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foreign [Music]
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this is WP product talk the place where every week we interview an experienced
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WordPress products owner on strategies tips experiences failures and successes
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of running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses uh I'm Katie Keith CEO at barntube plugins
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and I'm Zach founder of gravitykit and trusted login and today's topic is customer-centric
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support enhancing the WordPress product experience
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uh and this is a great topic because customer support is the only interaction point that we get between our product
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owners ourselves and our customers and so it's the quickest way to build loyalty trust set a tone for your
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business or you can really screw it up and uh make enemies instead of customers
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and to introduce Our Guest today we have especially appearance from Jack Arturo from WP Fusion
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hi guys hey Jack hey Jack
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thanks for coming on and welcome um could you first introduce yourself and talk a bit about what you do for
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anyone who doesn't already know you yeah um I'm Jack Arturo and I have been
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working my company's very good plugins and our main plugin is called WP fusion
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um it's been around for like eight years now and um it provides a tight integration
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between WordPress and crm's and email Marketing Systems so if you are um you
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know selling event registrations with the events calendar or signing subscriptions of woocommerce subscriptions or whatever and you need
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to get that customer data into your email marketing platform or you know into Salesforce or into HubSpot or
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whatever so you can run reports on that data send automated emails um create tasks and generally automate
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the sales process um we provide that link bi-directionally between WordPress and whatever platform
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you're using cool well thanks for coming on and um so
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we're going to be talking about support and how to get it right in a WordPress product business so anybody watching
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live uh please add any comments on the YouTube comments and we'll be happy to answer them while we're on so that would
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be great if you've got any questions so first of all we'll talk about why is
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this topic so important for WordPress product owners and I'll go first this week
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um so well you can't deny that customer support is essential for a WordPress product business
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um it keeps customers happy it boosts your reputation because people talk about companies that have good support
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prevents refunds and helps to gain Customer Loyalty which in turn can increase your retention and future
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renewal rates but many WordPress product owners more than most Industries I would
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say start off as solopreneurs who are doing all the support themselves as well as all the marketing and the product
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development you know how it is and this raises many issues for WordPress product owners in particular is support your
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main skill set maybe it doesn't come naturally to you I bet there's an opportunity cost of spending your time
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on support instead of growing your business as well so what should you be spending your time on
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um to grow your business the most effectively when should you hire people to do support if you are going to hire
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people should that be in-house or Outsource should you use help desk software so it's a very important topic
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for us to discuss here today because of all those questions that product owners have to think about
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uh Jack what's your um kind of take on the issue
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um I actually still consider myself a support technician first and a business owner second
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um I spend probably more than half my time on support still after eight years and I like it actually if I had a choice
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I would hire a CEO and just do support full-time um it's for me it's the most
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satisfying part of the business um but yeah because I think it is so important and
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um I would say that especially with our product because we are an integration solution
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um it's not like a a monolithic thing like an e-commerce plugin where you decide this is going to be the feature
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set and this is how it's going to work and and that's you know my Founder's vision for the product um we are constantly adapting to AP
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Fusion to the latest tools and um techniques and that's all coming out of direct interaction with customers
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um so yeah I still spend a lot of my day doing it um and I really enjoy it I was
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actually just running the numbers before the show and in the last seven years I've personally sent um 23 000 replies
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to 4 600 customers um so we have a support team now but I'm
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still um I'm still sending about a third of the messages um I quite enjoy it and I think it it pays off we have a reputation for having
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really responsive um understanding and um uh just very good
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support and I think that we get a lot of organic traffic and new customers as a result of that
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yeah I think the word of mouth that comes from having a a really strong support team uh and a support experience
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is invaluable uh the the way that word travels if you have a bad
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customer support experience versus a good one um you know bad news travels I think
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it's three times as fast or something like that like people will spread a lot worse uh it will spread bad experiences
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a lot more than good experiences but there it builds such loyalty and such a
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strong customer uh uh appreciation for you that it's an
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invaluable marketing uh tool your customer support um and I think that
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uh because it's the way that we as product owners
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interact with our customers it's really the only thing that we have that we don't control exactly like we control
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our marketing we control our ads we control our product to a certain degree
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um but the the one thing that we that we lose sight of when we're focused on all these hard metrics like you know
