Andrew: This course is about how to do customer service right. The course
is led by Sarah Hatter. She is the founder of CoSupport, which offers
support training, help documentation and outsource support for web and
mobile apps. I'm Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy, where proven founders
like Sarah teach and I want to go over just quickly what will be in this
session. As you can see - you can see all of these topics - but there are
two that I especially want to call your attention to. We're going to spend
a lot of time here on this section on how to answer questions that your
customers have before they even ask them, so that you can make them happy
before they even have a chance to be frustrated.

And in this other section here that I want to make sure that I want to make
sure that you stick around and pay special attention to is how to keep
track of all the right things. Of bugs, of feature requests, we're going to
show you how to tag things, how to make sure that you're not getting in
feedback and fixing things or responding to things real time, but that
you're using that feedback to make your business better and to understand
what's going on with your customers. All right, so those are just two items
that I want to call your attention to out of a really big program that
we've got for you. And the first thing that I want us to go over is what's
possible. So, Sarah, first of all welcome and thanks for doing this session
with me.

Sarah: Thanks for having me. This is exciting.

Andrew: And you talked about . . . I want people to understand why this is
so important. And you had an issue where you were facing the same problem
over and over again. And, well, tell people, before you got it all right,
what was your life like?

Sarah: Well [laughs] before I got it right, I mean, I did everything wrong.
Everything that I teach people not to do I did hundreds and hundreds of
times. And, you know, that's because support was a very different animal
maybe five, six years ago. With the last five years even we've seen this
advent of suddenly the internet has become a place where everyone can
comment about everything. They can comment anonymously, they can Yelp
review, they can iTunes review and it wasn't really like that, I think,
when I started doing email based support for web apps. What I learned is,
we're now in an age where support is marketing, support is part of your
conversion, support's part of your brain recognition, your brand name,
everything that happens online. Twitter is a historical record, you know.
If someone goes and bashes you on Twitter, when I type in Andrew Support in
Google, I'm going to see [laughs] that and respond to that.

Andrew: And people are going to see in the sessions, speaking of Twitter,
how Taco Bell, for example, does it right. But before we even get into
that, six years ago you were trying to figure out the best practices for
customer service methods and you were inundated with feature requests and
what happened? Tell people about that experience.

Sarah: This is my a-ha moment with support, because I was working for a
company that really just didn't focus on feature requests. They were really
focused on development and design and so we didn't pay a lot of attention
to it. And I used to send out sock answers a lot to people without thinking
too much about it, especially if they were asking for a feature. And this
one day [laughs] I sent out this standard sock answer that I had sent 100
times to someone, to this person. And he wrote me back immediately and he
said 'Really? Because you sent me that exact same response about something
else last week.' And I was so embarrassed, but it kind of hit in the face.
Oh, wow, I'm being defensive and reactionary to these people instead of
treating like passionate, loyal customers paying me money.

Andrew: And then, right. We forget, it is people. And they don't forget
they're interacting with the same company over and over again and having
bad customer service. But we forget that we're interacting with the same
people over and over and sometimes giving them bad customer support. You
then had a new way of looking at the world and as a result of it, what
happened at a company where you were starting to get a lot of refund
requests? What was their policy and what did you do?

Sarah: The refund story's funny. So I was working for this same company, no
refund requests or no refunds ever. And that was just . . .

Andrew: And as usually, by the way, at this point I would show visuals. But
we're intentionally not mentioning the companies that have bad customer
support. Yes, you're doing there and they had no refund policy.

Sarah: They had no refund policy and there were, I was seeing issues where
it was, I didn't like your product, give me my money back. Or I forgot to
cancel, give me my money back. Or I can't afford this, give me my money
back. And there was this range there that didn't really work with a blanket
policy. I started giving refunds and I didn't tell anybody. I had this
little button I could press, and I started getting refunds. I was so
pleased with the response from people, I realized that when we did
something we weren't going to do, or when we responded humanly, when we
responded kindly to people and surprised them with our responsiveness,
people really liked it. They really started responding differently to the
company itself.

Maybe a year after I did this, I said, "Hey I think we should start giving
refunds to people. We should take down this policy of no refunds and we
shouldn't be so definitive about that." Because we've been doing it and I
knew it was proven, it was working. But, the big issue here wasn't about
money and it wasn't about money transferring, it was about the way people
felt about the company. That changed dramatically. I think that it's a
little story, but it made me think that small things you can do for people,
even the small tone and attitude that you have, really changes the way
people talk about you, write about you, review you, and tell their friends
about you. I would rather lose $5 than have someone say terrible things
about me online.

Andrew: And as a result you told me, before we started this, people who
asked for their refunds felt more positive about their company so they were
more likely to buy another product, they were more likely to say positive
things about the company and send over another person who ends up buying.
When you get it right, it works really well.

Sarah: It's really important that we talk about that, because no one wants
to give their money to a total dick, and no one wants to have to
continually have to, like on a subscription basis, keep paying a total
dick. If they do have to use your service because it's the only one, or
because it's the faster whatever, and they don't like you, they will tell
people "I have to use this product, but I hate them, I hate them." They
will do that even if they're still giving you money, right? If their work
forces them to do it, they will tell people, "I hate this product that my
work makes me use." We think about that, it's not just a matter of people
vote with their wallets. Sometimes they don't have the option of voting.
They'll still talk about it. That stuff is important. No one wants to give
their money to and be loyal to a company they don't like.

Andrew: Another upside, we'll get to it later on in the program, is you're
going to show us that when you get it right, you can get information from
customer service that will feed into products that people will then want to
buy because they're telling you what they want to buy, and you're
organizing it right. You blew my mind when you showed me how to do that. In
fact, I can't wait for that section. Why don't we get started with the
tactics?

Sarah: OK.

Andrew: All right, let's do it. So, after the big board, the first big
tactic is... it goes back to who you're hiring. Hire extroverts with the
right experience. What's the right experience?

Sarah: I don't think the right experience has to be someone who has worked
in a call center, or someone who's done email support, or someone who's
done, whatever, the exact same job in the exact same circumstance. I look
for personality first, because I can train anyone to do this job. I just
trained you how to do this job like five minutes ago and blew your mind.
Literally, I think it does not matter who you hire, as long as you're
hiring the right personality.

Andrew: What's the right personality?

Sarah: I want to say it's an extroverted personality, but I feel like
that's discriminatory. I think you can be an introvert and do the job. I
think that extroverts are... they're more public people per sense, so they
tend to have jobs in retail, in hospitality, working in restaurants. I am
big on focusing on people who've done any of those types of jobs before.
Anything that customer is facing in public at a desk behind a counter,
baristas, they're great. Bartenders are the best. Bartenders listen,
they're empathetic, they're used to chaos, all that kind of stuff. So
they're my number one choice.

Anyone who's worked in a great retail environment, like an Apple Store, or
whatever, they are already trained in how to handle people face to face,
fix people's problems, listen, give them results and solutions. They
fascinate me constantly, people who work in retail, I don't know how they
do it. This is a kind of personality that we're hiring, that we're looking
to hire to do email based support. When you're not face to face with the
customer it's the exact same problems. It's people yelling at you,
strangers day in and day out. I think I'm used to saying that you should
hire extroverts because they're better with the volume of people. From what
I've seen introverts tend to tire with people. When I was doing email
support daily for a company, I was answering 220 new emails a day from
strangers, interacting with 220 strangers a day. You can't tire of people.

Andrew: I want to show user voice and how they hire people properly but
before we get into that, let's talk a bad situation, right? You worked at a
company and a friend of yours from high school took your job after you
left. What happened?

Sarah: That's actually a good story.

Andrew: Oh, that is a good story. OK.

Sarah: Yeah. She was someone who had never done the job before. And there
was even speculation of if she was the right fit for the job because she
had never done any sort of email based support for a web company. She
worked in real estate. She actually worked in managing, a management
company for a big apartment. They owned big apartment communities all over
the country. She was used to people coming up to her desk and saying you
know, my garbage didn't get picked up or my water heater's broken or I need
a new lock on my door. You know? Day after day after day it was new people
with different problems.

She had to prioritize how to handle those problems. She had to be
empathetic and apologetic to people when they were talking about something
that had nothing to do with her at all, you know? That's one thing that
most people hate doing is apologizing for problems that aren't theirs and
really good support people apologize all day long. I thought that she would
be great at the role and she is wonderful at it. She loves it. It's like
puzzle piece perfect fit for her.

Andrew: Even though she comes from a real estate background where she had
to help people with water heater problems and all those and now she's in a
web app company where she has to help people with software. Because she's
the right personality she can do it.

Sarah: Exactly.

Andrew: OK. All right. Here's a company that you also say is doing a good
job. This is User Voice. This is their actual job posting on their website
that we found. What do you like about this that you think...

