This article is a modified version of one I wrote for my team at Campaign Monitor. I'm sharing it here because I think it has broader applicability.

My two sons, with their barely-making-a-venn-diagram sets of food allergies, visit a paediatric allergist regularly. The receptionist there is pretty grumpy at the best of times, and occasionally outride rude.

But we keep going back there, because the doctor we see provides the best care and treatment for my boys. It'd be nice if the receptionist was friendlier, but until there's another doctor with the same skills, we're not switching just to feel happier while we sit in the waiting room.

What is the goal of customer service?

The point of our job as customer service agents is not to make customers happy. It's not to keep them from finding out about the competition. It's not to solve their technical problems, up-sell them on a higher plan or even to get them to refer more clients.

Those can all be good things, and important things, but they should not be the essential goal of a customer service team.

We're here to help them grow their business as our first goal. Or to use Kathy Sierra's phrase, to kick ass. Or arse, depending on where you live.

Helping them kick ass is helping them to reach whatever goal they are trying to achieve. That goal is almost certainly not "get really good at using Campaign Monitor" or even "send really beautiful emails". It's also probably not "be happy". It's more likely to be "sell more of my consulting time at a higher rate" or "double my business growth this year."

And that means we should be thinking about our job differently. We should seek to to understand what they are trying to do, and help them get it done.

Adopting "Help every customer kick ass" as our core goal means:

• We have an obligation not to just answer questions, but to ask questions, and to listen to the answers.
• When we do give answers they should be written in the context of the customer's goals.
• We should be looking for opportunities to build relationships with our customers that help us understand them better.
• We will work at reducing the roadblocks of process and policy for our customers, but not at reducing the communication with them.

Here's one example. If we're focused on helping a customer kick ass, we're more willing to have the tough discussion about their borderline email list gathering practices, because we know that doing it the wrong way will create problems for them, as well as for us.

That conversation probably won't make them "happy", but if we do it right we can make them more successful. And that's the path to customer retention for us.

The key question in every conversation should not be "how can I make this person happy?", it should be "how can I help this person kick more ass". If we can do that, and also make them happy...well that's a double rainbow situation.

Useful links:

• https://hbr.org/2010/07/stop-trying-to-delight-your-customers — "Let’s return to the key implication of our research: When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily."
• http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/surprising-customer-service-data — yes, being friendly and fast still matters!

Nobody can make "sorry" sound less genuine than a three-year-old can. Eyes down, body turned away, fists clenched and a foot that could clearly stomp at any moment. Every parent has seen it. Eventually they manage to force out a sound which could be "sorry" or could be just a well-timed burp, but by that point it's not worth dragging it out any further.

As the head of a customer service team, when things go badly wrong they often end up in my inbox. Service interruptions, billing bugs, misread emails, accidental deletions and often just mutual misunderstanding. I've called myself a professional apologiser more than once (though my dislike for quirky job titles is thoroughly documented).

Saying sorry is hard, and apologising to a customer in an effective way can be even trickier. You'll often need to balance the apology with the need to hold firm to certain decisions, or to turn down requests you can’t fulfill.

Why should you apologise?

Some companies don't allow their team members to say sorry because they fear legal consequences of "admitting fault". That sort of attitude is infuriating to a customer who really just wants to hear someone admit their part in a problem.

I recall a study that investigated the rates of legal action taken against medical doctors by upset patients and relatives. The study found that the biggest factor in reducing legal action was encouraging the doctors to candidly admit to their patients when they had made a mistake. A separate study found “people are more than twice as likely to forgive a company that says sorry than one that instead offers them cash”.

Acknowledgement of fault is a powerful thing; it tells the customer "you are right, I see your perspective and I understand it.” It recognises a shared reality with the customer and is the opposite of the defensiveness and denial approach we can often be drawn into.

A genuine apology is a mark of respect and a sign of humanity, two values that are in short supply during most commercial transactions. Pragmatically, an effective apology costs a lot less than a court case or even a refund or discount.

I say an “effective apology" because not every apology does the job. Earlier on in my customer service career I sent a lot of pretty ineffectual apology emails out that said sorry but didn't show sorry.

That, I think, is the root of the correlation between the amount of apologetic language and the decline in customer satisfaction noted in Zendesk's recent customer service report. Using phrases like "sorry for the inconvenience" in isolation makes them pointless at best and more often outright irritating.

How to write an effective customer service apology

I'm talking here about written apologies because that's where I have the most experience. The same concepts will apply to phone calls and in person too, but you have less time to get it right in those channels. Practicing with the written word is a less stressful way to start.

1. Recognise your own emotions

Before you send off your email, give yourself time to understand how you are feeling. Upset customers often use broad and unfair characterisations because they don't think anyone is really listening (Fun fact: I've personally been told more than once that I am ruining Campaign Monitor).

My instinctive first response to that sort of email is often to defend myself, attack the customer's views as wrong and unfair. That doesn't ever help, but letting myself feel that emotion; sometimes even to write it down (not in the ticket -never in the ticket!) gives me the mental space to write a much better response.

2. Make sure you're actually sorry

If you aren't genuinely sorry for at least some part of the problem, then don't apologise. Instead, try listening again to make sure you understand the situation fully. They will know if you are just saying sorry without comprehending why.

3. Validate their feelings

You don't have to agree with everything a customer has said, but they do need to know that you have heard them, and that you acknowledge how they feel.