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pay-per-click and SEO and conversion rates and and build scripts and all this stuff
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um we lose sight of the number one thing that actually matters which is our customers The Experience they have with
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our with our products and uh and it's the one place where customers get to
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know us as a company uh outside of word camps or in-person events but like this is our chance to make an impact on our
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customers and I think that um no matter what you're doing for your business focusing on customer support
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focusing on the customer experience will always pay off
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so now we've established why
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why in a bit more depth about our own experiences of customer support let's do
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it uh Kate let's start with Jack um
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I didn't have like a knockout support story I was trying to think of one I guess just generally I mean I got by the
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time I started this company I've been working in WordPress for maybe six or seven years so I had a lot
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of support experiences and I know um while running an agency a lot of
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times the products that we chose to use were the products that had good support experiences even just like something
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like getting a reply the same day would make us choose one product over another and
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um so I knew that that was a big differentiator in a world where a lot of
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products do achieve the same functionality in the end um so for us from the very beginning support was a priority
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um and even now when I'm choosing I mean like for example we are in the process
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of switching away from active campaign for our email marketing and a big factor
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is that um if you send a message to their support you wait two weeks is typical um and I've got a customer who
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in January we we pointed out um a bug with the API that was easily reproducible in a browser and by the
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middle of may they had fixed it um and this is you know like one line of code fix um so it's this kind of thing it's like
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I I guess for me um yeah support has always been a part
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of the products that I choose and um and so that's why it's been such a
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big part of our business and probably one of the things we put the most time into is that I think it makes people choose our products
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you know I think WordPress companies often have better support than a lot of other software type companies in my
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experience a lot of the SAS ones seem to take for ages forever like you said and
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WordPress is generally quite good and I think there's probably an aspect of venture capital in that too um because
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we've seen kind of an economic downturn in the last year and um I know a certainly active campaign has taken a
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lot of outside investment and one of the easiest ways to cut costs is to cut down the support center I don't know how many
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people but imagine you know they have 100 agents and you can save a lot of money by cutting that down to 50. um and
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the customer has to wait a little bit longer but are they really going to switch away they have their whole business on this platform whatever and a
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lot of people just complain about it and don't switch away but it like I would hate to have a product where the number
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one thing people talk about is how bad the support experience is like I like I like having a profit that people are
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excited to use not one that people say yeah it works well but hopefully nothing goes wrong because then like I'll never
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get any help with it um but uh I guess yeah it's a bit of a different mindset
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because they're in this sort of looking for this um SAS growth bootstrap or like um you
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know going to public kind of mentality whereas we're more of a bootstrapped slow and steady
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um we're okay with keeping our support team through a downturn even if it's costing us a little more so yeah
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so what's your setup with support you said you do lots yourself still
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yeah so um we use level up uh for support like you do
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um and they handle uh billing and um any kind of technical issue that comes in
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they'll set up a test and reproduce it to confirm it which is sometimes the most time consuming part because we work
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with a lot of different plugins uh so that's super helpful and it cuts down on most of the boring work um but if
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there's a technical issue then I'm still the one to fix it um so for example today I mean this was worse than usual
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but I spent two or three hours with one specific customer who um he exported uh
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10 000 orders uh to his email marketing system from member press and 90 of them
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were missing and so and so the exporter said they were all
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exported but when we ran the counts they were missing so that kind of I mean I don't know what normal companies would
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do but for us or for me at least I kind of introduced an opportunity of well we don't have any status tools to indicate
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like was this successfully exported or how many were or um what was the time stamp and that kind of thing so that led
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into an afternoon of building new tools to help everybody understand um like what were the points of failure
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in a large export and um being able to go back and correct individual records it might have an issue one at a time
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instead of deleting everything and starting over so that's the kind of thing where I like to be part of the process because
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um you know if it had all just been running by A playbook we might have just told him delete everything and start
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over and keep trying until it works again but as a result of this we get to build something that makes the product easier for everybody to use and ideally
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we'll never have to do this again once we have these new tools built so for me that's that's the process working and that's the part that I enjoy
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that's the big thing about customer support for me and I this is one of the things that I say over and over to our
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team and I try to internalize it every time I say it and not just uh not just say it but really feel it by the time
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customers get in touch with us we have failed them to a level where they have given up and that is a really