Sarah: If you scroll up a little you'll see there's like a general posting
about what it's like to work for User Voice. I love this because they give
you really concrete stuff but then they have fun about it. They say, you
know, we work hard but we have fun. There's a picture of them karate
kicking another guy. Like, you know, they say you can work from home. But
with the customer support position specifically they talk about your
personality traits. Like you need to be fast and able to do this kind of
thing. You need to be empathetic. That's the number one requirement that
they have for this job. Be empathetic. They're looking for a type of
person. Beyond that, when they actually have the call for submissions they
say show us specifically what you would say to this person who asks this
question.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: Like at the very bottom it says give us an example of what you would
say. They're not just saying we want fun people to come karate kick us all
day long at our office. They're looking for smart people with high energy
who can, and again energy gets back to being able to handle people after
people after people all day long. They're looking for someone who can
really do the job. Who can answer a question and be educational and
efficient as well.

Andrew: Yeah, here's the section that you mentioned earlier. They say
please sign up for a free trial, we won't ever bill you, and provide your
cover letter and resume, and provide with your cover letter and resume an
original response to this question from one of our customers. "How do I add
an admin to my User Voice account?" They want to see then how empathetic
the person is, how they respond.

Sarah: Exactly. If I were (inaudible) this job I would write, you know,
this great thing but then I would include a screen shot with an arrow
pointing to the tabs that the user needs to hit.

Andrew: Oh, I see. That's how you understand that the person's empathetic
because they're thinking the user doesn't want a bunch of text. They want
an image. I'm putting myself in their place. Got it, OK.

Sarah: And whether English is their first language. Whether they have good
eyesight. Because remember, computer writing is really tiny for some
people. When we have a help section that's just a wall of text you have to
think, like, that's hard to read. You know, when I'm looking at your app
and your app is visual and your app has tabs, anyway, we're getting into
this whole other thing we're going to talk about later. But you know you
want to find someone who understands it from the customer perspective. What
it looks like, what it feels like, and how to do something easily.

Andrew: OK. By the way, this jacket may not be the best jacket for me to
wear in these sessions. I wonder if people can hear every time these
buttons...

Sarah: Are they clicking?

Andrew: Can you hear it?

Sarah: No, is it corduroy?

Andrew: No, it's not. I don't know what this material is but it's the
buttons that are causing problems. All right. It looks good. It's...

Sarah: It looks dapper.

Andrew: It looks dapper, right. It looks like I know something. I'm looking
like a CEO of a company today.

Sarah: The books stacked up behind you made me know that you knew
something.

Andrew: This book stack, yeah. I've read all the books because it's all
from people who I've interviewed on Mixergy. Which is a good thing because
when people walk by my office here and they see the books the first thing
they do is they compliment me on the books and the second thing is the quiz
me. Did you really read those books? Because that's my favorite one.

Sarah: Yeah. Well they're...

Andrew: Sorry, what were you going to say? I just interrupted you. You're a
people person and I'm a talking person apparently.

Sarah: We were just talking about people. I think you understand and I
think people watching this understand that there's, you can hire someone to
do the job or you can hire the best person for the job, who's going to do
it well and who's going to do it for a long time. I think, also, when we
get down to hiring part of the turnover rate and the mediocrity that we see
in customer support online is due to just having the wrong people in the
seat.

Andrew: OK. Onto the big board. There's so much that we want to cover later
on that I want to make sure that we keep it moving. This is really
important. You say, "Do not wait to bring someone in and to handle this
problem, don't wait until the point when you're resentful to handle it."

Sarah: No. This happens to us a lot because we do help with support. People
hire us to do support a lot. They usually come to us way too late. They
come to us when they are just really sick of doing support. We find out
it's A because they're not the right person to do it and B because they're
doing it wrong. You don't want to wait until you hate your customers
because that happens more often than you'd think. People come to us and
they have been doing support for their product for two or three years and
they have so many other things to do besides support that they just really
resent it. That's not the attitude that you want to have going into support
with people. You want to go into doing support really interested to hear
what people are saying and really eager to fix their problems, and helpful
and with the right attitude and not, "Oh God dammit, you know I have to
answer these thirty people."

Andrew: [???] maybe get rid of the visuals for this so can you, at least,
give me an ad story?

Sarah: Yes, I will. I'll tell you this story. This is a hilarious story to
me because it happened so long ago and it shows me that things never
change. I met this guy randomly and he was starting a product. He had it
online for a year or so. He was this only person working there. This is way
before I had a company doing this. He wrote me an e-mail and said, "I don't
know what to do. I'm getting all of these support e-mails. I don't even
know how to handle it. I'm answering e-mails in the middle of the night,
during dinner. I'm getting an e-mail and I answer it. I wake up in the
middle of the night to answer e-mails."
I'm thinking, "Oh my god, this guys getting this avalanche of customers.
What is his issue?" I said, "Well how many e-mails are you getting from a
customer per day?"
He told me it was probably twenty. And I was like are you kidding...

Andrew: Twenty? I get 20 an hour, at least.

Sarah: Right, so that...

Andrew: I mean in my personal.

Sarah: The volume wasn't the issue. The issue was he hated doing it.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: He hated people asking him questions because he spent all day long
fixing problems, changing code, doing design, and business development. He
was at a point where twenty e-mails to him was over his head. Typically
that's when people come to us. We get the exact same thing from them. It's
not my place to judge how many e-mails they want to answer in a day, but it
is my place to judge why they waited this long. We can fix this problem for
you really easily. There's things that go into building a great support
department that don't have to include hiring someone at 60,000 a year to do
your support. You can do stuff on your own, if you're just doing it right.

Someone who's doing business development full-time or coding full-time
who's having to do support because no one else can do it, there's a way to
manage that without making your customers pay for it. And typically what
happens in that case is customers don't get a reply or they get a shitty
reply. Neither of those are acceptable when you're trying to build a
business and get people to pay you money for things.

Andrew: What do I do if I'm a developer who's building a business and
focused on building the right product; I can't get my head out of code to
go answer e-mails from people who are complaining or confused. What do I do
at that point? Twenty e-mails a day is not enough to hire someone.

Sarah: No it's not enough to hire someone. Absolutely not. It is enough for
you to sit down and spend a good thirty minutes a day answering people's
questions. As long as these aren't twenty to thirty people reporting twenty
to thirty new bugs a day...If that's your problem, that's it's bugs
reports, then you need to shut down for six months and...

Andrew: Fix it.

Sarah: -fix it. Right? But if they're people asking for future requests or
people wanting to change an admin and you don't have that on your site how
to do that; that stuff is easy to fix. The first thing that I would suggest
doing it getting the right tools, setting up you tools, but also, moving
into our nice little subject here, you want to be educational with the
tools you have. Can we go into the turbo scan thing? I love the turbo scan
story.

Andrew: Turbo scan is...Yes do you want to keep it as this, yes let's keep
it this show right now.

Sarah: Kind of like with two topics, but they're the same topic.

Andrew: This is turbo scan. I use this at least five times a week to
take...

Sarah: Oh yes, turbo scan's the best, right? They're...

Andrew: What is turbo scan?

Sarah: Turbo scan is an iPhone app. You take a picture of a piece of paper.
It turns it into a PDF, a high resolution PDF. I don't know how it does it.

Andrew: It looks just like a scan and if it's a little bit askew, it fixes
it. It's beautiful.

Sarah: They are awesome, it's like $4.99, it might be less now. It's one of
the top iPhone apps of all time. That's their support site

Andrew: This is actually their home site.

Sarah: That's their home page that's linked to from iTunes. So, if I go to
iTunes and say turboscan support, I get this page. turboscanapp.com

Andrew: So what's the problem, now they give you an email address, if you
have a problem, you just send them an email. They solve it and life is
good. No?

Sarah: No, [laughs].

Andrew: No? What happens?

Sarah: They lie on this page, because it says that they respond to every
support request within a few hours. They don't. I've written them 17 times
since December and they've never written me back. Listen, if I was one of
the top paid iPhone apps and people were writing me from this page all day
long, I wouldn't want to write them back either. I would be so annoyed at
looking at my inbox all day long, but, here's the deal Turboscan? You're
one of the top iPhone apps of all time, why don't you have a help section?
Why don't you have a searchable help section? Why don't you go through and
catalog all the things that people ask you all day long and write them
down?

Andrew: All right, that now feeds into our next topic. If you only get a
handful of emails a day, you can't hire someone. If you're getting a ton,
before you get to that place, hire someone. Make sure you're not getting
resentful of these people who are paying you money because you're never
going to be able to build a business, making those people happy if you're
resentful of them. If you're getting a lot of costumer support emails like
this, you're saying find a way to answer it before it even comes in?

Sarah: And how you do that is by using these tools correctly.

Andrew: All right, let's go on now to the big board. We got to go onto this
next big idea, because this is what I promo'd and this is what I'm eager
for as well. It says, "Get that answers on your site, before people ask for
them." You say, "Put them in all formats, video, audio and screenshots." I
don't know how to do this, even though my friend Gabriel of duckduckgo said
that once he did it, he loved it. Everything in his business became easier.
Because he gets a lot of emails, I guess. He doesn't charge users, so he
doesn't have enough money coming in to service each user. But, he did
something like what you did right here. This is, let me bring this up.

Sarah: Readability. And I want to preface this by saying...

Andrew: Wait, you did this?

Sarah: I did this.