"I know it has been really frustrating for you to be held up like this when you just want to get your job done"

You can find out a lot more about how to do this if you look up some resources on reflective listening, it's a truly valuable skill in all areas of life.

4. Explain what happened

Write a full explanation of the situation as you understand it, making sure to address all the points the customer has raised. Sharing that explanation of "here's what happened, and what went wrong" is critical; it's the framework that an apology fits into. Without it, any apology risks being meaningless words unsupported by explanation or any change of behaviour.

5. Admit to your mistakes

Whether it was your personal mistake, or the mistake of the company or service or product, explicitly admit to it, again trying to reflect the way your customer has described the problem. It should be a genuine and specific admission.

"You are absolutely right, we should have made that clearer much earlier in the process" or "I can see now that I didn't read your email properly, that's totally my fault"

6. Explain what you'll do differently

Explain clearly what you or the company will do differently next time to avoid this happening again. This part is what takes your customer from "ok, whatever, at least they said sorry" to "Oh, they really do understand why this matters and they're going to fix it".

"We've already added a new monitoring tool that will alert our support team immediately if this happens again, so that we can get on top of it quickly".

7. Leave the conversation open

It's up to the customer whether or not they accept an apology, but you can make sure they know that you are there to listen and help.

"Of course I totally understand if this has been a deal breaker for you, but I want you to know that I'm happy to explain anything in more detail, or to hear from you about any other issues. Just reply to this email and it will come right back to me"

Do not:

• Make promises you can't keep (For example, never say "This will never happen again" if you can't 100% control that).
• Trivialise or ignore the customer's feelings "Our other customers don't have any problem with this"
• Defend yourself by blaming someone else or minimising the problem
• Over apologise (the word sorry can lose all meaning if you say it enough times).

Apologising honestly and effectively is a super power for customer service folks. It can strengthen your relationship with the customer even beyond it's pre-problem levels. You might even find it helps with your three year old!

When I joined Campaign Monitor there were only four of us, and as the sole support person each day was a constant series of decisions; should I give this person a refund? Do I make this change for the customer or do I ask them to do it? If someone sells their company, who can now login to the company's account?

There were no procedures or policies for anything, only 'have I done this before?' and 'what should I do this time?'.

8 years later we have over 20 support agents all over the world talking to our customers 24 hours a day. Every one of them is highly skilled and independent but ad hoc decision making is a lot less efficient when it's happening 20 times more often than it used to.

Mistakes multiply too; an account broken because the wrong tool was used or a customer leaving because they were given the wrong information.

As the team gets larger and our customer base grows nobody can have a perfect understanding of the full history and context of every customer question or request.

Two paths

The temptation is to add a new procedure, another document with rules to avoid the same mistake happening again. And we certainly have started to work hard at documenting everything.

But when you have a team of independent and skillful people, adding more policies and procedures can stop them from being their most effective. One of my team leaders expressed this very clearly:

" there's been a small, naggy part of me that's had a bit of an unhappy reaction to the quest to document and process-ize everything. We have a fantastic team of wicked smart customer service professionals, and it feels a little disenfranchising - do we want a team of empowered professionals or monkeys who only have to work off a flow chart?"

She makes an excellent point. Processes can create a perception of taking away the authority of people to make their own decisions. The cost is emotional (that feeling of being disempowered) and also financial.

A team member who has been told how they must respond to a certain situation is much less likely to take the time to come up with a better solution for the customer. Too many processes and procedures can lead down a path of dimishing independence and increasing frustration.

We'd end up losing our best people because they would no longer feel like they could do their work in the most effective way. Adding a procedure or a script for every conceivable situation is how the average call centre operates, and we've all been the recipients of that sort of "service".

Still, the problem of multiplying poor decisions and inconsistent service remains. Even the most experienced people on our team can't know everything about everything any more.

The as-few-as-possible policy path we try to walk at Campaign Monitor is a riskier one (because it removes some of the barriers that prevent mistakes) but when it works it pays off in the form of an engaged team who provide exceptional service. It allows them to do what needs to be done in most situations quickly and with confidence that the organisation will back them up if they go "off process".

There's a book by David Marquet called Turn the Ship Around which discusses "Commander's Intent". The core idea is to let your team members make decisions for themselves based on their clear understanding of what their company is trying to achieve. This short video explains it well.

That's the model I'd like to use for our support team. If we are all clear on our goals as a company and as a customer service team, then we can all make decisions that further that goal.

So to take an example: Should we have a detailed policy on when a customer is entitled to a refund? A decision tree that will get them to an exact amount to refund? Not under this model. Instead, each agent would consider the overarching goal of our customer service team and decide whether offering a refund would further that goal.

They may decide that actually a refund isn't going to help the customer as much as a personal phone call would do. Or that the right answer is to give a full refund, even though the customer was at fault. This system really only can work in the right circumstances:

• We have a clear understanding of the company's and the team's goals
• We only hire smart people who share our company values
• We put the tools and information in place to help them make good decisions
• We trust them to do their job well (and back them up even if they make the wrong call)
• We have some way of measuring that we're on track overall

There will always be a need for processes and policies,
but they should act as safety barriers on a wide open highway, not as rails on a train line.

On stage at this year's Chicago UserConf, I put up these slides.

I was using those increasingly wacky titles as an introduction the main point of my talk: Instead of making your support team be heroic in order to get their job done, build your company, policies, processes and products so that great customer service is almost automatic. You can read the full details in this post.

