The Art of Customer Engagement and Retention: Premium Support for Freemium Software

  1. hi, my name is chris mccraw, or "fool", if given my druthers. I've been a unix system administrator for my entire post-teenage career until this year; for those counting that's about half my life. Now, I work as a senior customer support engineer for New Relic - a company whose philosophy is very support-focused. It's got me thinking about tech support differently than I used to--I've always loved helping people, but I've also always been biased in favor of people who were smart enough to help themselves.

    But tech support is often treated as a joke - if you've done support, you've probably made fun of some of your users....

  2. ...and some of them might deserve it. While I'm certainly guilty of this myself, lack of respect totally gets in the way of effective communication - which is key in providing great support. A better way to look at it might be that some people just aren't technical and don't want to be, and they aren't necessarily dumb, and they deserve the same amount of respect as any other customer, since their money, happiness, and loyalty are just as valuable as that of any other person. Think about your the experience your software provides--sometimes it clicks with someone and they get it and go on to do great things with it without bothering you. Sometimes it sucks, and sometimes it's even your fault. So: be prepared to be humble, honest, forgiving, and put some effort in, and you can weather almost any problem. Turns out, people like it when you're good to them more than they hate the problems in your software...as long as you have good backups, anyway.

    So, here's the easiest thing to take away from my talk, and the easiest thing to apply to whatever system or systems you already have, and by far the least structured suggestion you'll hear from me today too:

  3. How would you want to be treated? I already mentioned respect--that's a big one. Assume your customers are brilliant, wonderful people, and treat them like it. They may do their best to disabuse you of this notion, but at least enter into it, even to the most poorly-worded, detail free request: assume respect-worthiness until definitively disproven. This doesn't necessarily mean spending more time, it just means treating folks like you care, and much like smiling while you talk on the phone, folks can hear your demeanor based on your words, even when they're just "have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

    As technologists, I suspect that you have suffered a little for your art. Suffered through poorly designed API's, services that are not reliable, documentation that was clearly written in another language, and worse. So maybe you can put yourself back in that place when people write in for help using your software. Of course your software isn't terrible, but these folks wouldn't be writing in if it were perfect. Practice a little empathy--"Yeah, friend, I've been there too. Let me guide you out of the woods."

    And when someone just doesn't get it, missing something glaringly obvious, or asking for this feature that just doesn't make sense...remember, they're frustrated and you may not be able to solve their frustration, but you *can* take the edge off..

    Think about when you're at your best--caring, giving, attentive, making an effort to leave a good impression. For me, that's on a first date. So I try to treat the folks I'm helping like I want them to come on a second date with me...

  4. The company I work at doesn't do all of the things I'll talk about in this presentation - just most of them. It's impossible to meld all of them at one organization, in fact (but our community regularly achieves the "impossible", right?).

    However, they have all been proven in the corporate marketplace. Maybe you can only add one to the support experience you provide. But I'd like to think that even that one will make your customers happier, and I believe that's what makes customers into evangelists, and buyers into repeat buyers, and skeptics into customers.

    examples of great and poor support -

    vs

    [query: what is your company like?]

  5. Supportability is our mantra at New Relic, and it is a philosophy that any organization can adopt, and achieve in different ways. Having a product that you can support easily makes supporting that product easier. This seems like a tautology but if you start out with something as complex as photoshop, you need killer docs out of the gate; however if you start out with something like Skitch or MS Paint, it's possible to provide killer support with minimal effort, and grow in ways that are sustainable to support no matter what your organization's size.

  6. Growing a Culture

    This one is a little easier to do when you start small but with customer support in mind. However, it's worth the effort to do at any stage if you haven't started there--it has a lot of aspects that help your company as much as your customers.

  7. Attitude
  8. bedside manner.

    Think back to "how would you like to be treated?" I don't know about you, but when I write, phone, or walk into someplace looking for help, the perceived quality of the help is as much about "did I get an answer the first time?" as "was the receptionist pretty, was the office friendly, and did I get a backrub?" I wouldn't object to any of those things, but as someone trying to solve a problem, function is way more important than form. and the most frequent measure of our success as a "show the customers some love" philosophy at new relic is how often they rate our support experience as good. And those ratings are frequently influenced by how quickly someone got the answer--not "did it take 2 days for them to answer me" but "how few back-and-forth interactions were there?" Finally consider the common wisdom on context-switching and time management: context switches are expensive! to have to change repeatedly for a few seconds to volley back and forth on questions is not conducive to worker happiness or high productivity. once-and-done sure is, and if you can pull it off with an extra minute the first time, it could save you 30 minutes of low productivity later.

  9. know when to give up.

    This is something we don't do particularly well at New Relic, and it has been a conscious management decision. The way our VP (my boss's boss) puts it:

    Our #1 most successful marketing plan is when people change jobs and take their love for us to a new company. This philosophy was perhaps guided by the story relayed in Tony Hsieh's book about Zappos called _Delivering_Happiness_ in which the company struggled and perservered to help a small-time partner get up and running, and that guy later changed jobs to work at a huge company and landed one of the bigger deals based entirely on the support experience he'd received at the former job. So we work with just about every customer to the point of exhaustion, even if they clearly aren't our target market (we land a lot of those via promotions like free books and t-shirts if you try our software). While that story is a great one and that magic customer who will some day get you that million dollar deal might be lurking at the bottom of your support queue asking how to figure out what his password is, when you're a small organization, you may find it more sustainable to let some go. Just don't do it for the wrong reasons, or with low style.

    Go back to that first-date analogy: maybe your date is nervous at first and needs an hour to settle down and show his or her true colors. But maybe an entire evening with them was painful and you couldn't imagine spending any more time with them. So be a good person and tell your customer "I'm sorry we're having so much trouble here. I'd be happy to refund your payment for our software" instead of just ignoring them. "I'm sorry but I don't think our software is a good fit for you" is a lot nicer than radio silence...and perhaps you've noticed the (average) negative support experience leading to a lot more negative press than a positive experience...well, your potential customers are likely to notice as well.