Andrew: What is, for people who are maybe listening to the audio version of
this or don't understand because I'm not zooming in properly on this. What
is this page that you built for them and then we'll talk about how others
can build this, too.

Sarah: Right. If you looked at the turboscan site, you saw that the
difference was that they had an email address on the page.

Andrew: And nothing else?

 Sarah: Well, six months ago when we started with them, they came to us
because they were being buried in support and the first thing I did was say
here's why, "You have no resources on your website". All they had was, Get
in touch. They had one page that had about 10 frequently asked questions in
a line. So, instead we used the help desk. They were using desk.com. We
used the help desk, a tab that very few people even go to in desk, it's the
content management. We created this out of the box help section that's
searchable and that has the contact form.

Andrew: So, it looks like they built it but basically they're using
desk.com. Software that a lot of use to answer and organize email. What
you're saying is that they did something that most of us don't do, we don't
do it at Mixergy either. Create this community support where questions are
already answered, where if they type something in the answer will pop up.
Like, how do I sign, there we go.

Sarah: So, yeah. They pop up, say, whatever. This is the thing, I know that
it looks complicated. It looks designed and it looks like somebody was
hired to do this. I did this, we just changed the fonts and added the logo.

Andrew: But, you know what, the design doesn't worry me because I do know
that I can sign up for Zendesk or desk.com and get this stuff with lots of
different programs, Uservoice. The part that concerns me is, how do we get
all this data in here without hiring you?

Sarah: Well, you should hire me.

Andrew: We can hire you at some point, but I want to start without you,
frankly. I want my audience to say, at least, I'm going to start before I
give up and go and hire somebody. So, how do we do it? It's a lot of work
to put this together?

Sarah: It's a lot of work. The great thing about Desk and Uservoice
especially, Uservoice maybe even more than Desk is they make this very easy
to do. First things first is we're going to go through our emails. Anytime
we get a question from a customer, we're going to think in our mind, "Wow,
is this a question another customer is going to have?" When I'm training
support agents, I tell them, "If you're asked the same thing 5 times in a
week; and remember that these are support agents that are typically doing
80 to 100 emails a day, so 5 times in a week means once a day, at least.
Then you need to write a help article for it. All you need to do is copy
the question that the person asked, post it in as an article and fill in
what you sent to them as an answer. This isn't very hard. What makes it
hard is we neglect these really simple steps. If you just stop for a
minute, create the help section article about it, post it on your page.
Then you're going to see that stuff start decreasing.

So, that's how I tell people, even thinking ahead of time, I mean, I know
it's really difficult to think about what people are going to ask you but
have someone whose not working for you, whose not familiar with the app sit
down and use it start to finish and have them say well, this is what I did
and then I looked for this and I couldn't find the log in and then I
couldn't get logged in and I couldn't remember the password thing because
you have it hidden and I have to click log in again to get to the password
so I couldn't reset my password. I mean this is all stuff that when you
build and app you're to close to think about someone's going to have a
question about that.

Andrew: So have a stranger go through and try it out and any questions that
he has I want him to write them down.

Sarah: You shouldn't be pulling people in vans on the corner, you know, to
look at your app but ...

Andrew: The next time somebody looks through my door at my books I'm going
to say hey, want one? I've got a job for you.

Sarah: Right. Have people that don't work for you that you know sit
through, you know, this is the thing that's so silly. I tell people this
all the time and it blows their minds. Like I have so many people launching
apps, launching apps all the time and they always ask this, do you know
someone who will do market research? Do you know someone who can do user
research for us so we can watch people use our apps? And I'm like fuck it,
have a party and invite people over and set up two laptops and watch how
people use your app. How hard is this?

Andrew: And so, for this your saying do the same thing, have a party, have
somebody go through, pull them aside and say look, go through this and tell
me what's up.

Sarah: Right. If you don't have the email volume have someone sit down with
you and predict what people are going to ask.

Andrew: Right, and if we do have the email volume?

Sarah: Email volume; just start noticing what you're answering all day
long. That's all you have to do.

Andrew: So anytime I get a question...

Sarah: If people emailing you are.. People emailing you are your power
users. Most times for, I think the conversion right now is like one person
for every 3,000 people who use your site will write you a support email and
almost 80% of people who use your app will never write you a support email.
So if someone takes the time to write you a support email and ask how to do
something, they're not some annoying jerk that's there to destroy your
life. They're there because they actually want to use your app quite a bit.
They're asking you a real legitimate question. So listen to them. Don't
think of it as every single person who's ever downloaded your app is going
to write you a question you have to answer. Think of it as these are
already curated for me. If this guy's asking it then I'm guessing 3,000
other people may to.

Andrew: OK. All right, what about this? I know that I should go through all
my old emails and find the common questions, that's a lot of work. I guess
if I'm starting to see questions come up over and over again, that makes
sense because I can notice the things that I'm doing often, start out with
that you're saying. If I'm seeing that I'm answering the same thing over
and over, copy and paste it into the system like this.

Sarah: Right.

Andrew: What if I'm not noticing it. What if I'm so deep into it and all
the questions seem different to me? Everyone's frustrations seems a little
bit different.

Sarah: For that we still need to use the tools correctly. We need to learn
how to reuse the tools that we're already using presently if you're in a
help desk. But from there we need to move into this other realm of topics
and that's actually doing tagging, labeling and organizing of everything
that people are sending you requests on.

Andrew: All right, we're going to get to that in then end and that will
help us then figure out, that will help us organize the email that's coming
in so that we can figure out how to answer questions before people even ask
them.

Sarah: Exactly.

Andrew: All right. When you say create a document like this you want, if
it's how do I sign up to start using readability, for example, you would
like us to include and image showing people how to do it.

Sarah: Right, that one I don't think has an image.

Andrew: It looks like it's not that complicated but if it was, you would
want that. In fact, it does have this image here. Click this button.

Sarah: Right, yeah.

Andrew: Screen shots and everything.

Sarah: Screenshots and everything. We have to remember that people may
don't always speak English or if they don't speak English they may be using
Google translate for something which isn't' always going to be the best
option. So, you really want to use a screenshot with an arrow. If you go
back to the readability search part and you search for contributions or
something like that, you'll see actually or change avatar, you'll see where
we put in an actual screenshot that's, you know, we've highlighted how do I
change my photo, how do I change my profile photo.

Andrew: OK, this one, when I signed up my pictures appears to have an
avatar.

Sarah: Right, click that one. No image. These are terrible examples.

Andrew: How do I change my profile info? No that's...

Sarah: Try that one.

Andrew: Oh wait, this one, yeah.

Sarah: Right, we've actually put in here, like, here's a big red arrow that
shows you were to click on this page. Almost, I mean, if I would say 90 to
95% of your help sections need an image. If they don't have an image, it's
going to be more difficult for people to really quickly scan them and get
the answer and move on.

Andrew: And what you're doing is you're using this. Basically, you're using
Skitch [SP]?

Sarah: Yeah.

Andrew: And screenshot.

Sarah: Oh my gosh, Skitch is the best. Boom, done.

Andrew: Free program and then you're just do that, well actually let's do
it like this and that's how you're marking it and then you can add a note.

Sarah: Right. Type here. It's great. You can choose fonts, you can change
the color, you can change all that stuff. That's a simple, easy, free
little app that you can do but if you want to get fancy put in in
Photoshop, have someone mock them up, whatever. So, the reason, you know,
I'm really big into visuals, but this also gets back to another point about
support needs to be educational for people. Like, I don't want to write you
a support email anymore then you want to read it and have to respond to me.
I'd rather just get the answer. So, seeing the big search box at the top
and being able to type some stuff and get an answer for me, even if I don't
get the right one right away, I'm still interacting with that and learning
from that and doing that, being self-service instead of just send me an
email at Turboscan.com. We want to encourage people to be educated but be
self-service and it's not, I don't think, pushing them off into the ether
and making them answer questions themselves. I think it's much, much better
for most people to not have to interact with support at all.

Andrew: OK, I'm going to ask you in a moment which software you recommend
and why. Just not even which software you recommend but give us an
understanding of how their all different from each other so we can just
decide for ourselves but before I move off of this, what issue is someone
who decides that they want to create this self-service question and answer
site, what issues are they likely to have as they do it? I want to
anticipate our audiences problems as they do this.

Sarah: Well the biggest problem is content. Where are they going to get the
content and whose going to put it in there? When it comes to getting
content, this again can be a weekend job that you commit to or it can be
something that as you go along in the development of your app when a
question comes up you add to it.

Now keep in mind, all these help sections that are hosted on help desks are
living, huge, historical, documents. They are organic. You can change them.
They can be edited. They can be deleted. They can have a picture changed.
We're no longer locked into that world where our whole help section is in
html and we have to get our designer to stop whatever he's doing to change,
you know, the text in something, which is what it was five years ago when I
was desperately trying to change help sections on things. So, this is, I
mean, if you use a Zen Desk or Desk or User Voice, it's as simple as
opening the item and clicking edit, making your changes and saving it. And
it's real time. It's right there. So, the biggest issue that I think people
are going to face is where do we get the content from, how do we load it in
and then keeping on tasks that your updating the stuff regularly.