Recently on a SupportOps hangout my friends Jeff and Carolyn discussed the importance and power of language in customer service, a topic close to my heart. They disagreed (in the politest way!) with my characterising job titles as unimportant, and made some really solid points in their defense.

For example:

• "Happiness Hero" and similar names send a signal to your team (and the rest of your company) about the importance of the role to customers.
• Customer service people at Wistia and Buffer (and indeed at Campaign Monitor) do much more than 'tech support'.
• Alternate titles can be more fun, people enjoying having them and dealing with people using them.

I agree with all of those things, I really do. But I still think that job titles really aren't important. Here's why.

A customer mostly won't care what your title is, they care about whether or not they are getting the help they need. A fun title might help make a connection with a happy customer, or it might piss off an already upset customer. Let's call that a draw.

When it comes to the support team members, and the rest of the company, is the title an important part of building great service? Does it really matter?

Will you try something for me? Rank by order of importance these various ways of showing the value a company places on great customer service.

• Consistently spends more time and money on the overarching customer experience than their competitors.
• Provides reliable, consistently great service to customers over time.
• Gives their customer service department and team broader, more fun titles to dissociate it from normal customer support, and elevate perceived importance.
• Gives their frontline staff authority to go outside the guidelines when it makes sense to help a customer.
• Gives their staff tools and resources so they have access to more and more capabilities over time, and are less often forced to hand off customers.
• Pays above the market rates so they can get the best team members.
• Treats their customer service team as full members of the company when it comes to entitlements, input, and career development.
• Promotes the success of the customer service team internally and externally.

Where would you rank the importance of a job title on that list? Job titles and team names matter, undoubtedly. It can be that extra little recognition of value and culture. They just matter so much less than everything else. If you're in support and your company is doing all those other things up there, then you won't care what your title is. You will know deeply how important you are and how important your work is.

If your company isn't doing all those other things, but you've got a cool title.... well how meaningful is that going to be? Language is absolutely powerful, but it can be used to deceive as well as to promote. If Comcast changed their retention team's name to 'Happiness Enforcement", we all know that job still sucks.

Jeff and Carolyn are great leaders at two fantastic companies who genuinely value customer service and consistently do great work. But it isn't their job titles that made them that way. They did it the hard way. Just like you have to.

Tracky Dacks is an Australian term for sweat pants; comfortable, casual and desparately uncool. I like to think that my approach to customer service is fairly similar. Customer service isn't cool, but it can be done honestly and in a way that leaves everyone comfortable at least most of the time.

Other pants tell a different story. The Norwegian curling team are famous for their loud and proud uniforms, about as far from an old pair of black tracky dacks as you can get. Their 2014 Winter Olympics uniform is a fine example.

Curling as a sport dates from at least 1540 in Scotland (another country known for some strong choices in men's clothing) and involves a team working together to move a 20kg lump of granite smoothly and accurately across the ice to the right spot.

The thrower sets the direction, velocity and the curl of the stone right up front, and then as it travels there are two people who scurry around in front of it, sweeping frantically like cleaners in a meth lab who've forgotten to wear their masks again.

I've never played the game . In my job I started on the frontline, answering customers directly. I was the person who threw the stone. I threw a lot of them, and I got to be pretty good at it.

Now my role has changed from thrower to sweeper. It took me a while to understand that shift and to realise how to influence the results from in from of the stone instead of behind it.

To be an effective support team manager, I have to let my team take care of the stone throwing work they do so well. While they get on with answering tickets and helping our customers, my time is best spent in other ways.

The most important work I can do happens off the ice between matches. By the time the stone is thrown it is too late to make any big changes to the strategy, or to the direction. Instead, I can have the biggest impact for my team by:

• Giving them the best tools, resources and equipment I can get.
• Smoothing the ice; removing any obstacles in their path.
• Making sure the systems are in place to reduce wasted time and effort.
• Making sure they understand clearly what we as a team and a company are trying to achieve.

Then from day to day I can give guidance and feedback, and make small course corrections as we go, while helping my team develop and grow in their roles.

It's still a constant temptation to focus on the throwing, to check that I'm still good at it and to get that little rush of adrenaline. But then who will sweep the ice? I've traded in my stone for a broom. The pants can't be far behind.

"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?

I have two sons, born a few years apart. My first son was born in very stressful emergency conditions with an epidural and lots of chaos. My second son ultimately was born into a chaotic room too, but for us the two experiences were vastly different.

What changed? Before my second son was born, my wife and I attended a Calm Birth course with Peter Jackson (not that Peter Jackson, though I did fear we'd signed up for a 9 hour labour over 3 years).

The core idea of the course is to help pregnant women and their partners to change their perspective on labour and child birth, to alleviate the fear, anxiety and tension that can occur. We learned a lot more about the process of labour, and practised using tools like breathing, meditation and visualisation during the two day course and in the weeks leading up to the birth.

The difference in the two labours, for my wife, was honestly completely astounding. She experienced the same labour pains for just as long but this time she was much more informed, and felt more in control, calmer and less fearful.

She went through the entire labour, complications and all, without any pain relief. It was truly amazing, and the difference was purely a mental shift that we'd both learned in less than two days.

If our minds are capable of making that sort of change, dealing with undeniable physical pain and emotional stress in a completely different way, then my complaining about a support vampire starts to seem more than a little self indulgent. For one thing, it's pretty hard to put a labour on hold.

