How (and why) we chose our Support Stack

I have had a lot of long (passionate) conversations talking about the way we do support, and why we chose the methods we have.

The truth is, there is no perfect answer here. Each company, team and growth stage requires a unique support setup.

For us, the number one goal was to give prompt, accurate and stellar customer service. This is/was the guiding force behind each path we’ve taken (and not taken) thus far.

Things to Consider (And some hard lessons learned)

When determining our support stack, there we learned a lot of hard lessons. Here are some motions and growing pains that we went through.

What channels will you support? Are you going to support phone calls, emails, live chat, twitter, facebook, or maybe even snail mail?

When I first joined the team we only did email support. A few months later, we added live chat and things shifted dramatically. We were always fast to reply to emails, so we never strayed far away from the queue, but live chat added an entirely different dimension here, since people expected instant responses.

Soon there after, we also added a phone line because that is what you do next, right? Suddenly we realized our (small) team couldn’t handle live chat and answering phones at the same time, since both of these tasks require instant attention. We also saw our email support (which is our largest volume of tickets) suffer. After the first time I “hopped on a quick call” that lasted an hour and a half, we put a pause on phone support.

Sometimes it is difficult, as customers don’t always understand why you can’t jump on ad-hoc phone calls with them. We use this response when explaining this to them, and most of them understand.

Our primary modes of support are email and live chat. Please don’t think this means we don’t want to speak to you — quite the opposite, actually! We’ve found we can give our highest quality of support when we focus our efforts on email and live chat. We hope you’ll find the same as well :)

Realigning this concentration has immensely helped our team give higher quality support, to everyone. Being up front and honest with customers in how we do support also helps to set the proper expectations, to avoid surprises down the line.

Our Sales team does call prospects, and does demos with them. Our Success team also does ongoing education demos with customers. Before both of these teams were in place we did do more scheduled calls with customers. We also will occasionally jump on a scheduled call about a specific topic if an issue just can’t be resolved via email or chat.

Who are your customers? When you are picking your channels, you need to make sure you consider your customer base. Are they all incredibly tech savvy? Then live chat, email and maybe even social media support may be the way to go. Are they all in more traditional businesses? They may expect and demand more high-touch phone call support. It’s important to match your customer’s needs with realistic expectations of what your team can truly handle.

What hours will you offer? Another big piece to the puzzle is determining what hours you will offer support. This also goes back to what business you are in. Some places close the door at 5pm, and don’t look back. Other arenas (healthcare, for example) are open 24/7/265. Knowing your customer’s needs here will help you to meet them in a place that is still reachable for your structure as well.

We do 24/5 through the advantages of timezones. We also do ad-hoc support on the weekends via a rotating schedule.

Our Stack

Once we went through all of these motions, we decided on three methods to add to our Support Stack — email, help articles and live chat.

• Email — We manage email through Freshdesk. We receive emails through the app itself (via a handy widget!), as well as from outside of the app, to our support email address. Email is my favorite way to give support, as it allows me time to formulate awesome answers that include links and screenshots, but still provide fast service to our customers
• Help Articles — Help articles are in no way a substitute for solid customer service, but they are a great way to help your customers find what they’re after. Help articles should solve simple problems — but you should never use help articles to bandaid system issues that just need to be fixed. To help with this, we monitor what people are searching for on our help article page. This helps us find articles that we may have missed making, as well as places on our app that could use a little more in-app guidance
• Live Chat — We manage live chat through Olark. In our current setup, live chat is only available to our customers who are logged in to the application. This helps us narrow our focus on users instead of prospects (which our sales team handles).

Obviously we don’t know everything

Our team cares about a super high support level for our customers, but we’re also still figuring all of this out, and growing and learning every day. The biggest lessons we’ve learned:

• Be realistic about what your team can manage
• Understand your customer base and what they need, verses what they want
• Determine the level of support your team wants to give
• Try something, and don’t be afraid to stop if it doesn’t work

What does your support stack look like? I’d love to hear about it!

I have the extreme pleasure to share the ups and downs of this journey with some wonderful folks over at Support Driven — A group for those who are serious about a career in Customer Support. Over the next 6 weeks we are focusing on writing for us, and have put together a fun writing challenge. Feel free to join us — we’d love to have you!