Andrew: So what do you do to keep updating it regularly?

Sarah: Well, you listen to your customers is the number one thing that I
tell people all the time which people just don't like to do these days. And
I think it gets back to that weird, you know, defensiveness we have about
doing customer support. We need to listen to what people are asking. And
again, if people are asking the same thing over and over, God dammit, put
it in your help section. They'll stop asking it if you put in their help
section.

Andrew: Is this the kind of thing where we can put every single answer in
to the help section unless it has personal information in it?

Sarah: Sometimes yeah. I recommend people do that when their starting from
scratch and they don't have a help section. It's a great way to kick start
getting the stuff out there.

Andrew: So every question that you get for the first week, just pop it in
there, why not, so you have something in there.

Sarah: Why not right? And then you can curate those later on yourself. You
can take stuff out if it's not real [?] no one's asking it again. The other
thing that you should do if you're using a help desk, something like this,
is watch the ratings on these because if you go back to the readability
section, pull up the profile, you'll see at the bottom, I found this
article helpful.

Andrew: I'm going to say, since it you, I'm going to say I found this
article, I didn't not, I just want to see what happens, can I do that?

Sarah: Yup.

Andrew:  It's not going to screw you up with your client?

Sarah: No. It's not going to screw you up on the client and if fact I'm
going to show you another really cool thing.

Andrew: Oh, that's it. It just says thank you. I thought it was going to
ask me why.

Sarah: Well no. What happens on the conversive on the other side is that I
can go in there and then look at the ratings and see that you downloaded
that. And so, desk doesn't give you an option to give feedback and to say
stupid answer images don't work, dumb thing spelled wrong but I can through
them and say, gosh seven people didn't like this answer. I wonder what's
not clear about it. Is the image out of date, are the instructions not
clear enough. Do something else for me really quick. Go click on a contact
s on the side...

Andrew: So now, if the self-serve answer is not enough, people can go back
and ask another, or they can click contact us, and let's say I'm a
developer.

Sarah: Well, let's just say I'm reader.

Andrew: I'm a reader. OK. I'm a reader, and I'll zoom out so that we can
see the . . . OK. This is what you wanted to show us too.

Sarah: This is what I wanted to show you, because this is really important
and this is also imbedded in all of these help desk things. I want you to
just fill in this information and say in the message: Sarah's showing me
how to use Desk.

Andrew: OK.

Sarah: Because what we'll hopefully see, even though we haven't had a lot
of luck with Desk examples.

Andrew: Oh, what are you going to say?

Sarah: Oh, I was just going to say send email, [??] on here, and what
should happen, is you should get a prompt that says, send me . . . are you
going to press the send email button?

Andrew: No, because maybe if you want to generate a prompt, maybe I should
select something from here or do something . . . SS . . .

Sarah: Well, we'll go back to that in a second. But first of all, send
email. Oh shit. We're going to have to cut this whole part out of it out.

Andrew: No, we keep it all in. OK. What I think you want to do is something
like: How do I change my avatar? You want to show that if someone sends an
email that you have the answer to in the system, no it doesn't happen.

Sarah: It's not doing that, because Desk is not set up. Go back and maybe
if click on the website's developer. Anyway, what you should see is desk
prompting you to say we found these other responses in the help section
that might answer your questions. Did it answer your question right? So try
it from here. Do the same thing again.

Andrew: Oh I see. I didn't realize you were seeing my screen. I thought I
was slick.

Sarah: Oh, I see it. I see all your typos. And again the quirky nature of
this just has to do with the . . .

Andrew: Ah, OK. There we go.

Sarah: There we go. We haven't entered email yet. Did you mean one of these
things, right? And look at that, right in the middle: How do I change my
profile picture? Well there's the answer and now I don't have to send my
email. So, the thing was is what we saw on the first form, the first form
was actually our great negative answer, is that that's the option that you
can have. Someone send you an email. How do I change my avatar, or you can
answer the question for them and they never send you an email.

Andrew: OK. And I think the reason that this happened is because from my
understanding of Desk's system is, you can't have, I don't want to say this
because I'm not sure. I was going to say that . . .

Sarah: The answer has nothing to do with Desk. The answer actually has to
do with the first one isn't a Desk contact.

Andrew: That's what I was going to say that that one where you had drop
down, this is not Desk.

Sarah: Uh-uh.

Andrew: I don't think Desk allows you to do this, but so what you did was
you created your own form here that asks people to categorize the email
before they sent it so that you knew what it was about.

Sarah: Right. And in our next little subject we're going to talk about why
that's important. I don't know if you want to talk about that now, but we
can.

Andrew: Um, you know what, let's do one other thing. Let's break down which
one people should use. So, what's the benefit of desk.com, and actually we
should include Gmail in there, but desk.com, what are the pluses, what are
the minuses?

Sarah: OK. So, the minus is they're own by Sales Force.

Andrew: Why is that a minus?

Sarah: It's Sales Force.

Andrew: OK.

Sarah: The minuses, they had some ups and downs with their support, their
actual support themselves. They just hired Graham Murphy who is now leading
their support team and he is the best decision they've ever made, so going
forward they're going to have an amazing support team, so they're kind of
fixing that issue. They're free for one user, which is awesome. All of this
stuff is out of the box. You don't have to do any customizations unless you
want to, and it pretty much works like a Gmail inbox does. It's a little
bit more robust because it does offer analytics, which we'll talk about
later, and it does have the content management, but mostly it's just a
really pretty looking Gmail inbox. It's a redundant usage, so you have to
have an email address that you plug in to Desk. It used to be called [??],
sorry. So it's expensive when you start adding lots and lots of users.

Andrew: And you can also pay per hour that the person's on, so if you have
a few people who are answering your emails but not every one of them is
full time, you can pay for the hours that they happen to be on.

Sarah: Right.

Andrew: Of all of them, there's a reason why you use them for readability.
What's that? What's the big reason that made you say, readability, we're
going to go with Desk.com?

Sarah: The reason we went with desk.com was because it was the easiest out
of the box, and we were desperately under water. And so, at that point we
needed a help section up online tomorrow. I wrote the majority of that help
section in less than a week. We got it up online in five days. So for ease
of use, and especially because they have a great trial period. It's free
for one user, it was like, boom boom boom, we're done, we're set up. So . .
.

Andrew: So let's take a look at, sorry just cut you off, but let's take a
look a zendesk.com.

Sarah: Zen Desk is the old bear of the help desk solutions. They've been
around for a really long time. They're really good people. And it can do
the same stuff that desk does when you talk about the knowledge base and
the integration with twitter and the integration with Facebook. All of that
stuff. They all do that the same way.

Andrew: So then what is it about Zen Desk that makes me want to use them.

Sarah: Zen Desk has better analytics. They have better reporting. Their
pricing is a little bit more competitive. And it's really great if you're
working with developers. It seems to have a more developy edge, from what
I've seen. So if you're working with people who are more developer-minded,
they tend to like the UI a little bit more. I personally don't like the
green at all. But the other thing, too, that I really like about Zen Desk
and think that they don't get enough recognition for is their customer
service team themselves. Incredibly responsive, really helpful. They
actually have engineers who work on their support team full time. So they
fix issues real quickly. They are always adding great custom features for
people, and they're just really . . .

Andrew: They also have good mobile apps. I don't think that desk.com does,
so if you're answering a lot of emails on the go, that's helpful for you.
And they have strong integration.

Sarah: Right. Their integration is great. And they also do chat which is
wonderful too. I think their integrated chat is much better than desk's is,
so they can plug in to so much stuff. The great thing about the plug-ins
that they do is that it also can put it in your analytics. So if you're
checking to see where people are writing these support requests from,
whether it's Twitter, Facebook, or whatever, it's all part of that.

Andrew: OK. User Voice is another one that you mention.

Sarah: User Voice. User Voice is just my new favorite. . . The great thing
about User Voice is the forum that they have integrated. They do this out
of the box forum experience. So if you want to have community support in a
public space, if you actually go the weather.com, the weather channel and
scroll down and go to their support, you can see what it looks like. That's
done by User Voice. And people can ask questions. They can vote on
features. You can convert a public forum post into private email. And
again, all of it is included in your analytics, so when you go in to see
how many emails or customer cases, or knowledge-based articles, agents are
working with, that's all included. So their forum acts as a, they have on
top of that the great knowledge-based that you see in Desk as well. We
didn't get a chance to see that in Zen Desk, but I just really like User
Voice, and it's so customizable. If you have an authentication setting
where you want people logging to their account on your site to write you an
email, you can set that all up in User Voice. They use their own
authentication to write you an email.

Andrew: What do you mean by that?

Sarah: I mean that if I go to, you know, if you have a website and I'm a
member of it and I pay you money, like Andrew.com. And I have to, in order
to write you a support email, being logged into my Andrew.com account, I
can log into that through User Voice and send you the email.

Andrew: Ah I see. OK. So they know my account and it's connected to them.
OK. And they're really good, as you said, for forums where people want to
answer each other's questions. I always like this thing about them that if
you do click the feedback and you start typing in your message to them,
first of all as you can see on the left as soon as you start sending the
message that you can get feedback yourself. But also, as soon as you type
it in, something like Advanced, CSS, I think they start to give you those
answers there you see right there on the left.

