Customer Support: cost center or a super-power?
When we started the support team at Hiver, we assumed 2 things:
- It is our responsibility to offer world class support to every single user.
- Outstanding technical support is a fundamental right of all our users.
When looking at support we wanted to make sure we offer two channels. One almost instantaneous and the other for people that want to run things at their own pace. We chose chat and email as our default support channels.
3 years later, we offer world class support to all our customers, irrespective of what pricing plan they are on. We never bothered to look around and see what our competition was up to. My curiosity was piqued when prospects started leaving our competition and coming to us just because they were unhappy with the level of support they had received from our competition. And I am not talking about customers that were paying the competition pocket change. I am talking about customers that were paying in the thousands of dollars a year but were still told to upgrade to the next plan to receive something as fundamental as chat support. Forget speaking to a support agent on the phone or via a remote session.
Discussions with my head of support Shankar confirmed what I always suspected. Most organizations see technical support as a cost to the company. Something that adds no value to their operations and is simply an overhead. But that led me to another discovery. At Hiver, our customers and even future prospects saw our support team as something that was a value add. I got confirmation when I spoke to my new business team. The team has leveraged the support we offered when closing deals. To quote a team member from the new business team “there have been deals that would not have closed without the support team”
Intrigued, I decided to dig a little deeper as to why organizations are labelling support as a cost center. Here is what I uncovered.
The way most organizations offer support is lousy
Let me give you an example. You just subscribed to a new product. You are the typical buyer. You don’t want to go all in with a product. So you do the trial, decide to subscribe at a lower level and then decide to start using the product. Day 2 into the subscription, you come across a problem that you cannot figure out on your own.
You decide to send support an email. Stop there. Before you go any further. Why are you sending an email? You feel you want to speed this up. Start a chat. You realize that chat support is only offered to the high paying customers. Phone support? Not a chance in your current plan. Even if you do get phone support the wait time is plain ridiculous.
Don’t take my word for it. Here is a recent post in the Washington Post that highlights the frustration of waiting on the phone. Yes the COVID situation has not helped. Waiting on the phone to get technical support is so much a part of our lives, Google launched a feature that keeps your phone on hold while you wait.
So back to you and your first support experience after paying for a service/product. You figure out that your best option is to send in an email. You send in the email and receive an instant response. Impressive? Not really! It is an autoresponder that tells you that you should get an answer shortly.
A few hours later (only the top plan you have supports a 1 hour response SLA), you get a reply that gives you a series of steps. You try them out, that does not fix your problem. You send a reply……. you get the picture.
Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with email support. Some people prefer to find answers at their own pace and email works perfectly for that. Not to mention, the amount of information you can share on email is vast. But you have to do email support right. Delayed responses, being told to upgrade to a higher plan on every other post is not it!
Which leads me to the second issue I uncovered:
Support is treated as a privilege
I would love to sit here and share a detailed analysis of what I discovered about the industry that Hiver is in and what our competition is doing. But the purpose of this blog post is not to bash the competition around. Not at all. It is to bring to light a fundamental error in the way most organizations have offered support to their customers and prospects. Want faster support? Pay more money. Want to speak to a liver person on the phone? Pay more money. Want me to show you how this is done.. You get the drift.
As a paying customer, I am comfortable paying for a higher plan that has more features and is a better fit for me. What I am not comfortable paying for is better/faster support. There has to be a minimum level of acceptable support that all customers receive. If this bare minimum is not fast, efficient and not designed to ask for more money, then it sucks.
Let me take an example, Netflix asking me for more money to stream on more devices and in 4K is understandable. But why the heck would I pay more to receive support for a query faster than any other customer?
There is a flip side to the coin though. If I asked Netflix to remote login to my device and configure it so that I saw a specific set of content only, that is white glove service that not every customer asks for. That is not your everyday ‘support’ query. I should be and will be comfortable paying more for that.
This is where most organizations have got it wrong. They have equated support to man hours and decided that anything that demands more man hours is a privilege and hence should be reserved for a select few customers (no marks for guessing what these select few have in common).
Even at Hiver we have reserved call back support for our top plan but with good reason. We offer an equally effective and time saving level of support at no extra cost: chat.
