You’re reading Signal v. Noise, a publication about the web by Basecamp since 1999. Happy !
Jason’s latest Inc. Magazine column: “People don’t judge you on the basis of your mistakes — they judge you on the manner in which you own up to them. In my experience, most companies do a terrible job of taking blame. They lob press releases. Or they apologize for the inconvenience. Resist that temptation and say you’re sorry like you’re apologizing to a friend. Be good — and your customers will be good right back to you.” Jason’s other columns at Inc.
We’re looking for two more people to join our customer service team. This time we’re looking for people who live in the Chicagoland area.
You’ll provide “it was so good they couldn’t stop talking about it” customer service via email for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire. You’ll also be responsible for chiming in on 37signals Answers, updating and improving the articles in our help section, writing tutorials and how-tos. We’ll also be exploring phone support and in-person training shortly, so that should be something you’d like to do as well.
You’ll be expected to answer about 75 emails per day once you’re fully up to speed (2-3 months on-ramp). This is a significant volume, so be sure that you’re ready and able to deal with that kind of challenge.
We’re looking for someone who loves to help others, someone who can keep smiling even when dealing with tough customers (empathy is important), and someone who has a passion for our products and company. You should enjoy the process of making an anxious customer a happy customer.
In addition, you have to be an excellent writer who enjoys writing. Our customers love when we get back to them within 10 minutes with a clear, concise, and friendly answer. Great writing is key.
Please submit a cover letter explaining:
Also, attach the following writing samples:
We offer health-care coverage, a 401K with a generous match, a Flexible Spending Account, plus a progressive work environment. Starting salary is $45,000 with a review in a year. You must live in the Chicagoland area.
Email everything to [email protected]. Include “Customer Support” in the subject line. If you’re attaching a resume, please send it as a PDF. Note: We look favorably on people who get creative with their applications.
We look forward to hearing from you.
[Sitting next to Craig Newmark while waiting for a delayed flight.] I’d heard Craig say in interviews that he was basically just “head of customer service” for Craigslist but I always thought that was a throwaway self-deprecating joke…But sitting next to him, I got a whole new appreciation for what he does. He was going through emails in his inbox, then responding to questions in the craigslist forums, and hopping onto his cellphone about once every ten minutes. Calls were quick and to the point “Hi, this is Craig Newmark from craigslist.org. We are having problems with a customer of your ISP and would like to discuss how we can remedy their bad behavior in our real estate forums”. He was literally chasing down forum spammers one by one, sometimes taking five minutes per problem, sometimes it seemed to take half an hour to get spammers dealt with. He was totally engrossed in his work, looking up IP addresses, answering questions best he could, and doing the kind of thankless work I’d never seen anyone else do with so much enthusiasm.
Thank you for your recent e-mail inquiry to Qwest. I apologize for the delay in responding to your e-mail. I apologize for your frustration but you must call 1-866-283-0043 for assistance with your VoIP service.
Late Monday afternoon David, Kiran, and I were discussing how we could begin to measure how our customers felt about our customer service. We’re already measuring things like response time, average tickets per day per person, average tickets in a thread, etc. Those stats are helpful for measuring internal efficiency and speed, but they don’t measure quality from a customer’s perspective.
We talked about it for a bit and came up with this basic goal: Let’s make it really easy for our customers to quickly rate our customer service every time we talk to them. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not a breakthrough idea, but it wasn’t something we were doing. It was time we experimented with the concept. We’d write some software and try it out. We’d call the app Smiley.
The whole feedback process had to be easy, it had to be fast, and it couldn’t be a burden on our customers. We didn’t want to put people in front of some long-winded complicated survey — no one likes filling those out. We just wanted to ask them one quick question and that was it. The whole thing should take about five seconds and it should be entirely optional. We’d start there and see how it went.
We decided we would add a short link to each support person’s email signature. The link would encode the support person’s ID along with the ticket number for the support request. When someone clicked the link they’d go to our site where they’d be asked to answer one question about the customer service experience they just had. That’s all.
The next morning I went off and started designing some screens. After a few minutes I had the basic structure. There were five screens total: Three customer facing (and two of those were optional), two internally facing.
About an hour or so later I had the customer facing screens done. We went back and forth on a few iterations, and experimented with two options (“great” and “not great”) vs. three options (“great”, “fine”, and “not very good” – we picked this version), but overall the design was settled in about an hour. Originally I used some stock photo smiley faces for the mockup, but I asked Jamie to design some custom smileys for the design (you’ll see these below).
The screen the customer sees after clicking a link in the email signature.
The optional screen a customer sees if they answer the first question.
Next David took the UI and began writing the Rails back-end to make it all work. While David was working on this, I started working on the internal facing admin screens. I spent a few hours messing around with some ideas, but eventually settled on the simplest version:
Continued…
Call Apple to have a FaceTime chat and learn a few things about your new iPhone 4. Great idea.
We’re looking for a new person to join our support team (internally known as Team Omega), and we thought we’d let you in on what it’s like doing support for 37signals. It’s not like working behind the customer service counter at Wal-Mart. It’s not like answering calls in a phone bank, or automating responses like an email robot. It’s undoubtedly the best job I’ve ever had, and I hope it’s the last job I have.
I’ve been doing support for 37signals for almost 4 years. I didn’t want to at first; in fact when I was interviewed and eventually hired I was explicit: I will not do customer service. This left me doing back office sort of admin things and keeping myself busy, until one day I had to help Jason out on emails. Then daily I kept taking on more and more until one day I said to Jason, “Stop taking all the customer emails from me!”
They let me take over support full time, and I can’t tell you how surprising it is that I love this job. I love it so much that I’m passionate about it, I fight for it, I push back against very heavy opinions to protect it and improve how we help our customers. So what in the world made me go from never wanting to answer customer support emails to answering sometimes 200 a day by myself? Well, pretty simply, our customers are awesome!
Our customers love our products. They are loyal and fierce about them. They write us for help making sure everything works because they can’t imagine working without Basecamp or Highrise or Backpack. They want new features because they want to do more with our products. They’re funny, they are so kind and patient, they’re opinionated and friendly. 200+ emails a day of that sort? Bring it on.
We take support seriously as a way to educate and help. We use bad experiences our customers have to improve our products and processes, and turn that experience into a positive one. Our support team is a vital connection to our customers other teams don’t have, and we use that link to determine how to make our products better. We let people vent, and we understand their frustration. We stop and think to ourselves, “How can I make this person’s experience better?” Then whatever that is, we do it.
Support at 37signals was not good 5 years ago. It wasn’t and we know it. It took years of us recovering from stumbles in the beginning to be the support team we are today: Enthusiastic, fast, agile, happy to be here and eager to help. Not all of us come from customer service backgrounds, and we don’t think it’s required to do this job well.
What’s required is a will to make people’s day better, to teach them how do to things, to surprise them with speed and accuracy and become leaders in the support industry. And if you think that sounds awesome, why not come join us?
We think you’ll like it here. Plus, there’s often cookies.
Transcript posted for latest episode (#15). Features Kiran Max Weber and Sarah Hatter discussing support.
Time: 23:14 | 05/25/2010 | Download MP3
Summary
Kiran Max Weber and Sarah Hatter, two members of 37signals support team, discuss what it’s like helping out customers, the pros and cons of email-based support, and more.
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“Learn your way around a Mac” = friendlier language than the typical “Take a tour…” (seen here).
Interesting to see that, at the end of the Macbook features page, Apple devotes a large block to pimping its support efforts (“Your own team of experts.”).
The Energy Saver icon in System Prefs goes green. [via Treehugger]