Sarah: It's much slicker than the way that Desk did it from what we saw.
But other great thing about User Voice is they really push customers
education, and they want you to have self-service customers. They want you
to have customers who find answers on the site.

Andrew: And answer it themselves so that: this is answer and if I didn't
like this answer, I can answer it right down here.

Sarah: Exactly.

Andrew: OK.

Sarah: Yeah, and there's voting integrated to it. If you want to have
feature requests voted up or down, the great thing is all of this is out of
the box on User Voice. You don't have to create this stuff or set it all
up. That's how they created the product, you know?

Andrew: Right. What about one last tool: Gmail. Plusses and Minuses of
using customer support through Gmail. What do you think?

Sarah: Gmail is the love of my life. I love Gmail. I used to teach courses
on how to completely ninja your Gmail because I did support in Gmail for
years. Like three or four years, just a Gmail account, a shared Gmail
account.

Andrew: So, why shouldn't we use. . . And by shared you just mean two
different people have the same password to this Gmail account and they
answer it.

Sarah: Yeah. Like five different people have the same password.

Andrew: So, what's the downside of that?

Sarah: Well, the downside of it is there's no analytics. If I wanted to
know how many emails we sent per day, I would go to the sent email folder
and I would count them by hand. I'm terrible at math, I can't even
calculate a tip, so that was dumb. There wasn't really a great way to, you
know, when a developer needed to see an email, I'd have to star it and
you'd have to go to the starred folder and find the one. There weren't
kernel links for emails, so we couldn't share them and then chat or
campfire. Gmail is wonderful if you're getting less than 50 emails a day.
30 to 50 emails a day is when you need to start thinking about, "We need to
move this into something else."

Andrew: I see. OK.

Sarah: But the great thing about Gmail is you can share it. Hiten Shah, my
friend at KISSmetrics, they still use a Gmail inbox. I'm just completely
wowed that they do. They have six or seven people going in there all day
long. What they do is what I always recommend. Each person gets a label
with their name. When I want you to read an email, I mark it as unread. I
tag it Andrew, and I archive it and it goes into your folder. When you log
in, you look at your unread items in the Andrew folder and you answer
those. When you want to pass it back to me, you take your name off it and
give it to me unread.

So, there's ways to sort of be hack-ish about it. If you're doing support
by yourself, and you're getting less than 50 emails a day, please, you just
use something like Gmail.

Andrew: OK.

Sarah: Don't OK things, right?

Andrew: But what we don't get with Gmail that we would. . .

Sarah: Is a help (?).

Andrew: Sorry?

Sarah: You don't get a help section either.

Andrew: You don't get the help section, which you're saying is so important
that you might want to set up an account with one of these sites, just to
get that.

Sarah: Exactly. I've had a lot of customers who've done that before. They
don't even use the capabilities of the help desk feature. All of these
focus on the email part, but they all include these other fantastic
features that you can use in addition to it. You can use support and mail
app for all I care. It doesn't matter what you're using but you need to
have a great tool that represents you online that's a searchable help
section that you can edit easily.

Andrew: You know what? I've actually called up these companies, asking them
--not all of them, but some of the companies, you've mentioned -- asking
them how to create a forum and what the benefits are, and how to do it
right? They just seem bothered to answer that. It's a tough thing for them
to answer and I feel bad for them as they try to explain how to use it. I
wish that I just would have heard you when I was signing up for Desk.

Sarah: I know. It bothers me, too. I'm not even kidding you. It bothers me
that all of these help desk solutions push themselves in to be the next
best Gmail inbox. For God sakes, you can just do an out of the box forum
experience for your customers. Why aren't you showing people that?

(?) at least shows that this is a huge component of what we do, right? Most
people that use Desk don't know half of the features. It has really great
features, from recording to labeling and tags.

Sarah: We're going to cover those in a moment. Everything that we do with
Desk.com will actually use my account. That's why we're using Desk.com, but
you could do it with any account, any tool, including Gmail, if you just
want to go free and simple and cheap.

All right. Anything else on this before we go on to the next topic?

Sarah: I don't think so. I think we covered it all.

Andrew: All right. This one was a meaty one. We're going to go into one
that's a little bit lighter and a little more fun. Then we'll go back into
a meaty one. You say be fast, friendly, and reply to every post.

Sarah: Yes.

Andrew: By the way, do you mean every post, every email that we get needs a
reply?

Sarah: Yeah, I think it. . . I don't remember if I said post, but I think
that it means every customer communication.

Andrew: If they're talking to you, you need to talk back.

Sarah: Right. So, I asked this question of Comcast carrier's Frank, the guy
that started that, I said, "What if the person is just being a dick, or
they're trolling? What do I do?" He said that the rules that they use is
two attempts to answer them with helpful voice and great attitude and
everything. Then, after that, they ignore it.

I know that's going to be the question, that people are always going to
say, "Well, what do I do if the person is just trolling, you know, they're
baiting me or they're not listening to me?" Then, set your limits on what
you're going to do. Never react publicly on Facebook, on Twitter, or
anything else negatively. Don't ever mirror negativity in public, right,
because that always comes back to you.

Andrew: OK.

Sarah: So, yes.

Andrew: So the company that you wanted to show us that's doing this in a
fun way, and doing it right, you say, is Taco Bell. Here's Taco Bell on
Twitter.

Sarah: Oh my God! So, look at this. This is a screenshot I took a couple
weeks ago because I couldn't believe that they were talking like this to
customers. Right? "I think the Doritos Taco sucks." He says, "That makes
you and nobody else." That's hilarious. It's hilarious that a huge, billion
dollar corporation is responding that way.

Andrew: That they would even respond to someone who says, "I think the
Dorito Taco sucks." I would think, "All right. Great. Congratulations."
What am I going to say to that? And they had something to say, "That's just
you".

Sarah: It's brilliant. I've had friends who, a few weeks ago, and this new
person took over the Twitter taco feed that I don't really know too much
about, he was replying to them very casually and whatever. I had a friend
who wrote that he was going to go try the new Dorito tacos, and he couldn't
wait for the weekend. And they wrote back to him, "why wait?" Like funny.
Like something I would say to him, why wait? What are you talking about?

Andrew: Right. Here's another one, "hey, Taco Bell, do you guys sell
hotdogs?" And Taco Bell says, "let me check, no".

Sarah: No.

Andrew: They're responding to it. This is just something that you pointed
out to me that if we just went it, even now in our session, you see they
just respond to everybody.

Sarah: It's funny and they're funny. Some of the stuff is, yeah and some of
the stuff is here's a coupon for a taco, right? But some of the stuff is
just, frat boys talking about Tacobell, and they write back to the frat
boys talking about Taco Bell. And its fun and none of it is thanks tell
your friends, thanks, like us on Facebook.

Andrew: Good one. This guy [yetyear] wrote, "or at Taco Bell soounds
heavenly right now. I want one of everything, a has [?] stomach". And Taco
Bell responded, "if you do that, please send us a photo".

Sarah: Yeah. And of course, they're so good at it.

Andrew: And here we go, here's another one. And I promise I wont keep
reading these.

Sarah: See you can't, because they're all like this.

Andrew: This guys randomly says, "I could eat at Taco Bell anytime of the
day" and I guess he's just saying this to his friends. Taco Bell responds,
"as you should".

Sarah: As you should.

Andrew: As you should. And so this is what you want us to do, don't ignore
people, don't let them pass, don't let these opportunities go.

Sarah: Right. If you go to any Twitter feed for any airline, except
Southwest probably, United, Delta, Continental, Alaskan, whatever, all it
is, it's really kind of embarrassing, but it's either, thanks for the kind
words, or glad you had a fun trip or so sorry DM me your itinerary number
so I can take a look. I mean, it's really sad. There are million dollar
corporations out there, like Taco Bell who are doing it completely wrong.
And I don't like going to a companies Twitter feed and seeing a copy and
paste reply to every single person. I don't like that at all. It really
enrages me when I see people do it like that.

Andrew: I believe even art is like that. I think there's a lot that even we
can learn from this. I was checking out, my head was actually turned to my
side monitor so I could pull up United and see what they do. "Every mile
counts, donate your frequent flier miles to wish Illinois Wish Flight,
United@Gaygatsbe(sp) thanks for sending and tweeting the info, we've sent
it to our maintenance team". Alright, so they are at least responding. But
your saying, you could be a lot more fun then that.

Sarah: A lot more friendly and human. And I hate professionalism, I hate
Dear Sir.

Andrew: I know. You've cursed like five times already.

Sarah: I know.

Andrew: And I told you before we started, we have no editing team, so all
off this is going out.