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unfortunate thing that we we have an opportunity there so Jack you took that opportunity to say okay I can improve
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this so that next time the customer won't have to reach out and it will be fixed and it'll be a seamless process
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and that's where um customer support is so vital for improving the customer experience
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because every single interaction point is an opportunity missed where we could
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have avoided them having to get in touch with us like every every single ticket is a sign that we have failed them in
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some way with onboarding with our user interface with our documentation
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um with our feature set everything kind of comes when whenever you get in a customer ticket it means something has
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gone wrong and it's that could be hard when you're doing the support because it means that you're not hearing all the
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good positive you know moments of wonder that customers have with your products but it also is an exciting thing that
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you can say okay cool I can see how this can be fixed uh with code or with better
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email drip campaigns for onboarding uh it's it's every interaction is an
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opportunity for improvement yeah and I guess I mean maybe not everybody sees it that way
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level up sent us a survey this morning um with questions like what is your expectation for the number
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of tickets the agent will be able to resolve a day and this kind of thing like like do we need to make the asian work faster and my reaction to that is
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like in a perfect world the agent won't get any tickets at all um like we're trying to really get it down to zero so I I said like um however
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long it takes doesn't really matter like it's my job to prevent them from coming in and then if they do come in um the
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agent can take their time and reply to them
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yeah and so that's that kind of feeds into my story with customer support which is um when I started gravity view
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uh I really used the initial feedback from the beta period to uh build out the
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product set and customer feedback uh was super vital to saying okay this is what
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we need to work on next and it's just invaluable so every time I uh
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have a customer support request that comes in and that I reply to I try to
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eke out a little bit more information about what their goals are as a company what they were trying to accomplish uh
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Beyond just what what went wrong or what questions they had like what are they trying to do and how can we make that
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easier for them in the future and I just love how um how they volunteer their time to help us
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with our products so that we can help them like it's a beautiful cycle when it works properly
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yeah definitely how do you always get that information though when you're not the one doing the support
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yeah that's where the culture of support comes in and it's hard um because it often is seen as creating
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more work so that's where um you know when you're anything becomes
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a a gamification system when it's your job it's like what can I do can I do X
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easier to achieve y outcome like Jack was saying like with level up support like he has to say no take as much time
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as you want we need to get this right when it's when it's all you do every day it can be easy to just say I want to
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close all the tickets in box zero so you might not want that follow-up message from the customer but that's where
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training and and encouraging people to have the customer first mindset is the
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way to go and uh to say okay thank you for sharing that no no really like
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what else like give us a bigger picture what is the what what this was what you
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were trying to describe this little piece now let's zoom out and see how how we can fix like how we can help you
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along your journey for solving whatever problem you're trying to solve with our product like
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um it takes training and it takes uh determination it doesn't always happen but when it does happen it really it's a
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really great um Revelations and you need a lot of capacity for that
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as well because when you don't have the capacity to cope with the ticket it is about getting to inbox zero and just
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clearing them in a acceptable way but if you don't have capacity you can't really go above and beyond in that way and do
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the learning that comes from each ticket as an opportunity so it's about somehow finding investing in that capacity
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it's a great thing to also so let's say you have a flood of tickets for some reason you had a new release and there's
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a single bug that that everybody has that and you just are trying to close the tickets you can always come back
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later when you're in a slow period go through your old support tickets and and follow up with them and say hey how are
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things going what you know following up with with customers who have already gotten in touch with you to find out
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what uh what else they're experienced if they switched away from your product to another product why they've done that
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like it's it's such a powerful marketing tool
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so for my story time I thought I'd talk about the kind of history of support at Barn too because we've gone from me
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doing all the support to Having Eight full-time support engineers
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um so I hang on to support for a really long time it was the thing probably the
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thing that I found the hardest to um delegate out of everything because I
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felt like I knew our products better than anybody else and even though I'm not a developer I knew about all the
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advanced use cases and um all these random work around like use our plugin with this other plug-in to
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fix any gaps in functionality and Achieve different requirements and I thought how can anybody else know all
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the different WordPress plugins and what worked with ours and so I really didn't want to lose that because I think that's
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important for like sales and things because often even when our plugins couldn't do something by having that
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extra knowledge I was able to recommend solutions that would meet their full needs as that was talking about and then