Still, as the head of customer service I am sometimes asked to deal with upset people, or people who've simply worn out other team members. I try to practice some very simple calm customer service techniques. I think they'll help you too.

Practicing calm customer service

• Breathe—Even on a phone call you can take a moment to breathe and let yourself relax before speaking. Tension in your body absolutely affects the way you respond.
• Change your perspective—Describe the situation to a colleague from the customer's point of view. Instead of "He screwed up his settings and now he wants us to sort that out right now", try "He's in a huge rush trying to get this job done, he knows he's made a mistake and now he's really worried that he's not going to make it."
• Ask for the customers story—Asking the customer to tell you a bit about what they're trying to do can really help reshape the way you're feeling about them (and help them understand you are there to help). You both want the story to have a happy ending, but if you don't know their story it's really tough to help them get there.
• Change your language—The words we use to describe a person and a situation don't just record our emotions, they can create them. Consider carefully the way you're thinking about the customer. Is she pushy, aggressive, impatient? Or is she excited, keen to make progress, really engaged with your service?

The beauty of practicing calm customer service is that it doesn't rely on the customer changing his behaviour. He may well still be loud and aggressive, just as going through child birth still involves a lot of physical work.

Calm customer service helps you to see the same emotional and physical situations in a very different way. That can make all the difference in the world to your feelings about the customer, your company and your work.

I'd love to hear your best calm customer service stories; what do you do to handle a stressful or tiresome customer situation?

You can now watch the whole talk on video over at UserConf.

I was demoted from my first support team-lead role, and became a web designer for 7 years before I joined Campaign Monitor in 2006 (when the team was 4 people) becoming the first support team member.

In 2014 we have over 20 people in support, and we get some pretty great results (averaging 94%+ happy customers over more than 10,000 ratings)

This is the story of how we went from just me to 20+ people in support, and improved our customer service along the way.

It's also the story of the mistakes and pitfalls I hit along the way, and how the Wizard of Oz is more than just a classic movie.

Our Age of Heroes

Early in Campaign Monitor's history everybody did everything, because there were not the other options. We did a really good job in a scrambling sort of way.

I was working every day, because the queues were not too long but we always had more overseas customers than Australian.

I knew every customer who wrote in, and every issue because it was just me.

Early hiring

• Finding highly independent, experienced people who we flew in, flooded with knowledge like an F1 petrol stop then sent home
• Communication "just happened"
• Hiring smart, over-qualified people was a useful shortcut for the first few years

First challenges

As we gathered more and more customers and the product became more complicated, our system for support was stretched.

I should have realised when HelpSpot stopped working (because I had too many resolved tickets) that we needed to do more strategic thinking about our support queues.

I was still doing a huge chunk of the direct support myself, and lots of product and customer knowledge was locked up in my head and in the heads of my team mates.

I loved being knowledgeable, and if I'm honest there's a sort of addiction to being important and swooping in to rescue a ticket with a knowledge bomb.

If I could go back in time now, I'd tell myself to get my head out of the queues earlier and make some of the changes that needed to happen.

Learning to let go

I bet a lot of people in small support teams are still in this phase, just keeping in front of the stone of Sysiphus where you solve a ticket and another one arrives forever.

I'd talk to my bosses about all the bigger picture improvements we wanted to make, how to reduce tickets and fix problems. We'd agree, I'd go back to my desk and there would be tickets to answer and it would be suddenly 6 months later.

Being on frontline support is like being a bear catching salmon in the river. You can get really, really good at catching them, but there are always more salmon.

You can keep adding bears but eventually the woods get pretty disgusting. So instead, you need to find a way to create enough time to get upstream where you can make smarter decisions about reducing the number of tickets, handling them more quickly and resolving problems.

It took me far longer than it should have to make the space to do all the things we knew needed to be done.

I tried a lot of different ways to make space and time to do that, but ultimately we just needed to add more people to create enough slack.

Some examples of what we were able to do once a few new people started.

• Working with designers to tweak our pricing pages to clarify some confusing issues that generated a lot of questions
• Changing some of our contact forms to request specific information that helped us respond more quickly
• Writing summaries of product changes and sharing that regularly with the support team so they were not surprised by new features and updates
• Documenting some of the information previously trapped in our brains

Letting go of individual support answers also meant not micro managing how tickets are answered, and trusting in my team.

Communicating

As the team grew, our processes hit their limits. We tried:

• wikis
• ad hoc emails
• Unstructured meetings
• Chat rooms

With varying degrees of consistency and success. Information would be lost, or confused.

Growing pains

This is the modern era for our support team. We are 20+ people now and the systems and processes that worked for 5 people are just not good enough any more.

My role has expanded and I no longer try to be the best or the fastest at answering tickets.

• Be a multiplier - small improvements across 5 or 10 or 20 people add up very quickly
• Really work hard at communication. As you get bigger, it needs more deliberate effort to share information. This is especially true for Campaign Monitor where we have a mix of in-house and remote staff
• Avoid the Rumsfeld effect for remote people. Unknown unknowns lead to fear and uncertainty

When you have smart people with access to great resources, you can spend more time keeping them engaged and happy in their roles.

Some of the ways we try to keep our team engaged:

• Regular weekly emails that cover the big topics, but also the little bits of social information remote people can miss out on
• Having full size cardboard cutouts of some remote team around the office
• Our Directors calling out our support performance and the value to the company

Define success

When the team grew, hiring people just like me stopped being a handy shortcut and started being a limitation on our quality of service.

