservoice (they're a UserVoice customer too).
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re pretty passionate about making customers happy. And there’s no clear blueprint for that (though there are plenty of sketches to start from). Please come join us (or scope out the livestream) and keep this conversation going.
Everyone knows that we're supposed to listen to our customers, but we frequently forget to understand them. To succeed as a startup, this is essential.
At UserVoice we're all about understanding our customers and helping others do the same. Here's hoping this blog helps us all get better at it.
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A few weeks ago we stated that 
