Having a good product is key to building a good business, but perhaps more so is the support you give to customers. You could have the best product out there, but if your support sucks you may not get any sales. Conversely, if you have good support then you can sell what may be a mediocre product incredibly well. Combine the two together and you have a solid base for success. This post is a result of a call to Paypal’s support and I thought it would be good to outline support and where is can help a product greatly.

Paypal: Polite, Fast, Intuitive and Helpful

I might as well start with the one that sparked this post. In order to get past certain limits with a Paypal account you need to go through quite a few checks on your details. One of those is a security check against money laundering, which requires you being sent a code and then entering it on their website. Having not received this code yet I phone up (this at nearly 5pm on a Sunday) and went through the obligatory automated machine.

Once I’d exhausted all the automated options I was given a choice to speak to an agent. I can’t emphasise how annoying it is if there’s no clear way to get in touch with a human for support, and you have to spend ages searching through the many options to find the “talk to a human” option.  The agent I got in touch with was Irish and very helpful. Again, the emphasis is on having someone who is fluent in your native language giving you support. She informed that the letter does take a while to arrive and apologised, asking if I was willing to wait another week as it is around this time frame that people get the code. Otherwise, I was told to call back at the end of the week and they’d send another code out.

Web Hosting Buzz: Turning irritation at a product into praise for the service

I left WHB a while ago to move to Dreamhost. After a year at Dreamhost I moved back to WHB. I realised that I didn’t exactly need the extra features Dreamhost offered and could get by with WHBs packages. Unfortunately soon after I signed up again I was suffering issues with downtime. I sent a few support tickets that gradually got angrier. I knew that they were reliable from my past stint with them, so this was uncharacteristic.

The key to this situation, where something has made a customer angry, is to acknowledge that it is your fault and promise them to fix it. My last support ticket was responded to by the COO who agreed that this was a problem and I was right to complain. He also said he would keep an eye on the server for any more problems and apologised. The speed, politeness and professionalism turned an angry customer back into an avid customer. Remember that angry customers are angry because they like your product but it isn’t doing what they want. They are passionate about your product and want you to do well so you need to treat these customers well. A little politeness in an email can do amazing things for your word of mouth reputation.

British Telecom: Know what you’re talking about

Trying to get line rental set up with BT is a daunting task. You phone a number and have to sit there for 40+ minutes to get through to someone, and then there can be certain problems. After sitting through 40 minutes of nothing the last thing you want is someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Luckily this is BT’s saving grace. It may take forever to get through, but it’s worth it when you do. Their support staff are based in the UK (native speakers to the rescue again) and are very knowledgeable. There isn’t a case where they are absolutely clueless about a problem. People are willing to put aside an annoying wait if they get what they want, though that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get through people as quickly as possible

Apple: Going the extra mile

Apple Care is expensive, but it is worth every last penny. The support you get is always at an extreme with Apple. You occasionally get extremely bad support or you get the best support on the planet. The optical drive failed on my iMac a while ago and it wouldn’t recognise blank DVDs. So I phoned up Apple and got put through to someone who helped me diagnose the problems. Unfortunately he couldn’t solve the issues so he asked if I could be put on hold for 2 minutes while he tried to put me through to somebody higher up.

Now when you are put on hold for 2 minutes you know that it may take 30 seconds or 10 minutes, but never 2. This time however I had the support guy take me off hold after two minutes and asked me for my number so he could call me back when he’d got through so I wasn’t waiting on hold for ages. Going that little bit further and not asking your customer to wait on hold for an unknown amount of time so that they can get on with other stuff make a huge difference. The most annoying thing with phone support is having your hands tied due to using the phone and so not being able to do anything.

I also had an issue with the battery on my MacBook, which had started seriously losing capacity, even though it was only 9 months old. I booked an appointment at a genius bar and went in to see if they could sort it out. 20 minutes later I was walking out with my MacBook with a new battery. All I had to do was sign a form acknowledging the “repair” and that was it. Try to set a baseline for your support and aim to always exceed it and remove as much hassle as possible from the support process.

Conclusions

Good support can make or break a company more than a product. Being friendly, polite and not treating customers as “tickets” but treating them as people can help a lot. When releasing new products, people are more likely to try them if they know that they’ll get great support from them. Good support can help word of mouth more than a great feature in your product and people are more likely to buy from you if they know that everything about you is great, than knowing that a certain feature in a certain product is great. And most importantly good support can get customers to complement you and developers need that because it is our ego’s that keep us going.

If you’ve got any more suggestions for companies that deserve commending for their great support then post them in the comments below.

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