All posts by Evan Hamilton

Finally, a marketer realizes social media is not marketing

Community, Marketing, Tech

“We marketers are awesome at talking about ourselves.

In fact, our penchant for this may be the single most compelling reason that marketing should not own the social channels. We are TOO good at promoting and selling and social is not for direct selling, really.”

From Social Media Explorer

I cannot tell you how much it excites me to see marketers saying this. Finally, they are realizing that the immense value of social media is very hard to tap if you abuse it…and marketers are not built to focus on engaging instead of selling.

I disagree with her assessment that community managers are marketers (no, you’re probably interacting with social media marketers who really wanted the title of community manager). But I think she’s getting at the exact right thing: the department that is focused on making customers happy (in my opinion, this is the Community Department) should be running social.

You don’t become evil overnight

Community, Tech,

"Microsoft is" Google searchHow did Microsoft get a reputation for being evil and having inferior products? Was it one thing they did? Of course not. It was the increase in blue screens of death, along with bad Windows design decisions, antitrust lawsuits, along with the increasing quality of Apple products.

Did Groupon start out evil? No, they slowly started pushing tougher tactics as they reached for IPO, focusing less on their original goal of helping small businesses and more on metrics that investors.

Neither of these companies woke up one morning with a completely different reputation. They slowly earned it. (And they’re just as slowly trying to get past it.)

Most companies never aim to become bad or shady or evil. But many start sacrificing their values in the rush to hit short-term goals. They gradually start ignoring the customer experience in favor of the investor experience. And then, maybe years later, they suffer the consequences.

Invest in your values and your customers now and you’ll have longevity. Sacrifice them for the short term and suffer later.

(“But isn’t Microsoft massively successful? Can you really say that they’re a failure?” Sure I can. They used to be exciting and loved and the thing to have. They have plenty of revenue now because they’re a massive, diversified corporation but I can’t imagine Bill Gates feels that this is the company he dreamed of having.)

“Pending” status for support tickets might be useless

Customer Service, ,

I’m moving ZOZI from Zendesk’s helpdesk software to UserVoice‘s (full disclosure: I used to work at UserVoice). As part of my due diligence there was one important thing I had to investigate: the “pending” status.

Zendesk has a few statuses for support tickets: new, open, pending, and solved. UserVoice goes the simple route with simply open & closed. ZOZI, like many companies, uses the “pending” status to indicate that we’re waiting to hear back from the customer. If we don’t hear from the customer after x days, we reach out and remind them that we’re waiting to hear from them. This is often folks whose problems we think we solved, but we want to verify.

(It’s worth noting that when we were developing UserVoice’s helpdesk we interviewed dozens of people who used Zendesk and found that, overwhelmingly, most folks used “pending” to represent tickets they needed to follow up on…but most of these people also admitted they never ended up following up on said tickets.)

My mission: to discover whether setting tickets to “pending” was a positive practice that results in more clarity for customers and higher satisfaction ratings for us…or a waste of our time. I looked at 20 tickets that had been “pending” and 20 tickets that were never set to “pending”.

screen shot of ticket When we sent follow-up emails to customers whose tickets were “pending”, only twice out of the 20 instances did the customer actually respond to the follow-up.

Both times they did respond, the customer was waiting on a third party (we work with vendors who actually run the fantastic experiences we sell). They appreciated the follow-up because they had not heard from the vendor.

There were no satisfaction scores given on any of the “pending” tickets that were followed up on. However, there were two (positive) satisfaction ratings to 20 random tickets that did not use the “pending” status.

My Conclusions:

  1. EXCEPTING cases where we’re waiting on a third party, users do not respond to pending follow-ups. If they didn’t respond before, they’re not going to respond now.
  2. Pending follow-ups do not increase customer satisfaction. Again, they were already done with us.
  3. Pending tickets are in fact less likely to get any sort of satisfaction ratings for the same reason.

Although I wouldn’t call this entirely scientific, it’s my conclusion that the “pending” status and process doesn’t actually benefit our users. Customers who don’t respond, won’t respond. Instead, it wastes agent time and may annoy the customer. We will likely be leaving tickets that are waiting on vendors “open” in UserVoice, as it seems clear that this is the one situation in which checking in is useful. But other than that, we’ll happily leave “pending” in the dust.

Photo courtesy of Delwin.

Updated 11/11 to disclose relationship to UserVoice. Updated 11/12 to provide information on UserVoice’s user research when developing our helpdesk product.