Here is why our philosophy of doing support makes it a super-power.
Technical support is a fundamental right of all users ( We treat all our customer equally)
We discovered very quickly that people who found a problem big enough would be willing to resolve it quickly. Chat was the obvious choice for such customers/prospects. From a support point of view, we could handle multiple chats at the same time which meant a lean team could manage a larger volume. We could share information like images, links and even meeting invites much faster.
We could also transition from chat support to email if we needed to at the click of a button. Let’s be honest, sometimes it takes a developer to fix problems.
We later discovered that a lot of our non-English speaking customers were able to use Google translate to chat with us. This was an added kicker in favor of chat.
So no matter what plan you are on with Hiver, chat and email support are available to you. Unless you are looking for a particular feature that you are not paying for, our support team will never tell you “please upgrade to speak to us further.”
Inc. magazine predicted that email was dead way back in 2018. It’s 2020 and email is still indispensable as a medium for communication. As an organization that builds a service that helps better manage emails, we know a thing or two about email. Hence, we had to nail email based support.
Now that you know why we chose email and chat as our preferred channels of support.
I want to move on to something equally important:
3 years later, we offer world class support to all our customers. Irrespective of what pricing plan they are on.
We wanted to fix what we found wrong with the world of technical support today. To our surprise it was not that difficult. We went with a very aggressive yet sustainable solution. Here is the state of our support team. We have build a support team
That is available 24 hours a day
Being a B2B solution we are allowed to offer technical support 24x5. However, we soon discovered that our solution is used by customers that are not just Monday to Friday. So as I am writing this blog post down we are in the process of considering moving to 24x7 support. Our technical support is only useful if we are available when our customers need us.
That does not make users wait unreasonably
We don’t have a chat queue system at Hiver. Don’t believe me? Try chatting with a technical support agent at Hiver. You will get through straight away and will receive a response fairly quickly. I know what you are thinking: ‘fairly quickly’. You are right, this is a no bullshit post.
Here is the median first response time from our chat tool over the last 90 days. I am slotting in a screenshot to avoid any mistake on my part.
The same holds true for our first response times. Here is a screenshot of our first response time when anyone emails into our support team with a valid query (no we don’t respond to spam emails). Importantly, at Hiver we don’t have a culture of sending out an email that says “Give us some more time please.” So that first response is a genuine attempt to solve your query.
That benchmarks improvement on meaningful metrics
We also typically look at support bench measures that industry follows like Average Queue time, Average response time, Average Resolution time, etc.
Our approach to driving improvement for the above customer critical metrics are different.
For example, we have set an internal target for “Resolution Time”. Rather than looking at average resolution time which is a skewed data, we measure % of customers’ issues resolved with the Resolution Time target set.
If 100 customers contact support, 92 customer issues are solved within the targets set. So we say 92% of our customers go through the experience without much deviation. We still have scope to improve the quality of service for 8% of our customers.
Our support team operating engine runs with the mission of “ Don’t waste customer’s time”. Needless to say our company wide OKRs are also along the same lines.
That takes all feedback seriously
Every time our customer rates us poorly on a support interaction, Shankar closes the loop with them asking them for feedback. I know this can be time consuming and tedious but unless they have misclicked, we make every effort to find out why their experience was not up to the mark.
But we are not saints at Hiver either, we are extremely objective and if we feel that our customers/prospects are treating us unfairly we let them know. The days of “the customer is always right” are gone.
Why have I bothered to share the methodology with everyone? Every single organization claims they offer ‘world class’ support. We feel our method and results have earned us the right to call ourselves world class.
Here is a small snippet of what our customers have said about our support team.
Check out our G2Crowd to hear what our customers are saying about us too. No surprise we were also named leaders in G2’s fall review and our support team is the highest rated among our competition.
To Conclude
So my submission to everyone reading this: support teams are not a cost center. The way they are run and envisioned are making them a cost center. Change the way you treat customer support and your support team will be your super-power. A super-power that can be leveraged when selling, growing your existing customer base and keeping your existing customers happy. How does my customer success and sales team feel when asked about support? They get it! Half of them were in a support role at one point of their lives! Which includes me.