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even if it wasn't just with our products and I didn't want to lose that but eventually I kind of had to because it
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was just growing too much and I was dealing with something like 50 tickets a day and it would take more than half my
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time luckily I can type very fast and had lots of Saved responses I had a
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massive Google doc which my team still uses and now actually with common responses in it so quickly copy and
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pasting and personalizing and all of that but I couldn't keep doing that as
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the company grew and grew and so I um hired someone from level up which is
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the agency that is that so that Jack mentioned a minute ago which is they
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just do support if you don't know them for WordPress theme and plug-in companies so they're all there people
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are really well trained and no WordPress as well as customer support philosophies and principles and things so I think it
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was James Kemp that recommended them to me and I was really skeptical they're based in the Philippines and having had
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bad experiences of um over overseas Outsource customer support from things like Banks and other
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Industries I was really cynical and so but I contacted level up and they sent
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me some sample responses of one of their guys that they were proposing allocating to farm too and he was just amazing and
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I immediately realized that I would be proud to have this guy answering tickets on for my customers and he's still with
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us now like four years later or something and my camera has gone so I'm
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going to switch cameras they keep overheating um
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sorry about that so I started him off as our first support engineer and he's
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still with us and we've grown as we needed to basically since then
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um and so now we've got um maybe four level up people and four people that
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I've hired directly um when maybe I need a different skill set they didn't offer or something
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but the other thing worth mentioning is the different tiers of support because once you get past just having maybe
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yourself or one person to help you then you might need to think about what
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different expertise you need in your support team so we have support on three tiers where tier one is the kind of
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basic account type queries refunds where it's obvious they need a refund things
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like that tier two is kind of advanced uh WordPress knowledge level where they
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can do Advanced products Knowledge Questions troubleshooting but not coding
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and we also have two tier three support Engineers who actually are developers as
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well so that their role is to really save our developers time and act as a
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bridge between support and development so that they will even do things like pull requests and identify the exact
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source of the bug and how to fix it and then pushing that through to the lead developer to say and time particularly
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on the simpler bugs and the scene compatibility issues or whatever so we've got quite a complex system so
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we've gone from me on my own to this basically and it's kind of funny because at first
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you think like I'm doing everything how could anybody ever do what I do and a year later they're like how did I
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ever do all this stuff and these people are doing it way better than me yeah definitely
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and kitty how do you help these uh people who are outsourced or how do you
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help your outsourced customer support team feel like part of the team or how do you how do you manage that
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the way level up work is they don't share support Engineers across multiple companies they allocate them full time
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to you and they don't even offer part-time anymore so this person joins
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your team they will join your company slack you can put them on your team page on your website and things they join
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like we just started doing team social calls and all the level up people are on just exactly the same as my direct hires
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so they're not really any different because of the way level up do it it's not like you've hired you've outsourced
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to a massive agency where there's a hundred people that might end up with one of your tickets these are dedicated
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people but level up have put the investment into the training and the policies and all that which I may not
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have capacity to and managing them they do a lot of Performance Management as well which I wouldn't have the capacity
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to do um so I think it's the same or better as having your own people rather than a
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compromise are all your hires are direct to that
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yep uh we have two full-time support team members and they uh one of them
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lives in Brazil and another lives in Italy and uh both of them are named
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Hoffa so it makes it easy for our customers because whenever they respond uh they're responding to Raphael
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our customers don't always know that there are two Raphael's so it's a a seamless customer experience
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uh until uh our developer Vlad or I get involved um it's just Rafael all the way
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down oh my good actually that the customer because sometimes there is a bit of
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friction introduced when people feel they're being bounced so they won't realize will they right and it's nice
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one of the things that's nice about having them uh in different time zones is that they get to cover different time
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periods so we have uh what eight hours in Italy and then eight hours in Brazil
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it covers a large portion of our uh user base
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Katie do you have most of the day covered as well or are you like me where you're still operating based around the
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time zone you live in um we're kind of like Europe plus a few
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hours on either side um the level up one's very good at doing
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what is actually quite anti-social hours for them they understand that they need to have some overlap with American time
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which wouldn't be natural for them but I don't think we have anybody working past midnight their time but I do feel bad
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sometimes about the hours they do so we have more than just eight hours a day coverage but not by any means 24.
