Support Matters
This is a topic that gets brought up fairly often, but I don’t think it can be said enough: great support makes a company.
I want to bring up a couple examples that I’ve encountered recently.
The first I want to mention is about BuySellAds. We’re in the process of converting Bodega’s ad system from our homebrew setup to one managed by BuySellAds. We did some research before selecting BSA… they were our front runners but I had a whole list of questions that I needed answers to before I could be assured they’d provide the functionality that I needed for Bodega. On their website, they encourage people to email them, literally saying “there are humans behind this site.” So I emailed them with a couple of my questions, really not knowing what to expect. Within hours I got a really friendly response from Todd at BSA answering all of my questions properly. We then had a significant back and forth where he addressed all of my concerns, some which were non-trivial : Bodega is an app… BSA isn’t setup to support apps (officially). It got to the point where I was almost feeling bad for taking up so much of Todd’s time with my questions, considering I hadn’t (and still haven’t) paid a dime yet for services. Yet he keeps insisting that we take our time and make sure we’re 100% comfortable before we pull the trigger.
I don’t know how big of a company BuySellAds is. They give off the impression of being pretty big. And yet they’ve managed to provide an extremely personable experience. Well done.
Next up… Balsamiq. Last night I was testing out Balsamic Mockups out, and got very frustrated by their demo limitations. As I tend to do when I run into software that frustrates me, I tweeted about it. Within minutes, I had an employee of Balsamiq tweeting at me trying to help me out. She eventually provided me a link to a blog post of theirs that explained a bit of the limitations, and invited me to email her with an explanation of why I thought the demo limitations weren’t good. Now… this all happened at 9pm. Balsamiq isn’t a big company, I know they aren’t. But they cared enough to either search freakishly often, or get notified when someone mentioned their product on Twitter, and did their best to help out. With all of this I went from wanting to quit the app and never use it again, to writing them a long email trying to explain what it was about their demo limitations that I considered to be wrong. I sent that email around 11pm, if not later. Again… soon afterwards, the Balsamiq employee emailed me back and answered some of my questions, and assured me that she would bring up my issues with the rest of the team. Due to her proactiveness, I actually believe that she did this.
You have this unique opportunity as a support person to drastically change someone’s mind about your product. And I don’t think it’s rocket science either. It’s just a few key things that make a HUGE difference:
- Time. This is the most important. If you’re dealing with email, I seriously see no excuse for waiting 24 hours for a response. You’re going to have to deal with it eventually, get it out there.
- Make sure you understand their actual problem. Make it clear to them that you get what their issue is. And if it’s not clear to you, fix that. Don’t give a bullshit answer and expect them to go away.
- Be personable. Show that they’re dealing with a person and not some faceless support queue system.
- Solve their problem. Yup… should probably do that too.
Support is so incredibly important, especially for small companies where literally, every sale counts. I’ve had countless people email me after I’ve solved their problem tell me that they purchased NetworkLocation simply because they now knew that if they had any trouble with the software they could count on the fact that I’d resolve it promptly. Hell I’ve had a couple ask me to let them know when we released any new products because they wanted to buy it sight-unseen to help support us. This from someone who initially wanted to abandon using our app.