We decided to hire more broadly, but as it turned out we weren't quite ready for it. Hiring people with different backgrounds was great, but we didn't have a clear idea of what skills and abilities were really critical, and which could be learned.

We also didn't have a training structure to build up all the knowledge we'd previously assumed people to have. So a few new people had a much harder time becoming productive, and it impacted the rest of the team who had to help them up.

More recently we have created a clear, detailed document called "How to Succeed in the Campaign Monitor Customer Service team" which covers things like:

• What can be measured?
• What are our attitudes?
• How do we work with other teams?
• How do we contribute to our team?

Reading it, a new support person knows what they are expected to get done, and how they are expected to behave as part of the team.

The same document is a useful interview guide and a ruler for measuing performance during reviews.

Customer service isn't cool

It's just not, and we do a disservice by pretending it is. Cool people often aren't the ones who are empathetic or who want to try to help.

So even though I understand why companies use titles like

• Customer hero
• Ticket champion
• Wow magician
• Email whisperer

But to me, it seems to be placing the emphasis on the wrong person. Customer service isn't rocket science, and we all at UserConf know what we need to do.

If you are saying being a hero is what you need to do to provide good service, something is wrong.

Heroes can get the job done, but they tend to trash everything else. Heroes in the support team may make one customer really happy but the next day the same person might get a mediocre experience.

There are customer service heroes, but they aren't us. They are the people who somehow manage to provide great service inside banks and insurance companies where they have no authority, no information, no control and no respect.

That's heroic. But that's not sustainable or desirable. The model we use at Campaign Monitor is not The Avengers, it's the Wizard of Oz.

Wizard of Oz support

Sometimes we get some effusive feedback for our team saying how we've gone above and beyond for them, and provided amazing service.

When I look at the ticket, sometimes it's literally a 30 second job for the customer service agent. We'v just given our team the tools to do it, and the authority to make it happen quickly.

So in Wizard of Oz Dorothy and her friends thought he wizard sounded impressive and powerful. But it turns out he just had access to a cool machine and his part of the job was easy.

That's our goal in support; make it so great service is as much as possible an automatic outcome from the whole company, and not something that takes heroic effort.

What that looks like in practise:

• Push authority for decision making down to the front line. Don't make people ask for permission to refund or to bend a rule.
• Give them tools and information to make better decisions, and back them up on it.
• Create processes that are customer friendly and automate them so that no decision needs to be made.

For my team, we have a whole bunch of systems supporting them.

• Written clear accessible guides for how to handle certain situations
• Added a Status page that intercepts a lot of questions before the customer needs to contact us
• Hire a tech writer who is constantly updating our help to answer common questions that crop up in support
• Built an internal knowledge base that combines our public help and our internal knowledge into one fast, editable and current tool
• Created "DQ" time to let our support team work on things other than direct customer support
• Created "kill that question" and "cringe list" pages that draw out the frustrations from our front line team and try to address them
• Built a custom front end to ugly JIRA to track feature requests in a couple of clicks
• Written training courses to reduce the time to competence for new people
• Expanded our 2nd level support team of engineers who feel the customer pain and can make changes and build tools to address it
• Created simple checklists of what a great response looks like, for new people and as a safety fallback

So Tina Turner said it best: We don't need another hero.

What we need is to get the rest of our companies being truly customer focused, and then let our support teams get on with doing their job.

Go!

That car did well by me, but I never loved it. I've never loved any car, not in the way other people seem to love their cars. I didn't name it, or mourn it's untimely passing after a roundabout accident. I washed it one or twice, maybe I put some oil in it.

I'm not a car person. All I want from a car is that it starts when I need to go somewhere, it is reasonably comfortable to drive and it keeps working without much effort or cost on my part. I worked my way through a few cars before I could afford to buy something that checked those boxes consistently.

Every car I've owned has been serviced and repaired by the same mechanic. Peter TToulounge was the local mechanic where I grew up, and he looked after our family cars (a procession of rattly Holden station wagons). My parents still take their cars to him today; I'm sure there are many other families in the area who do the same.

There are car mechanics everywhere; some are more conveniently located, some are sleek and modern, some are cheaper, some are mobile. But I never even think about trying another mechanic because I have no reason to.

When I call Peter and book in my car for a service he remembers me. He asks about my children and tells me what his grandkids are up to. When I tell him what needs fixing, he'll ask some questions to make sure he knows what I want, and suggest other areas he can check to save me some money.

If there's anything unexpected, Peter will call me and talk through what he's found, what the options are, how much they'll cost and what he'd recommend.

Peter has rung around and tracked down quality second hand parts when I was on a tight budget. He's arranged for parts to be rush delivered the same day to get me back on the road. And when I show up to pick up my case he has all the pieces he's replaced lined up to show me, and the empty boxes for the new parts he's installed.

I'm sure he knows I have no idea about any of it, but it's part of his routine for establishing trust and it works. If only every (any!) tradesperson I dealt with was as consistently reliable and trustworthy.

When I think about how I want my team to treat our customers at Campaign Monitor, I often think about how Peter treats me. They are all such simple ideas, but so powerful when applied consistently.

The (other) Peter Principles

Does the service you offer hit all these points? Every time? For twenty years?