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so we have a bit on weekend too that's one of the biggest things that I
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think that we can improve upon uh is to even with that time zone coverage
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there's still a gap that can result in like you know 18-hour period where somebody's emailing support uh were
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replying within 15 30 minutes because we're you know somebody somebody's available and then they reply one final
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time but we've logged off and then there's nothing for like 10 hours and that must feel really bad as a
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customer and uh it's always tough when there's there are gaps like that that
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um you know when reality of our businesses makes it harder for our customers to get there I'm definitely
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guilty of jumping in at 8pm on a Friday just because I see something there like I check on my phone I'm like oh this is
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really easy fix I don't want to make them wait all weekend but I also know that that's not sustainable and can't scale so yeah eventually we'll have to
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look at getting more coverage so what kind of things are you doing jack uh to from a like technical
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standpoint when it comes to customer support uh like what tools do you use
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um how are you trying to make it easier for customers to find their own like self-help uh Solutions uh can you tell
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us more about that um yeah I've been working a lot on that over the last couple years so
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for one thing is um uh in adding documentation to the plug-in
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um wherever it might be applicable um and linking back to the docs on our website and also trying to
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um like proactively detect things that might cause problems um we have some features that rely on JavaScript and if
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you're using WP engine or JS optimize or whatever these kind of optimized plugins that mess with JavaScript
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um we proactively put a little notice saying hey like be careful with this or if there's a problem try deactivating that first I think a lot of companies
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would just wait for you to put in a ticket and then say oh I see you're using an optimization plug-in can you try turning that off but um yeah for me
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it's worth putting in a little bit extra work to get ahead of that um things like we have some issues with
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WP engines we try to detect that in advance and let people know and then even like I've spent some time earlier
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this year on our search form when you type in the topic or sorry our support
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form when you type in the topic for your ticket it pulls up relevant documentation based on the keywords and
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I've got um Google analytics or I did have Google analytics hooked up to that before they shut it down and um we were
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seeing like yeah um not everybody but say 10 or something that people were beginning to enter a ticket and then
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finding the resource they need and didn't submit anyway so it's just kind of um yeah like make sure as much as possible
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people have the resources they need and that we try to like get ahead of them with anything they might have misconfigured or or they might be headed
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down the wrong road um to try to avoid the support touch
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and what are you using for your support desk so we were on help Scout for many years
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and it was it was good um but I never used the chat widget I
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never used the documentation thing I really just wanted like a nice looking multi-user um support email inbox and I
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kept adding all these fancy features um which was fine until they tried to double the price so
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um and especially because now um so we added a level up uh to support the support team was the first person to
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join in 2020 um and now I have another person who's doing kind of what Katie described as
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tier three um so with the help Scout pricing going up to was like 50 a month per user now
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or something or 75. something like that yeah it's gonna yeah it's gonna go up to like 50 or 75 the end of August
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um it gets expensive like you know 200 bucks a month um when we're not using most of the features so yeah just this
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week I've um moved to free Scout which is a self-hosted support desk um
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solution and um it's it's pretty good now that I've been using it for one day
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I've found a lot of things to improve um yeah I've sent you some things I
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don't know if I mentioned like them stripping the CSS out of the support ticket so we lose like the nice table uh so yeah
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it's kind of open the can of worms I'm going to probably spend a few more hours this summer tweaking it to get it the way I want but it's nice to have full
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control we can put in as many users as we want and now I'm starting to build a lot more process automation around the
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support process um so for example we have a public feature request board at the moment if a customer requests a
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feature and support or has a an issue that turns out to be a feature a support agent has to go over to our website
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create the feature add the customer as a user And subscribe the user to the future request so we can notify them
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when it's complete so um we're just now working on a integration for the help
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desk software where we could one click create a feature request from the support ticket add the customer to the
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request for notification and then put a link to the future request back into the ticket and um we have jira integration
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now too which studio we use for um tracking tasks and also managing pull
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requests and documentation so now we can take a support ticket and the agent
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Canon one click say this issue is a technical issue here's the steps to produce it please fix and it will go
