Monthly Archives: October 2013

Support team retention? The MOST important thing.

Customer Service, Tech,

ladder to the sky“So many support teams see members come and go. It’s the stepping stone for ‘more respectable’ jobs. This can be okay in certain organizations, but most of the time it simply results in lower quality of support for the customer. High turnover means training, re-training, and undocumented processes … your customers suffer, and usually the bottom line does as well. Keeping support members who are good at the job is vital.”

(From Chris Bowler‘s blog)

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’m encountering this a lot while hiring at ZOZI. This is the first company I’ve worked at that is very attractive to the general public (UserVoice was more “startup cool”) and lots of folks have literally told me “I’ve been waiting for a job, any job to open at your company” while I looked on at their marketing-heavy resumes. Some of them are promising (and hey, one of my existing, awesome team members came to us that way) but most of them are the types whose first question is about the career progression track is at the company. In short, they want to know how long until they can go work in Marketing.

I’ve always been focused on keeping my staff happy but this is a great reminder that it’s not just important, but essential.

(Via Andrew Spittle)

Photo courtesy of Prescott Pym.

Banning Madonna from your business? THAT’S community.

Community

After Madonna recently texted throughout an indie film screening, the famous Alamo Drafthouse made an announcement.

Alamo, a fantastic theater chain (Which I’ve been to!) that serves food and beer during movies (much like Oakland’s Parkway Theater), is well known for it’s strict values about not about disrupting movies. Founded by and patronized by film lovers, the Alamo has famously kicked people out for texting during movies (warning: mature language):

Why? Because this is a value their community cares deeply about. Their extreme adherence to this rule builds a much stronger emotional connection with their customers than anything else they could do.

But banning Madonna? Especially the Madonna who just released an indie film? Isn’t that a bit extreme? Won’t that hurt business?

Absolutely not. This is community-building.

Alamo is sticking to their values – taking them to an extreme, even – and it’s going to make their fans love them even more. For every hardcore Madonna fan who might swear off Alamo there’s going to be 3 passionate filmgoers who will make the extra effort to patronize Alamo.

Is this PR? Sure. Madonna wasn’t in an Alamo Drafthouse; they didn’t have to comment on this story. But it’s community-driven PR. It’s building a story not around whatever’s hip, but around what really, emotionally, honestly resonates with your community. As others have said, community is the new PR.

Don’t go middle of the road to avoid insulting people. Stick to your community’s values and back them up, even if it means doing something extreme like pissing off a major celebrity. It’ll make your fans love you (and bring you return business) even more.

Setting expectations can literally change attitudes

Customer Service, ,

“There were plenty of complaints regarding baggage claim time [at the] Houston Airport. They reduced the average wait time to 8 minutes, well within industry standards. But the complaints persisted.

So the airport decided on a new approach: they moved the arrival gates away from the baggage claim area. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. It resulted in complaints reducing to almost zero.”

Via FlightComputer

This is the same thing I wrote about for UserVoice regarding listing response times. People expect speed. Sometimes unreasonable speed. You can try to hit expectations, or you can set entirely realistic external expectations and then outperform them…which will utterly delight your customers.

Fall in love with the journey, not the destination

Life, ,

illustrationThis article rings so true. Falling in love with the journey is the right way to reach success.

“If you look at the people who are consistently achieving their goals, you start to realize that it’s not the events or the results that make them different. It’s their commitment to the process. They fall in love with the daily practice, not the individual event.”

I’m good at half of this. I like inventing things and making them work and figuring out how to optimize them.

Where I fall down is the follow-through. I’m stoked about inventing something but once it’s reasonably established I’m not as interested in following through with the minutia that makes it a long-term success.

I attribute this to two things:

1) Weakness of character. Honestly, I just need to get better at following through.

2) Delegation. Previously I had very few resources in terms of delegation, so any detail-oriented follow-through fell on me. I’m happy to do anything, but trying to balance company-wide strategy and editing HTML emails is hard.

I need to fall in love with making the minutia happen. I hope with a fresh attitude and a passionate team I can do this.

Start a dialog before you NEED to

Community

This is a fantastic article on why the lost art of schmoozing led to the government shutdown.

The key lesson: if you start a dialog with key parties before you need to, you’ll be able to deal with the rough patches better.

This is why we build customer communities instead of just having faceless users. This is why we build company culture instead of just a business. This is why lunches and coffees are not a waste of time.