• Treat your customers as people and engage with them like a human. It's ok to talk about your life with your customers while you're helping them out.
• Be reliable; be on time, do what you say you will do, but if you can't then be honest and up front.
• Show and tell; can you explain to the customer why you did what you did, and show them how rather than just telling them it's fixed? Even when they don't have the same level of knowledge they will appreciate the communication and you'll reduce their fear of what they don't know.
• Go the extra mile for your customers. Anticipate what else they might need before they ask. Do the dull job so your customer doesn't have to.

Me? I'm just hoping that by the time Peter retires I'll be taking the hyperloop to work.

When you work in an empathetic, competent and successful support team it's easy to forget quite how low the average person's service expectations are. When someone contacts your company for help (especially a newer customer) chances are they are not expecting it to go well because of their previous bad service experiences.

Those customers don't know that you're committed to solving their problem, and they assume they are going to get a slow, incomplete, or unhelpful answer.

In one sense low expectations can be helpful; I've certainly had customers blown away by how fast my response was, even when I've considered it to be unacceptably slow. The flip side of low expectations is that they become a lens through which email replies are viewed. Everything you write to a customer is interpreted through that lens of low expectation.

Here's an example from my personal support history. A customer wrote in having problems accessing their account. From what I could see it may have been related to a very small outage we'd had, and might already be resolved. I responded quite quickly, asking a couple of troubleshooting questions (including "is it still happening for you now?") that would help narrow down where the issue was occurring.

In my mind, this was a conversation where the customer would give me a bit more detail and from there we would be able to work out the problem together and get the customer sorted out.

In my customer's mind though, it was a different story. He left me some very negative feedback:

No resolution was provided. And no advice on next steps or how to take further. Worst 'support' I have ever received. Disappointed.

That one really hurt! It took me a few re-reads until I got myself approximately into the mind of the customer and could see it from his perspective.

Here are some facts the customer had no way of knowing (but that I was assuming he should know):

• Our support is always helpful and will work on a problem until it is resolved
• There was a tiny outage around that time that was a potential cause, but had ended (and so the access problem might not be a problem now)
• I was genuinely asking him for a response, not fobbing him off with my vague "is it fixed" question
• This was just the first part of a conversation, not the entirety

Once I understood all that I apologised and tried to recover the conversation, but I didn't hear back from the customer again. He couldn't read my mind and know I was going to help him out. I should have been much clearer.

Over-communicate when relying on text

When you read your own email, you're reading it with the benefit of knowing your own intention, your tone, your emotional state. Your customer doesn't have access to any of that, and while text isn't a perfect subsitute you can get a lot closer.

I think of this as "showing your working". Don't skip steps and don't assume the customer knows where the conversation is going.

• Acknowledge the problem and how the customer is feeling.
• Confirm that you will work with them to get the problem solved.
• Align yourself with the customer against the problem.
• Share the next steps (i.e "Once you let me know, I'll be able to look into our logs here and see exactly what has happened").
• Thank them for their help in getting the right answer.
• End by making it clear that the conversation is ongoing.

It can seem a little over-the-top when you write this way, but that's because you know all those points already. To your customer, especially one who isn't used to your level of service, it is just enough to overcome the very low expectations they have.

Here's how it might look in practice:

"Sorry to hear you're having problems getting in to your account, that would be very frustrating. I can definitely help you get that sorted out this morning so you can get on with your job.

It can be a little tricky to know what's happening, so it would be super helpful if you can answer a couple of questions for me: <questions here>

Once I have that information I can look at our logs and see exactly what's happening, and I'll get back to you right away.

Thanks for your help with this, I look forward to hearing from you soon (I'll make sure to pick up your ticket as soon as it comes back).

That's going to build your customer's confidence that the problem will be dealt with, and make them more willing to spend time giving you some more details.

Show your working!

You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometimes, well you might find
You get what you need

One of my favourite response patterns is “Answer, anticipate, elaborate”. What I mean is:

• Yes, answer the actual question they asked
• Anticipate follow up questions that your answer could lead to
• Elaborate on those questions and point the customer to the right help or resources.

Often a customer will ask a question that you can easily answer in full, but by their phrasing you can also guess where they are next going to get stuck. If you can anticipate that, and help them in advance it saves them time and avoids them feeling dumb by asking another question.

It saves your time too, because you will already have investigated their issue once and probably understand what they are asking. If they come back later with follow up questions you’ll need to go through that all again (or your teammate will). Don’t forget to actually answer the question they asked though, even when they really need to do something different than what they asked for.

Here’s an anonymised, real example from a Campaign Monitor support incident:

Customer – “We liked your system, accept that it would be very difficult to send e-mails from recent signups because we would have to upload lists daily to send out our recent sign-up e-mail. Your program just isn’t compatible with ours. Because we’ve only used your system for a few days we’d like a refund. ”

Agent – “Thank you for getting in touch about the refund. We’d be happy to refund you for the monthly payment you’ve made and just charge you for the one sent campaign, though, I wonder if there isn’t a way I could be of help to you so that you are able to have your subscribers added to your Campaign Monitor lists automatically.

Is the method described at <help topic link> for adding subscribers from an existing subscribe form not possible for you? Could you please send us the URL of your subscribe form and let us know issues you are having getting it to work with our system? ”

I love this answer. The agent immediately reassures the customer that she can definitely get her money back. That answers her question right up front and likely puts her into a more receptive mood to hear further advice. Then the agent goes on to address her underlying problem with some specific suggestions, and to ask for more details so she can help further. The customer is happy and the situation has improved from a refund to a probable returning customer.