Sarah: Oh, I'm so sorry. I hate that stuff because, there is nothing human
about that. You know, there's nothing about being sorry for an
inconvenience at all. That's just robotic, scripted behavior. So, I like to
see when people are really having fun, and being human. Jason Cohen, a
friend of mine, he spoke at Microcomp a little while ago, and he had this
whole section on, just be honest and people will like you. How silly and
first grade is that that we are having to have a conversation now in public
about what you should do with your business? Be honest and people will like
you. Be fun and be friendly, and answer every single post. That includes
Facebook, Twitter, god, I don't even know what ever the zillion other ones,
get satisfaction, and of course, every single email. That's really hard for
a lot of people because I think we have ingrated in mind that were not
suppose to respond to feature requests, that if someone's trolling us and
they're angry, we don't reply. I don't fall in line wit that at all. I
think everyone that takes the time to mention you or write you, or post on
your wall or whatever, deserves the courtesy of a reply.

Andrew: OK, let's go on to the last big tactic. Keep track of all the right
things. You want to know about bugs, complaints, design flaws, every thing
that people want improved. Alright, everyone says this. The reason that I
wanted to highlight this for our audience, and the reason that I cared
about this so much before we even started is, that you have a way of doing
this that is organized, that I thought was a little too much at first. But
you're signing on it. So what do you mean by this? How do we do it, and
then we'll show my screen, and you show me what to do.

Sarah: Right. So, if you're using Gmail, you already heard me talk about
how you can use labels to assign things to people. You can use labels in
the same way in Gmail to keep track of issues that you're having. Right? So
what I like to do is to tell people you need to label every single thing
that comes through. If someone is asking, how do I . . ., you need to label
it with how to, or how do I, or whatever language you want to use.

Andrew: Every email that goes out gets some kind of label?

Sarah: Everything. Everything. You might as well not even be using an email
address if you're sending an email without a label on it.

Andrew: Why? What's the point of emailing everything? I'm not challenging
because I disagree, I want to learn. Why?

Sarah: Well you challenge me, I can defend my position.

Andrew: All right. What the hell are you telling me to do? You give me more
work.

Sarah: Well, as a support person my role goes way beyond being cheerful,
cheerleader, thanks for using our product. It goes way beyond that, because
I have a responsibility to the people building this app and selling it for
money, right? I have a responsibility to sys admins, I have a
responsibility to designers and I have a responsibility to developers who
all work to create a product. I may not be a technical person, but I have a
responsibility to those technical people.

Andrew: What is that responsibility exactly? Is it just to make sure that
people stop complaining?

Sarah: No, no, no. The responsibility is to tell them what people are
asking, to tell them what people are complaining about, that's part of it.
To tell them how people are using the product, because so often we build
things the way that we want to, we build what we want to use, right? Well,
that's the most selfish, self-centered, like I'm an only child kind of
design philosophy I've ever heard of. It's, I'm going to build something I
want to use.

Well you're one person. You're not 50 people in an office room whose boss
is forcing them to use this product, right? You need to start thinking like
the masses if you're going to build a great product that people are going
to love to use. I'm going to take this feature out because I never use it
in the first place, well millions of other people are using this feature,
so what the hell, right?

So I think one of the problems with big support teams or teams that have 5
or 6 people doing support is that there's not enough communication about
emails I'm answering, emails you're answering, emails that person is
answering, what Andrew answered today, so we may all answer the exact same
5 issues all day long, but I only know what I answer, right? I only know
what I answered unless we kept a log somewhere what everyone else is doing.


Then if I'm a lead product manager, let's say I'm looking to see what
people are happy with and what people don't like about a product, then I
can't just take Sarah's emails, because Sarahs only represent a little bit
of it, there are five other people, right? But what if Sarah is the only
person doing support and she's really sick and tired of answering this one
question and she comes to me and she's like, I hate that people are asking
why the log-in is hidden behind the tab that they have to pull down.

And they're like, well we think this is an elegant design decision, what's
the matter? How many people are asking this? Well, it could just be that
Sarah is annoyed that people don't understand how to use it.

Andrew: And so, it stands out to her and seems like it's a lot of people.

Sarah: So the big points to this are, we really need time to pick numbers
and actual analytics and real decisive, non-human sort of interaction with
the actual issues.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: Getting back to this whole idea of what are we responsible for is
support people are completely overlooked in the development process. There
are some really, really great companies that are now including support
people in development, which I think is awesome.

It needs to happen way more. People need to listen to customer support
people because they're on the front lines, but support people need to be
communicating back to developers and designers what people are asking for
and what they're complaining about.

Andrew: You mentioned a few of the companies that you worked for, one of
the companies that you used to work for is 37Signals. I recently
interviewed Jason, the founder of 37Signals, Jason Fried and what he told
me was, when it was time for them to rebuild Basecamp from the ground up,
to figure out what to build they went back to their tech support, they
looked at the emails that were coming in and they understood what people
didn't want in their product and what people did want and what they were
frustrated with the previous version of Basecamp and that's how they did
it.

Now you're showing me that the reason that he was able to do that is
because you were tagging it, so you wouldn't just have a conversation with
support people and you'd ask them, what are your issues, he'd have real
numbers where he could say, look at how many people are tagging this
problem we need to address and look at how many people are tagging this
request. We need to consider it at least. All right. So I want to take a
look, actually can I show my screen now or do you want to say something
else?

Sarah: Sure.

Andrew: All right. This is my desk screen. I created an email, I don't know
how easy it is for people to see, but I'll narrate it and you can roughly
see what's going on here as I narrate. Can I zoom in? Yeah, I can zoom in a
bit. So, here's basically what we have, this is the subject, of course, I
sent a test message to myself. You can see my test message; this is where I
would respond down here. You can see in my history every email that I sent
in to this company; obviously I've sent a lot of emails to Mixergy that's
why there are 94. Basically, the part that we use of this and every other
help system that we ever had is this box right here and then we hit update
or update and resolve and that's it.

The only thing that we do differently and I'm going to show you this is
ridiculous, we sometimes add a note, like if I don't know the answer I
might add a note and then pass it on to someone else who can handle it and
then we sometimes use a little bit of macro, do we have anything secret in
here? No. Like how to cancel an account, we send it resolve and send a
compliment resolve and then send it but we don't do that much with macros.
So, this is basically the same interface that every one of these programs
has. What should we be doing to really use this well?

Sarah: So, this is what we get back to talking about how people are not
using the features that are built into these products, right? So, what you
should be doing, this is the funny thing, is the very first thing you
should do is look at your screen right now and look at what is taking up
the most space on your screen. It's not the reply box and it's not the note
box. It maybe because of how your screen is but I doubt it. It's actually
this huge section on the left that has subject, status, priority, group,
agent, description and labels.

Andrew: Yeah, I don't know why this was here. Why is this here? Oh, and by
the way, this you blew my mind about earlier to, I didn't know this. This
is not so much mind blowing but it's useful. There's now a direct link here
to this case so if I wanted to have a discussion with my team about it, you
said you use it around campfire, the program, you now have a link so you
can all say look, this is what people are saying.

Sarah: I mean, it's all developer who's all in the middle of promoting
something. Log into desk and go to spyglass and search Andrew for the
email. No, I mean send them, they all have this.

Andrew: You would just say here's the link, and that's it. OK.

Sarah: Right, so many people overlook this and desk is a terrible, terrible
job of telling people what these are and how to use the stuff. So if you
want, I'll show you exactly how to create a macro or I'll show you how to
use these labels. They're very easy to do. We can use the one that's
already in there.

Andrew: Let's use, so for macro, yeah, should we do macro, well you tell
me. Why don't we just start with just a label? Label is just add a label
here right? I would just start typing in junk, because that's what Andrew
just wrote about, right, and create new.

Sarah: Yeah, but let's pretend this is really someone asking you how to
cancel my account. I'm going to type in cancel account because that's what
this is.

Andrew: OK.

Sarah: This create new and there it is, it's done. So now the next time I
want to add, I get another email about canceling account, I'm going to open
this, I'm going scan it and as I scroll down to write the reply I'm going
to type in a label, cancel account. Now I recommend that most people start
automating this stuff using keyboard shortcuts. In desk their called
macros, in user voice their called canned replies. They all have a
different language around it because everyone's trying to diversify
theirselves or whatever but their all the same thing.

Andrew: But what it does is, a macro is a collection of actions and in this
case it would be type in a message to the user, add these labels and maybe
forward it to someone else. Those are the kinds of things you could do.

Sarah: Typically. A macro is going to give you an option to assign it to a
person to set some priority to add a quick reply if their one and to add a
label. So, labels are important because at the end of the month, when I'm
complaining about so many people canceling and account, I need to be able
to go into my analytics and click on the label that says cancel account and
see how many people actually asked that. And that's what going to then
start driving my development. Now this it was an idea that. I'm just going
to call him out; Jason did not come up with this idea. This idea was
actually David Hanson's idea.

Andrew: Which idea?

Sarah: To start labeling stuff and count them up and the end of the day
because we were in a place where we were using Gmail, we had just moved
over to starting to use Zen Desk and our support was around 100, 150 a day
and we couldn't get a handle on what was my intuition about what people
were asking and what people were really asking. And it was really mind
blowing to see that there actually weren't that many people complaining
about this thing and it's really weird to see what people are really
complaining and are really asking about. So it's very eye opening to be
using it the right way but I think it starts at a very base level. You want
to know at the end of the month or end of the week how many people are
writing me an email that their asking if the product does something or how
do I do this, how many people are asking about a billion related question,
refund, a credit, cancel my account, change my owner, those are very
important because money is involved.

