The best service can be no service at all

Mary pointed her finger at me accusingly:

"We thought you were sending us the worst of the worst! We spent hours trying to work out what was wrong with them!"

It was March in Austin, SXSW time, and I'd just queued up for a party sponsored by a web app whose name I no longer remember. The line had been long, and for the first half of the wait I'd thought I was in line for some sidewalk bacon cooked by the Freshbooks team. The bacon, it turned out, was for a different line and this was a great disappointment to me.

Still, I was inside and weaving around the various tables of stickers and hats on my way to the bar when I met some representatives of another company in our space. We chatted about our roles, had the obligatory discussion about how long the flight from Australia is, and then I mentioned to them how many customers I'd sent their way over the last few years.

They were amazed; they'd noticed people being referred from Campaign Monitor and they could not work out why we were doing it. Their assumption was that we were kicking off the problematic customers and sending them over to the competition to cause some chaos.

They'd investigated and not been able to find any obvious problems, so when we met they were very keen to know our devious secret. The truth was not at all exciting but as I explained it to them I realised that our customer service team were doing things many of our competitors would never do.

It's not you, it's me

Campaign Monitor is opinionated software. We leave out some things that we're told are obviously essential and includes features that people never asked for directly. It's opinionated because we believe that making those sorts of decisions carefully can lead to a much better product.

That is: a much better product for some people, not for all people. Every one of those opinionated decisions moves Campaign Monitor away from the centre of the market out towards a subset of customers. For the right customers, Campaign Monitor isn't just acceptable, it really fits in a way that some broader products can't.

When we talk to potential customers we ask questions and work to get a deeper understanding of what they are trying to achieve, so we can make a reasonable judgement as to how (and if) Campaign Monitor can help. In most cases, we then move on to explaining how to do what they need to do using Campaign Monitor.

Sometimes though it becomes clear that Campaign Monitor just is not the right choice for this person. It could be the big, obvious reasons. A customer looking for a particular feature we don't have, or with email addresses we would not allow sending to. But sometimes it's not so cut and dry. There's the customer who needs to integrate in a particular way, or who might be trying to make our product do something it really isn't designed for.

Those are the people that we talk with, make sure we understand and then will often refer to other products or services that are a better fit.

Serving is not selling

Those are people who we think will be better off if they use a different service. Better because they'll get their task completed more easily, and also by avoiding a limited or frustrating experience with Campaign Monitor.

To us it wasn't a big deal. It was about treating each potential customer like we'd prefer to be treated. Rather than forcing our product into contortions to achieve a sort-of success, we'd rather be honest and help that person get the result they really wanted. That's the best way to show them you respect them not just as a potential income source but as a person.

Mary and her colleagues were not convinced. It was clearly a little confusing to them because it means possibly losing that customer forever. She is right too, there have been potential customers we have recommended go elsewhere who never came back.

At the very least we've left them with the impression that we're an honest company who will do right by people. If they need a different service down the road, or they know someone who is looking, then hopefully they'll remember us then.

Still, saying no (even in the nicest way for the best reasons) to a person who wants to pay you money is not something to take lightly.

Doing it right

Sending possible customers to another service isn't something you could do safely without the right structures in place. Here's what allows it to work for my team:

Trust from the management team—if the customer service team aren't absolutely confident they have my backing and that of our directors they won't want to take the risk of sending someone to another company. Instead, they'll try hard to hold onto them, even when it might mean prolonging a bad experience for the customer.
Listening & understanding—we cannot make a good faith recommendation to a customer unless we really understand what they are trying to do. That means asking the right questions and going beyond the 'what' to understand the 'why'. Otherwise the risk of sending away the wrong customers is too high.
Honesty—our company needs to value honesty. If my friend asked me "should I use your product" and I knew it would not work well for them, I wouldn't trick them into paying for it. If integrity and honest are values our company holds, then they should apply to customers as well as friends.
A broad knowledge of the service, and the wider marketplace—If my frontline staff don't have a full understanding of what our service can and can't do, and what else is available in the market, then they won't be able to make a great recommendation.
Insight into future plans—I need my team to know where our product is heading, areas that will be improved and extended and areas that are not going to change. If they are in the dark, they won't be able to make a good judgement on which customers will really be better off elsewhere.
Tracking feedback and following up—the customer service team need to have simple ways of recording what people are asking for, so that feeds back into the product development over time. If our market demands a certain feature, we need to know about it. At Campaign Monitor when we add a feature we'll go back to people we'd talked to about it before to let them know it's now available. Very often they will come back and try it out.

We are not perfect at all of this, by any measure, but over the years we've built a culture that values this level of honest engagement and respect with our potential customers. Our team can feel like they are doing right by the customer and not pressured into pushing a service that isn't the best fit. That makes it so much nicer to work here.

In recent times as our service has grown there are less times we can't meet the needs of customers, but the option remains a valuable one.

Great customer service is truly more focused on personal service and less on the custom. That person you give great, honest advice to today and send elsewhere is a much better long term prospect than the customer who isn't a good match and struggles along for a month or two before giving up.

Have you ever sent potential customers away, and would your management support you if you did?