Some customers won’t be so helpful in explaining why they need a refund, but that just means confirming that yes, a refund can definitely happen but also asking if there is any problem that could be addressed.

Next time you answer a support ticket, think about answering, anticipating and elaborating. Then tweet me to let me know if it helped.

The store owner immediately (and in a none-too-friendly way) told her that “the warranty doesn’t cover child damage” and that she wouldn’t take the bottle back to even check on the warranty. Now it turns out she was correct, the lid isn’t covered by the warranty. Which is understandable and not a problem.

The real problem was that being correct was the least important part of the transaction. What she should have done was to say “I don’t think they will cover that, I’m sorry, but they do sell replacement lids and bases and I can order those in for you right now”. Which is what we eventually did ourselves.

So now we won’t go back there, and my wife will tell this story to any number of potential local customers. This scenario could play out many times during your own support processes, especially when you are not face to face with a customer (and can’t tell as easily when they are unhappy).

Getting beyond technically correct

Being correct is important; the friendliest, most helpful response will still cause problems if it isn’t accurate. It just isn’t enough to churn out the correct answer.

Give your customer the answer they asked for, and be sure it is accurate

Go back and look at what they asked, and how they worded it, then consider what they might want to achieve. You can sometimes explicitly ask people what their end goal is, so you can help them better.

Offer additional resources or alternatives that will help them reach that end goal

They may not have considered alternative options to get the same result. Consider searching for and providing the answer even when it is outside of your own service (for example, looking at support forums for plugins or even competing products.

I’ve personally had success with that last option. We have people coming to us at Campaign Monitor for something we don’t provide, and I’ve let people know about other tools that can do what they need. It’s a win for the customer and next time they are deciding which product to use they’ll remember who truly helped them.

Being merely correct doesn’t make for happy (or even satisfied) customers on its own.

That's why we couldn't contact them when we found out one day in 2009 that hackers were attacking our servers. It would be over a day before we could get a message to them, and another before they could even get back to land. In the meantime, we were on our own.

Handling customer service is a tricky job at the best of times; when things are going really wrong it can be terrifying. In my 2012 UserConf presentation I talked about how to be prepared when things go really wrong.

You can watch the video right here; I've included some summary notes below.

What's a crisis plan?

A crisis response plan is a document that you and your team can use when things have gone badly wrong (like a major service outage or a security issue). It will help you make better decisions under pressure, and give better customer service.

What to do before a crisis happens

The more time you put in before you need it, the easier you will have it when things are falling apart.

Understand your company

There’s no point writing a plan up about your fanatical customer service if your company doesn’t believe it to be important. Work out realistic options based on the resources and support you have available.

For example, are you a Ryanair “low costs are more important than any customer” or a Southwest “Customer Service company that happens to fly”

Decide which support channels you will offer

Will you respond on email, on twitter, by phone, on Facebook? Can you realistically do all that in a crisis? Or should you funnel people from those places into one full support channel?

At Campaign Monitor we will watch and post updates on Facebook and twitter but we may point people to our email support channel for individual help.

Nominate team members

Decide which person (or which role) should be responding on which channel, so in a pinch you can avoid double handling tickets; or worse, not responding at all.

Include a list of escalation points; how and when to contact developers,managers and operational teams.

Setup detection systems

Catching problems early makes everything easier to handle. Investigate technical options (like Nagios for one), human options (how easy is it for support staff and customers to report issues) and third party options (can your up-stream providers give you notifications of problems)?

Create a notification system

Create an easily updatable page where your customers can self-serve to see if there are any known issues, but only if you promise to actually keep it up to date.

Build up a library of shared language, tone and structure

Rather than having to come up with the right words on the fly, spend time in advance deciding on what terms to use (the ones your customers will understand!) and share lots of specific examples with your team.

Example of a general response structure:

• Acknowledge the issue exists, and let the customer know it isn’t their fault
• Explain the situation to the best of your current knowledge
• Explain what is being done to resolve it, and give a timeline where you can
• Let the customer know how and when they will get further updates

During a crisis

This is when you put your plan into action. So make sure the plan is readily available and up to date.

How bad is it?

Your early warning systems will help, but the faster you can see the scope of the problem the better your customer service can be.

Who can help?

Determine who you need to get in touch with (developers? managers? software providers?) and bring them in.

Work on a rapid response

You may have many people contacting you in a short period. Work out a shared basic response that accepts the problem and explains what is happening and get your team using that to quickly respond to every person.

Important: Take the time to modify the response to the specifics of each customer’s case. It makes a big difference to them.

Work out the right update frequency

A fast first response is great but if the problem continues with no further details being shared the goodwill evaporates. Work out how often you need to update people depending on the type and severity of the problem. Read the blog post I wrote when Campaign Monitor was attacked for an example.

Brave the wrath of developers (if relevant)

Someone in customer service needs to be a little pushy in finding out what is going on, on behalf of the customer.

Keep up internal communication

Don’t leave your support team on their own to guess at what is happening and when it will be fixed. Help them to help your customers by keeping them informed.

Maintain a list of people to follow up with

Some customers will need to know immediately that the problem is resolved. If you don’t keep a list it is hard to do that in a timely way.

Aftermath

Once the immediate issue is resolved, take some time to apologise to the affected people and improve your system for next time.