Andrew: Owner, meaning I own the account on this web app, I wanted someone
else to have it.

Sarah: Usually it's a very difficult transition to do that and then feature
requests, we really want to keep an eye on how many people are actually
running this feature request because if that's outnumbering everything
else, then that tells your development team we've got some problems we need
to figure out here.

Essentially, I think at the end of the day if you're doing support right
the only questions that you're getting are about administrative or billing
related stuff, and some of those things they can't ever be avoided right?
That's what we use labels for. That's what the point of this is, is to have
analytics. If you pull up the desk analytics page you can kind of show
people what the result is. All of these help desks have these beautiful
reporting mechanisms.

Andrew: So here you can see what percentage of our emails responded to are
resolved, first contact, we can see how long it takes for us to resolve,
4.7 minutes. Time for first response, wow 27.1 hours, that is shocking
actually. All right. We can bring that down.

Sarah: That's what it is for tech level and typically that happens. That
stuff is really hard to figure out.

Andrew: You know what, I know why that is.

Sarah: It's because people probably respond outside of desk.

Andrew: We respond quickly or handle it quickly. The reason is I just added
something to this. Let me see if I can show you. Maybe I shouldn't do it if
I don't want to screw up my data. Yes, so one thing that I did, well I
don't want to reveal anyone's stuff, so what I do now is when someone signs
up for our newsletter I email them and say, thanks for joining.

By the way, if you hit reply and tell us what concern you're having, I want
to know what concerns you're having or what challenges you're having, let
us know. Then we use that to create courses like this. Now it's all sitting
there, it's open and it sits there and it's open forever because we don't
have to respond to all of them.

Sarah: Right.

Andrew: So I guess I should just auto mark it as handled, or what do I do
with that?

Sarah: I would create a macro. I really want to show you how to do these
macros online, because they're so easy to do and they save everything, but
you could really just create that label and close them out.

Andrew: And that would automatically happen, if something comes in with
this message close it out.

Sarah: Yeah.

Andrew: Let's just show this one more time and then we'll go to macro next.


Sarah: Scroll back up a little bit, because this is important. All those
numbers at the top in the percentages, unless you have a guarantee rate
with your customers, we get back to you in 2 hours or 10 hours or whatever,
this stuff does not really matter. We want to focus on what's coming in and
who is responsible for answering it, right?

This is very high level stuff when you have high volume and you want to
actually dig down deep, but if we go back down what we can really look at
is the number of cases each agent is answering and that's very important,
but then if we go back down, top labels and cases resolved, we're seeing
the breakdown.

Andrew: Top labels and cases resolved.

Sarah: Way down at the bottom.

Andrew: OK. So you can see we don't really use them. We have cancel
account. Oh right, because we have a macro that helps take care of people
who want to cancel their account. We have a label for me so that I can be
aware of things that have to come to me, but we don't really use them.

Sarah: Right. So if you use them and people were actually responding back
to you like, I want a course on small business finance, then you would
actually be able to look at this and say, top labels in cases resolved and
see that 100 people wanted to have a course in small business finance, well
that's a no-brainer, you should have one.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: So the thing is, is that what you want to be able to do is you don't
want an Excel spreadsheet, which we used to do with this, we would have an
Excel spreadsheet.

Andrew: And the Excel spreadsheet would be people just sitting and typing
in what their issues are?

Sarah: It would be me at the end of the day counting up the number of
people who wanted to cancel their account and then you would present it in
an Excel spreadsheet. You don't need to do that anymore, all you need is a
visual birds-eye view of what people are asking you about. These products,
Uservoice is amazing. Their analytics is crazy. Zendesk has set the gold
standard for analytics in my opinion.

They do all the work for you, so anyone in your company, your vice
president, your president, your owner, can log in and see what people are
asking, but the problem is you have to be doing the labeling yourself. If
you're not doing that, just like if you're not adding every question that a
person asks your help section, if you're not curating that, if you're not
adding new questions and new screen shots then all you're going to have is
a backlog in support and all you're going to have is a bunch of support in
your email box that you don't want to answer and you're never going to get
a handle on how to develop your product better for your customers.

Andrew: All right.

Sarah: So, just be patient. It takes some time and dedication and actually
so in doing this job, which is why I don't recommend that Founder's do
support.

Andrew: Ha ha. OK. Let's see if we can bring up the macro. OK. So what I've
got on my screen is basically the macros that the system comes with because
that's basically all we're using. Thanks for feedback and resolve, more
info impending. This is just the sample that I think they gave us. So
macro, let's see what the macro can do. I'm going to call this Sarah Hatter
[SP] and I'm going to add it.

Sarah: Now, Desk is a little bit technical about their jargon, they don't
have a great way of explaining what this stuff means, but we're going to
apply it.

Andrew: So here, let me zoom in.

Sarah: A little bit.

Andrew: OK. That's zoomed in too much.

Sarah: [??] macro and remember, this is not a rule. A rule automatically
assigns things. We can go over rules in a second, but a rule automatically
assigns things. A macro is something you have to do manually. So if you
scroll down, you're going to see we're going to name this something, we're
going to choose, do we set a description and the description is the larger
textbox we saw in the left side bar. But more importantly, we're going to
have set labels . . .

Andrew: Well, let me go through one at the time. Do we use folders at all
for anything?

Sarah: I don't use folders for anything.

Andrew: You don't. OK. So we can ignore that. Set description. Do we set a
description?

Sarah: No. Most people don't need to set a description for anything.

Andrew: OK. Set labels. You do want us to set a label?

Sarah: We're going to set a label, and we're going to create a new label
that says "Sarah," right. So let's say that macro is seeing how many times
Sarah is emailing me throughout the day.

Andrew: Gotcha, OK. Or how many times people mention Sarah. Let's ask the
audience to please email us about Sarah. Now every time we get an email
that includes Sarah's name. In fact let's do Sarah Hatter. Sarah Hatter.
All right, so now we've got a label for Sarah Hatter.

Sarah: Right. And so, we're going to scroll down to . . .

Andrew: Do you use append labels? No?

Sarah: So, the difference here is append labels is what you use when you've
already added labels onto something, but since we're starting from scratch,
we're using set labels, and that will actually set the labels.

Andrew: All right. I'm trying to zoom in properly, but every time I do I
think I screw the way Desk shows this, but I'll just keep narrating it. So,
append label is if you already have one. Set label is if you don't. Why
didn't they just say add label and make it work the same way?

Sarah: I'm telling you, they don't do a good job on this. This is why a lot
of these features fail.

Andrew: All right. Then set priority?

Sarah: Set priority if you use priority. This is another really clunky
feature in Desk that makes no sense and I've never used it in my entire
life, so I don't think it's worth doing.

Andrew: OK. But the idea there would be if you were getting so many emails
to the, say, head developer, then you'd want to alert that something super
urgent . . .

Sarah: That's not even how you would do it. That's like the worst way to
alert a developer on something. But there's another thing if you use
priority, if you're one of those people who sends emails with exclamation
points on it, you can use priority. Whatever.

Andrew: OK. Good. I like that you're telling me what to ignore. Your whole
life is in this. I can't possibly know it as much as you. So tell me what
not to pay attention to. So set status?

Sarah: So set status. This is something you do want to pay attention to
because if you want to follow up on Sarah Hatter emails like later on,
you're going to set them to pending. If you want to send a quick reply with
this macro, you're going to set it to resolve. Or just leave it blank,
because you can use the update and resolve button. So . . .

Andrew: Let's call it resolve, because this isn't an auto-, oh I see. This
is where we would manually have to do it. OK. Never mind.

Sarah: [??] do it. It will be very easy. Don't worry.

Andrew: OK.

Sarah: So anyway, then you would want to assign, don't worry about groups,
you would want to assign the user so it would be current user because that
means the person who's in the email right now . . .

Andrew: So whoever happens to be answering, but if we say, hey, anything to
do with this we want to assign automatically. Anything to do with Sarah
Hatter we want to assign to Andrew. We would just select Andrew Warner.

Sarah: Right. So then, what you want to do is add a quick reply which you
don't have to do. Again, these are all features, but I use macros primarily
for quick replies, and quick replies are anything from a full template that
you send back to someone to, sorry to hear you're having this trouble, or
thanks so much for the feedback, or thanks for writing to us about Sarah,
since that's what this email is about, right? So you want to add the quick
reply if you're going to use the quick reply. And I can't see what you're
typing.

Andrew: I was just saying that yes, her site is cosupport.us, not .com.
Apparently, that was too expensive.

Sarah: I own .com now.

Andrew: Oh you do? You own cosupport.com, too?

Sarah: I just haven't put the website on it.

Andrew: Oh, OK. All right, she's too lazy to put the website on.

Sarah: And it wasn't, it was like $5.

Andrew: That's pretty good. All right.

Sarah: Anyway, so go ahead and we're going to update this.

Andrew: OK. Nothing else. We don't want append article, send out by email
subject, permission, we don't want any of this stuff, we just want to
enable it.

