Category Archives: Customer Service

Management and Operations Tips to Help You Avoid A Disastrous Holiday

Customer Service, Tech, , ,

So yes, I also felt a need to write about that Away article. The thing is, I have two sets of issues with what I read.

1) From an operations standpoint, a lot if this pain was avoidable
2) From a management standpoint, managing like this is cruel and unsustainable

I hope that the following tips can turn an unfortunate story and experience for these employees into something practical for those of you who have a good heart and want to avoid these situations.

Operations

I’ve run Operations teams in some form for over ten years now. It’s a little bit art, but it’s a lot science. And with a physical product, operations are incredibly important to get right. If you are selling a physical product that is likely to be a common Christmas gift, good planning is essential. I worked at the (partially) eCommerce site ZOZI for several years and successfully shepherded us through the holidays despite the massive influx in orders.

What I read in this article is a complete ineptitude in holiday planning for a physical brand…which is probably tied into the second part, because if you don’t care about your employees then you’re less likely to spend time planning for them.

The tips here are simple:

  • Plan
    • Understand your sales projections, estimated support volume per sale, support capability per staff member, etc.
    • If you’re retail, plan for a holiday influx. You will have one.
    • Staff should be allowed to have vacations, so you should plan how to handle vacation schedules early.
    • You should offer in advance, not at the last minute, vacation trade-offs for folks who truly are okay working during the holidays.
    • You should do your best to balance out people’s days off so you can have continuous coverage.
  • Invest
    • Not delivering Christmas gifts on time can be a death sentence for your brand, so you should over-invest during this period.
    • If your projections suggest you won’t have enough people, hire more early (full time or temp).
    • If you’re in a pinch, get all hands on deck to help with support.
  • Prep
    • You should address any quality issues with your product well in advance of the holiday and implement a code freeze (or in this case product freeze) far before so you don’t introduce any potential issues.
    • You should decimate any backlogs well before the holiday influx.
    • You should set expectations with your customers about holiday responsiveness.

Management

That said, the more important issue here is a complete lack of understanding of what makes a good manager. Managers are there to help their employees do their best work…and employees do their best work when they feel it is rewarding, challenging, and appreciated. Nobody does their best work when being yelled at, or if they do then it results in much quicker burnout. Every tactic on display in these Slack threads shows a fundamental misunderstanding, but here are a few tips that might help.

  • Your staff are both valuable asset and PEOPLE. Don’t treat them like gears in a machine.
  • Your on-the-ground managers are going to best know how to implement and deliver your directives. This “all communication should be public” thing is naive. Talk to your lieutenants to figure out the right approach, and let them deliver.
  • Don’t ever couch a punishment as professional development. It’s insulting and undermines any trust in you to actually help them develop.
  • Yelling at people in public only makes them feel worse. These people clearly felt dedication to the company, so any performance conversation would have been motivating to them. Doing it in public just shamed them and showed a lack of appreciation of their hard work.
  • If you’re going to get hands-on, ask how you can help, don’t threaten to take away the project. Get your hands dirty doing the same work as your team. People appreciate leaders that get in and help, but not when they do it as an exasperated, demeaning punishment.
  • When you are shitty to employees you lose them, have a harder time getting new ones, suffer from abrupt and rough departures, and maybe even get an article like this written about you.

I don’t like dunking on other teams, but I found the situations highlighted in this article pretty offensive…and sadly, I’ve seen versions of this in the real world. Life is too short to be a jerk. Build work memories you’re proud of.

It’s not the big stuff that destroys trust

Customer Service,

We like to highlight the big screwups companies make. Perhaps it’s so we can learn from their mistakes. Perhaps it’s relief that it wasn’t us. Perhaps we just can’t imagine how such a big foul-up could happen.

But honestly? Most of the time it’s the little stuff adding up that hurts a company the most.

The bad customer support interactions, the interrupted service with no communication, the extra charge that takes you 30 minutes on the phone to resolve, the advertisements the company sends you even though you’re already signed up for their service. It all builds, creating a consistently negative perception of the company much deeper than that created by a one-off faux pas.

Then the new guy comes along. He has lower rates, looks great, and when you talk to him on the phone he’s incredibly helpful.

Even if the experience once you sign up might be just as bad as with the old guy, you’re comparing the so-far great new guy to the mental list of all the lame things the old guy did. And then: “What? 50% off my first month? And it’s really easy to switch?” It’s all over at that point.

Sure, have crisis plans and avoid massive screwups. But worry less about the giant disasters. Worry more about death by a thousand papercuts.

People usually have a motivation

Community, Customer Service, ,

I’m late to the party, but ever since I discovered Alex Blumberg’s StartUp podcast, I’ve been devouring it nonstop. I recommend it to anyone who works in startups, owns their own business, or might do one of those two things at some point.

But I specifically need to recommend episode 9, We Made A Mistake, to community management professionals, PR professionals, and anyone who deals with crises and customer feedback.

The story is simple: Alex and his team are doing documentary-style interviews with Squarespace users to splice into their Squarespace ad spots. It’s unique, it’s powerful, and it’s real. But out of all the people they interview, Alex’s assistant drops the ball with just one. She forgets to clarify that this will be used for an advertisement for Squarespace. Oh, by the way: they’re interviewing a small child. Yeah, that’s a big oversight. And the mother of the child, Linda Sharps, gets very upset when she discovers this is an advertisement for Squarespace, not an interview for This American Life. She makes a big deal on the internet, and a crisis begins.

