Automating Customer Service At A Startup
Customer service can make or break a company; it has been one of the key differentiators as a new generation of startups seeks to compete against incumbents. While people remember examples of awesome customer service, the opposite is also true.
At GoCardless, we decided early on that we wanted customers to have a fantastic experience with the service, so that they’d hopefully tell their friends about it. Unfortunately, being a 5-person startup, we don’t have the luxury of a massive customer support team. What we do have, however, is access to a bunch of great tools that make running a startup much, much easier. These tools, combined with some really smart developers and the instinct to Automate Everything, results in a pretty great customer experience.
I wanted to spend a little time going through those tools, and demonstrating how they can be combined with a sprinkling of API magic powder to produce something vastly greater than the sum of their parts.
With these super-charged tools, we find one full-time person can generally run customer support on their own, leaving the other 4 to work on the product. We’ve also consciously made the decision that everyone should do some customer support - even engineers. It really helps people stay in touch with what our customers are saying, and lets us react quickly as a team to common problems that emerge.
I should note that we can’t claim credit for this idea - it was stolen wholesale from a great talk the Wufoo guys gave at a Y Combinator dinner.
Campfire
$12/month for basic version. As a relatively technical company, our Campfire rooms form the central communications hub for our company. It’s basically like hosted IRC with a few bells & whistles like file uploads & code snippet support. You can choose to make rooms public or private, and generate direct links that will enable customers to chat with you directly through their browser. We do most of our technical customer support through these rooms. And as a small community has built up, we find other developers helping with each others’ problems. Awesome!
A lot of other services have hooks that will send campfire messages into specified rooms via the API on certain events. For example, Github has a hook that sends new issues & commit messages into our private developer room. There are a few more custom-built ones that I’ll get onto later!
If you’re using ruby, I’d recommend checking out the Tinder gem, which provides a convenient wrapper to the REST API.
I can also highly recommend hubot, a Campfire bot written in Node by the Github team. It’s very simple to write extensions to perform simple actions like trigger server deployments.
Zendesk
$24/month per agent for standard version. While pretty expensive, Zendesk offers a variety of free trials, particularly for startups. It helps companies run email-based customer service desks, turning inbound emails into “tickets” that can be responded to or re-assigned across available agents.
It was the first customer service product we decided to use properly, and now forms the core of all of our written communication with customers - particularly email & twitter. It’s simple to add “tags” to tickets automatically or manually, so we can count the number of requests for “Repeat Billing” vs “European Rollout” at the end of every month. You can also get a bunch of metrics like response times & satisfaction rates, but at the moment we’re just focussing on keeping our heads above water!
We considered using the in-built Campfire integration to alert our Campfire room of new tickets, but quickly realised this would be more annoying than useful as we approached 30-40 new tickets per day.
Olark
$15/month for 1 operator. Discounts for startups. This provides live text chat on our website - the little “Chat Now” box you see in the bottom-right of your screen at gocardless.com. I was initially really skeptical of Olark’s value, but after using it for a month, I’m a convert. You can see where a user has come from and stay with them as they navigate through your site (including notification of which page they’re currently viewing), which makes it super easy to solve problems step-by-step.
With built-in Zendesk API integration, you can also save conversation transcripts in Zendesk as solved tickets and add “tags” to them - which makes running aggregated metrics really simple. It’s as simple as typing “!tag International” in the chat window. If you want to drill down even deeper, you can run metrics by page - eg 70% of queries from people viewing page X were about “Pricing”, whereas most people on page Y were looking for more information about “International Support”.
We generally use Adium or a GChat plugin to access Olark.
Phone Support
The one weak link was our phone support - we previously used a Skype number that forwarded to mobile phones. Unfortunately, we had a number of problems with the solution - call quality was really low, sometimes calls didn’t forward or just randomly dropped, and collecting voicemail was a nightmare. I’d looked at the Zendesk voice features, but they were only available in the US & Canada.
Then, a couple of months ago, some guys from Twilio moved into an office nearby. I’d been wanting to try out their service for a while, so we decided to hack together a simple customer service phone app. A few hours later, we had a pretty decent phone system with voicemail.
What’s more, we’ve built-in a tool to check who’s available in our private Campfire room to take the call. If someone doesn’t pick up, it will try one of our other agents idling in Campfire. It also talks to our Zendesk ticketing system, notifying us if someone leaves an mp3 voicemail, so that someone always follows up. Sweet!
One small gripe is that voice-to-text transcription is terrible, to the point of being unusable. Maybe it’s my English accent, but I couldn’t get above a 50% accuracy rate. So we turned it off and stuck with voice recordings.
A landline number costs almost nothing, but the call forwarding to our agents’ (right now, me & my co-founders!) mobiles comes in at $0.14/min, which isn’t cheap.
I’ve posted the technical implementation details here
Conclusion
The key for us is that consumers can contact us however they like - phone, twitter, email or live chat - and we can respond quickly using tools that we’re familiar with.
Metrics are also really important - we want to be able to track the number of queries by channel and easily categorise them by subject matter. This allows us to fine-tune our landing pages to address frequently asked questions more directly and also prioritise new product development according to customer need. But it’s vital that this we can do this tagging either automagically or at least in-line with whatever we’re doing. The “!tag International Expansion” in Olark is a good example of this. As soon as you need to open a separate list of “Feature Requests” and add a +1 to a tally chart, people stop using it.
The two weak points in this regard are Campfire and the Twilio voice app. For Campfire, we could do a text search on a month’s logs, or write a simple hubot extension (“!tag International”). With Twilio, I’ve still not come up with a good solution. Suggestions welcome!
If you want to work at a startup that hacks Twilio & Campfire apps together during the week, check out our jobs page!