Make an apology

Avoid the fake “It wasn’t so bad” or “it wasn’t our fault” apologies. A real apology is:

• Genuinely meant
• Detailed as to the cause and impact
• Open to a response from the customer
• Useful in fixing the problem (or compensating for it)

Modify processes and procedures

Review the whole event and see what can be learned for next time. Some good questions to ask:

• Was the plan used?
• Did your team have the tools they needed to help customers?
• Was information shared quickly, and accurately?
• Were there answers given that should be saved and used as a model for the future?
• Maintaining quality when the team grows - A small team (and one in a shared space) will absorb knowledge by osmosis. When you have 10 or 30 or 50 support staff, that process doesn’t work so well.
• Create a home for internal documentation that is updated
• Focus on soft skills for new people, maybe above technical training
• Keep working on the company culture, especially for remote staff

If you found this post useful, please do share it. I'd love to hear from you too, tweet me @mrpatto.

In Australia it is compulsory to hold third party insurance on all registered vehicles, hence the name Compulsory Third Party (CTP) Green Slips. You can choose from any CTP provider, and you need to provide proof of CTP insurance when registering your vehicle each year.

Today I received a letter from AAMI that looks very much like a bill I need to pay.

At first (and second) glance I assumed it was my normal CTP renewal. Here's the issue though: I already have a CTP green slip, with a different insurer.

This is not a bill I have to pay, it is an offer for me to switch to AAMI. They have done a number of things to make this look just like a normal bill:

• Put a big fat "Date Due" at the top even though of course it's not money I owe them.
• Used a fake stamp-look "Unpaid Green Slip" that implies it needs to be paid, which again it does not.
• Used all the details they have from my existing comprehensive insurance to pre-fill it all (so it looks more like a renewal).
• Mimicked the look of their actual renewals very closely.
• Included a "policy number" for what is actually a quote

They did include a letter which says "It's easy to switch your CTP Green Slip to AAMI" (and which correctly uses a Quote Number, not a policy number), but the letter is folded underneath the invoice so it's not immediately visible.

I am sure that's not accidental. I have no doubt all that is effective at gaining business, but it's also intentionally deceptive. I'm not the only one to notice.

Measuring the response to the offer is easy, but it is harder to measure the effect on customers who either work it out before hand and don't respond, or who switch without intending and later realise they were conned.

Some recipients won't notice at all but it's not just customers who are affected by behaviour like this.

The impact on customer service

I would bet that the AAMI customer service team are not fans of this policy of deliberate deception. Now when they talk to a customer, it might be someone who is already pissed off that they were tricked into paying a bill.

Customer service is a hard enough job, starting from that position just makes it tougher. Not to mention the impact on the way that they treat the customers. If you work for a company which clearly has no problem being sneaky and tricking their own customers, how much less likely are you to go that extra mile when it's needed?

Chances are the best customer service people leave for places where they can provide better service and avoid ethical grey areas.

Lessons for AAMI (and us all)

• Sales and marketing efforts have impacts beyond their immediately measurable results (see also My Origin Story).
• You shouldn't expect your customer service teams to act ethically if the rest of the company does not treat ethics as important.
• Tricking people is a terrible way to start a business relationship.

Next time my comprehensive insurance is up for renewal, I'll be looking for a better option.

Origin Energy are an electricity provider, the largest in Australia by customer base. When I bought a house last year, I contacted them to connect my electricity because I was aware of the company as a local option with decent pricing.

For months, I was a content customer paying my bills and otherwise having no dealings at all with the company. Exactly what you want from a commodity service provider.

Then towards the end of last year, I received a phone call from a number I didn’t recognise. Picking it up, I heard an obviously recorded voice starting midway through a sentence, making it quite hard to understand the message.

It was Origin, wanting to talk to me about some offer or other, that I had no interest in, so I ignored it. Origin did not give up so easily though, and I continue to receive robocalls most days, always the same content from the same number.

If I called the number back, it was a different recording about how they wanted to talk to me about something. Infuriating! I'm sure that if I sat through their whole pitch I'd eventually talk to a person and then be able to convince them to take me off their list.

I didn't want to go through that, so I just hung up the phone or ignored the number for weeks. Eventually, I complained to their twitter account. They asked for my mobile number so they could arrange to stop the calls.

When I gave them the number, the calls did stop, for a while, but then started up again. Soon after that, I switched to another provider, purely because I was annoyed by their intrusive marketing.

The final piece of communication I received from Origin (after I'd submitted a change of supplier form with the new supplier) was a letter which was carefully written to suggest (without outright saying) I had to call Origin to confirm the switch.

This was not true; the form I'd submitted was all I needed to do, they were presumably trying to give their retention team a chance to change my mind. It was never going to happen.

If I had to guess at the reason these programs of robocalling exist, I'd say that Origin can measure how many calls they make, and how many of those calls result in customers paying more or staying longer.

But they can't measure how many customers are having their tolerance worn away bit by bit, and who will therefore take the first opportunity to leave.

If they'd just left me alone, I'd still be paying them today. Instead, I'm writing this post about them and another company is getting my money.

Lessons from Origin

1. Don't treat your customers like a machine that you can find new ways to squeeze, irritate or trick money out of. Respect their time and attention.
2. You should ask for permission to market to people even when you don't legally have to.
3. Think carefully about what you measure (and what you can't measure) because you might be causing affects you aren't seeing.