Alex and his team watch as the anger spreads through Twitter. They communicate with and apologize to the woman on the back-end, but they don’t make a public announcement until some time into the crisis, apologizing for the mistake. The story threatens to grow bigger, but finally dies down.

Now, sure, there are some logistical lessons to learn here. Pretty obvious ones:

  1. Always tell someone what their interview will be used for
  2. For very important bits of communication, create formal language and a checklist to ensure you’ve communicated these elements
  3. Get out in front of a story like this

I’m pretty sure Alex knew at least number one, and had they followed the second it’s unlikely we’d be talking about this.

But we get a rare chance to really understand the motivations of a rabble-rouser because something very unique happens: After the crisis, Alex actually interviews the person who created it.

As the interview began, I couldn’t help but feel some disdain. Linda was a freelance writer and marketer. Of COURSE she was. She probably couldn’t WAIT to make a big deal out of this.

But as the interview went on, I realized that was far from the case. When she got the email, which one could easily misread as an opportunity to be on This American Life, Linda was excited for her son. So excited, in fact, that she Instagrammed a screenshot of the email before even responding. You can imagine her crushing disappointment when she found out it was for an advertisement…from a friend who had heard the ad.

But why did she stay upset, even after the team apologized to her? Why was she so aggressive on Twitter? “I think the reason also I was upset is…I was a little embarrassed!” she says. “You know what I mean? In retrospect, I kind of felt like the part of me that is prone to self-doubt was like ‘of COURSE it wasn’t a This American Life story’.”

This is a key insight, and something we often overlook…especially when we’re alarmed and frustrated by someone complaining about us. The main source of Linda’s anger was not actually the miscommunication and misuse. It was that SHE looked and felt dumb. Gullible. Excitable. And private apologies don’t address how you look publicly.

Every crisis and blowup is different. We often assume, from our defensive perspective, that the person causing it is mean, or stupid, or unreasonable. We often fail to understand WHY they’re so upset and WHAT would make them less upset.

There’s no perfect formula for this, but what StartUp might have done is:

  1. Get Linda on the phone (which they did) and spend most of the call understanding why she was so upset (it seemed like they were more focused on explaining themselves).
  2. Examined how they could address her specific source of anger. In this case, how could they make her look good online? An early public post saying “oh my god, we totally screwed up and can see how this was absolutely misleading” could have helped.

Humans are rarely just plain mean or evil. Usually, there’s something driving their behavior. Taking the time to understand it pays dividends when trying to clean up a mess like this.

“If we make an exception for one customer, we’ll have to make them for everyone”

Customer Service

no parking signNo, you won’t.

What percentage of your customers contact customer support? 1%? 5%? Let’s be crazy-generous and say 10%.

What percentage of those ask for an exception? Maybe 50%.

So that’s 5% of your customers you’re giving an exception to.

Sure, maybe word spreads and now 75% of those contacting customer support are asking for an exception. That’s still only 7.5% of your customers.

Exceptions are possibly the most powerful tool you have in delighting customers. Who doesn’t rave about how a customer service agent bent the rules to do something nice for them? Zappos practically built their entire reputation and PR on bending the rules.

Yes, you need to have some restrictions so you don’t break the bank. But if 7.5% of your customers leave delighted and tell 5 friends each, you’ve just increased your userbase by 37%. Not too shabby.

Photo via Patricia H.

Your morning cup of empathy

Community, Customer Service, Life

tip jar

The kid who made my chai this morning was a disaster.

It was his first time on the register in the morning, unclear if he had ever made a chai. He couldn’t find the bring-your-own-cup discount on the register, tried to get the cook to make the chai, couldn’t find the nutmeg, put it in a paper cup instead of my mug, etc.

I remember when I worked at a coffee shop, between freshman and softmore year of college. It was a tiny little place in Nevada City that tended more towards the grab’n’go crowd rather than the lounge’n’sippers. I was terrified of screwing up (and I often did). The thing is, the customers see a sign that lists items they can buy, and they expect to be able to buy those exact items, made as specified by the sign. That’s very reasonable. But when you’re new and have maybe never made that item, don’t know that there’s usually a sprinkling of parsley, can’t get the foaming just right – it seems impossible. People are often impatient and condescending; THEY know how this thing is made, why don’t YOU? Again – it’s not unreasonable, but they don’t have the full context of a kitchen with 300 ingredients and various things tucked in corners you’ve never seen.

Why is this story important? Because empathy is key to community management, customer service, and (in my opinion) life.

I believe empathy is imbued at a very early age by the people around you. When I interview, it’s clear some people have this as a core part of their personality and some people find it foreign.

But just because you’re naturally inclined towards empathy doesn’t mean you’ll always have it. Like a natural inclination towards singing or athleticism, practice is required to keep your skills of empathy handy and top-notch.

I frequently hear folks in customer-facing roles – hell, myself included – say that they often don’t have empathy left for the world when they get out of work. They feel pessimistic and mean. It’s understandable; you’ve used a lot of energy being extremely empathetic.

But that doesn’t mean you should only be empathetic at work. If you want to do your best work for your customers, you need to keep this skill sharp. I could have easily been frustrated with my barista this morning, tapping my foot and criticizing and holding back my tip. Instead, I assured him that it was ok, agreed that the register seemed complicated, and gave him a nice tip.

Practice empathy as much as you can, and it’ll come easier when you’re in that tough situation with a customer yelling at you, or a significant other snapping at you.

Photo via Dennis Miyashiro.