Sarah: And we're going to say update.

Andrew: And then update. That's another thing. Why do I have to enable it?

Sarah: I don't know. Why do I create something I don't want to use?

Sarah: Right. Ugh!

Andrew: OK. So now, it's here, and you want us to test this out, right?

Sarah: Let's test it out. So, go back to an email that we can show people
and I'll show you.

Andrew: OK, I am hiding my screen here just in case there's an email from
anyone who doesn't want to be seen.

Sarah: [laughs] And, again, we want to stress that we are not showing [??]
because we are just advocates, we are showing [??] because he actually...

Andrew: Because I happen to use it.

Sarah: Because these features are redundant in every help desk we've
mentioned before. If you don't have one of these, if you want to use Gmail,
just use text expander, it does the same thing.

Andrew: Actually, for some reason I don't see it, let me see if I got it in
right. Let's just make sure. OK. I'll show you that...OK. So there, it's
here.

Sarah: OK. Scroll down to the bottom to make sure that it's all users.

Andrew: So, this is where I would go to answer an email, and it should be
find macro, but for some reason, it's not. So I don't know. Let me try
refreshing.

Sarah: You might actually, refresh doesn't work very well in Desk, you
might want to close the email out and start it over.

Andrew: Oh, OK. I think we got it here. So here it is, and there is my,
wait I opened the wrong email, you were right. Hang on. Refresh does not do
what it needs to do.

Sarah: I am telling you, I am like the Desk [??].

Andrew: Who knew?

Sarah: I know all the quirks about Desk. I tell people all the time,
refresh doesn't do shit in Desk.

Andrew: So here now, we've got it. There it is. The Sarah Hatter.

Sarah: And if you watch deluxe sidebar, when you apply this macro, the
steps will change. It didn't change much because we had kept it open and we
didn't change the agent, but they are in blue now, which indicates that
something has changed.

Andrew: OK. So now, status opened blue, this is agent blue, and we have the
labels and the messages here.

Sarah: And since you are going to reply to this person, you are going to
use update and resolve, which closes and sends. In Gmail, you would use
send and archive, which closes and sends. So, the thing is, people get very
scared about closing emails. When someone replies to you, it re-opens it,
it puts it back into your view. If that is not happening, you are doing it
wrong.

Andrew: Should I just be resolving every email, and if they respond back, I
can open it, right?

Sarah: No. When they resolve, when they send it back, it opens it again for
you. That's default.

Andrew: So the reason why I hit resolve is that there is a macro for it.
Command R.

Sarah: Yes, but it's not a macro, but yeah.

Andrew: OK. Yes, I keep word [??]. Control R action. Not Command R.

Sarah: And there is update resolve, just close, and just close, and just
close. I tell people that all the time, and they get so afraid of it. But,
when the person writes you back, it will reopen, it will be there for you.
Trust me.

Andrew: OK. So that's one feature. What you really want to pay attention to
is the macros, so you don't have to do everything manually all the time.
You want us to pay attention to labels so that we have clear data about
what is going on. And, anything else that we want to be especially paying
attention to?

Sarah: Well, the big thing about macros that we touched upon a little bit,
but it is very, very important part of the process, and you hate doing
support, but you have to do it all day long, is those quick replies are the
bread and butter when it comes to the support. It does not have to be a
full thing. I have a quick reply that is "help", and I have a quick reply
that is "thanks". So, "help" is when someone is writing me and they have an
issue, and it's literally like, "hi, (blank), sorry to hear you are having
this trouble. Let me get more details from you so I can help out more."
There is a blank section, and it says, "Let me know if you need anything
else, and we will go from there," and my name. So, that saved me 200
characters that I don't have to type each time. All I have to do is fill in
the blank, right? I mean, you have to have an eagle eye on this stuff and
make sure you are not sending this out to the same person in like five
minutes, right? But if you list these tools the right way, it opens up this
whole process of support, and makes it so much easier, it takes less time.
Everything is organized rather than, I am up in the middle of the night
because I am getting 20 emails. And that's pretty much what is happening
right now.

The reason why people are coming to support is because of stuff. We give
them these little tips and tricks and it changes the world for them. Who
wants to just sit at an email box and write support all day? I don't want
to write support all day. No one wants to write support all day. But
everyone wants to be a part of the development process. And when I am
keeping track of bugs, and feature requests, and what people are asking me,
and I am having a great help section and watching how people are voting up
or voting down answers, and when I am doing analytics on labels and I can
take that to my product manager, I am a part of the process, and it makes
me very invested in the product you are selling me. It makes me feel better
about doing the support for it. So, it's not just about changing your
attitude, it's about changing the way you work.

Andrew: I didn't know all of this stuff existed in here.

Sarah: [laughs]

Andrew: All right. Now I can understand, too, how we can have even use
desk.com back or user voice which I really love, zen desk I don't know as
well, but I know it's very popular. Even Gmail. We could have done this so
much better, and we could have used these programs when we were just
getting started. Of all of this, especially with everything that you just
said around these programs that are going to help us do support. There so
much that, I always say at the end, there's so much that sometimes it's
overwhelming. If you were going to suggest that we do one thing, what would
it be? One thing to just get started.

Sarah: I think that's probably what it is.

Andrew: What was it?

Sarah: Writing a better help section? [laughs]

Andrew: OK. Start by writing a better help section.

Sarah: Absolutely. Start by writing a better help section. Especially if
you're sick of people asking you questions. Well give them the answers for
god's sakes. I think I say that a lot to people because they come to me
with the same complaints and I'm like, the answer is obvious. You don't
want to answer emails. Put it on the internet. Put it on the webernet so
people can search for it and can get the answer and they'll stop bothering
you.

Andrew: Let me ask you this then, if anyone else has a questions for some
reason we didn't get to, what's a good way for them to follow up.

Sarah: Um, send me an email, sh@cosupport.us.

Andrew: sh@cosupport.us.

Sarah: Yeah. Or info@cosupport.us. Either one. Go to our website. I'm @sh
on twitter. We're cosupport on twitter. We're responsive. I love how people
I'm [??] like this is my passion, so I'm always wanting to really help
people and whatever. I'd much rather people contact me personally. Contact
me on twitter. I'm not on LinkedIn, that's for sure.

Andrew: These are your prices, by the way. You charge just for auditing. I
usually don't bring up anyone's prices. It's gauche that I just did this.
Screw it. You charge $3000 for auditing.

Sarah: This is our old website, FYI. We're launching new website that's
probably gonna be up by the time this airs.

Andrew: That's how I actually, um, that's how I found you. You're partnered
with someone who is so good that they said they talked you up, and that's
how I found you. I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to say about that
and what I'm not. I won't say anymore. Let me ask you this: what are you
prices?

Sarah: You know, it really depends on the scope of work. So if someone
needs a quick and dirty turnaround help section, up tomorrow kind of thing,
then we need to obviously charge for them expedited rate, like Fed-Ex
would, right? But we tend to look at what are your needs. Do you need 20
frequently asked questions or do you need 100. Do you need screen casts.
And so it varies. So for help section stuff, it's going to start around
3000. It's going to go up to maybe 6 or 7. Auditing we never really got
into, but auditing is the process of me telling you what you're doing
wrong. Auditing is a way for us to set up your support process for you and
train you on doing this stuff. And so that depends on what the size of your
team is and what you're going to use, so prices are hard these days,
because people come to us all the time, and they you do our outsource
support. We only get 50 emails a day. And I'm like, oh that's, gasp, 50
email is simple. That's three grand a month. No big deal. And they get 250
a day and I'm like that's three times what I can do for you for that
amount. You know?

Andrew: I see. But you don't just do that, you would set them up with the
help center so that your user questions are answered before they ask them,
and you help them set up a policy for labeling and all that. And of course
if they want all this help stuff answered, that you'll do for them.

Sarah: . . . that you can just get someone to answer your emails for a lot
cheaper. And that's fine. But we do something that's a little bit more
refined and sort of high level for people who are very serious about
support.

Andrew: These guys better hire you right now. These Turbo Scam people.

Sarah: I with Turbo Scam would hire me. I've been talking about Turbo Scam
for six months. I've been [??] like doing conferences, and I bring up Turbo
Scam. I can't get a hold of them.

Andrew: You know what, I was going to say I actually interviewed them on
Mixergy, but apparently they're hard to get a hold of. But I'll see what I
can do. We've got big team here, people who can do research. All right, so
there it is. A lot of big ideas in here, but you've got the suggestions for
where you can start. I know I got a few suggestions for where I can start
and we're going to get on it with our team. And I look forward to hearing
from all you guys. You can see that this is an issue that we care about
here in Mixergy and I want to get better at, so if you want to share your
feedback with me, let me know what's working for you and what hasn't,
either mixergy.com/contact and contact us and hopefully you'll see it
improve the way we respond to emails. Or just send a comment on this
section here. Let's start a conversation on what we can do better. And
Sarah Hatter, thank you so much for coming here. You will always be
memorialized with that macro now on this site.

Sarah: No!

Andrew: Thank you for being a part of it.

Sarah: Thanks.