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into jira get Auto assigned to the next available developer and then when the jira developer um it's automated endure
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as well when they um basically sign off on their code and say the fix is complete um that puts a note back on the
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ticket in the free Scout and reactivates it tells the support agent to let the customer know um that the issue is
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solved so this is like it's kind of boring um but it's stuff you're spending a lot of time on just
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like manually copying out um oh okay this is a technical issue it's got to go in the issue tracker this is future request it's got to go on the
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request tracker and now that's mostly automated with one click so that's um I think Gonna Save a lot of time
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I found that following up with customers even years later about us
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a feature that they wanted or a bug that was so obscure that we couldn't deal
31:40
with it at the time but we finally fixed it uh following up with customers is Magic it makes people so happy with you
31:49
and it blows their minds and they they say thank you so much I can't believe you remembered
31:58
yeah we've done personal if anything on the feature request we contact them personally as well as sending a
32:05
newsletter to everybody or something yeah we just integrated uh we just
32:11
migrated to free Scout this week as well um it seems like there's a mass migration happening due to the changing
32:18
in pricing and uh we had a developer create a GitHub integration for us
32:23
similar to the jira integration because we keep our feature requests we keep our bug track uh track tracking all in
32:30
GitHub so uh it makes it easy to link an issue to in GitHub to a ticket and help
32:35
paying freescout and when the issue is closed in GitHub it reopens all the
32:41
issues in freescout and you can email them all and let them know that it is completed so that's going to be really a
32:48
huge enhancement for our customer support team yeah totally one thing I like about the
32:57
customer doesn't know you're using it from the customer's perspective it's just email or something
33:04
um I hate and again normally non-wordpress systems that it's all about the tickets and you've got
33:10
actually some WordPress themes have this you've got to log in and there's like a ticket system and it feels like you're
33:18
trying to jump through their Hoops I like the ones like help Scout where the customer just replies by email and it's
33:25
just an internal tool for us it doesn't need to affect the customer and I like using email first but um now
33:34
with free Scout we're also adding a support dashboard um and that will be embedded on our website sometimes as a person requesting
33:41
support I like that because I'm not 100 sure I didn't lose your reply and spam or something
33:46
um we do a lot of work with cloudflare for example I want to open a ticket with them I can check in their dashboard and
33:51
see that someone's looked at it and what the status is so I'm kind of interested or excited to integrate that more it's
33:58
pretty easy to use the customer just puts in their email and then they get a one-click verification link to their inbox they click it and then they can
34:04
see all their tickets the statuses and that kind of thing um so like We'll always stay email first but um some
34:10
people have asked for that in the past and we weren't able to provide it so I think that's a good thing to have now as
34:16
an option interesting so they can do email but there's a central record if they want to
34:21
access that exactly yeah yeah I'm excited about that too and I think
34:26
that it kind of fits into the meet customers where they are mindset where I
34:32
I love email first uh and I'm terrible at email
34:37
so I'm providing both modes for customers um same with live chat if customers prefer
34:43
live chat at some point there we want to be able to provide phone support if
34:50
somebody doesn't want to write or can't write they and they prefer to speak to somebody in person uh our our goal is to
34:57
make customers happy and if customers really hate writing emails uh what how
35:03
else can we serve them and how else can we help them be successful with our products yeah like I'm here hanging out with Will
35:10
Middleton from lifter LMS he's in Berlin for the week and he was on a call for like an hour last night at like 9 p.m
35:16
and I was like oh that meeting is running late it's like no I'm just helping a customer get set up with their course and like but I was overhearing
35:23
them the customer was loving it it was like like what do you suggest to do for this would you like the title of this and uh I don't have the capacity to do
35:30
that right now but it's like that customer really wanted to be met on a call and like have somebody really listen to their concerns and work their
35:36
solution with them and and Will loves doing that kind of stuff um so it's a win-win yeah I I'm starting
35:43
to think about like how can we make that happen for deck diffusion yeah I know that's something we haven't
35:49
got quite right yet we even have saved responses for when the customer requests the phone call politely explaining that
35:56
all our support is provided by email but that's not customer first and I'm aware
36:01
of that and I've noticed one thing negative with level up people is that there is quite a reluctance to do calls
36:08
of any kind with customers I think it's not part of their culture so at some point I need to tackle that and think
36:15
about it and how we can Implement that because some customers do want to just they always say it or just hop on a call
36:21
and I'll screen share with you to explain the problem and it doesn't feel right to say that we don't do that which
36:27
is how we currently are one thing that I do is provide in our
36:33
onboarding flow for our products we have a schedule a consultation call link that
36:39
goes directly to my calendar and people can book a 20-minute call with me uh for
36:44
to answer any questions that aren't answered by other things and the people might not want to create a support
36:50
ticket because they don't know exactly what their question is like that's one thing that that is tough is like how do
36:56
you define what you're trying to do in words uh that makes any sense at all that takes a lot of work to sculpt an
37:04
email to be uh understandable for for somebody who's unfamiliar with the problems you're trying to solve so I've
37:10
had these consultation calls and I think I've had five or six of them and I think maybe one or two decided that gravity
37:18
kit products were the right solution but they were all grateful when I said actually it sounds like you're trying to
37:24
do this other thing here are a couple plugins that are going to be better suited for you and they're all they're
37:30
all very grateful that they didn't spend the time trying to figure that out themselves and they also uh now have a
37:37
positive experience and a better understanding of what we do so we don't do customer support calls at the moment
37:43
but we do do consultation calls um for pre-sales what's the demand for those because I
37:50
can imagine it could become overwhelming thankfully not much at the moment uh not
37:55
many depends how prominently promote it and where you put it as well doesn't it yeah are we we have that
38:02
included in all our flows we customers probably see it two three times during the course of buying the product and and
38:09
setting it up um and thankfully not many people are interested in talking on the phone uh
38:15
like in like an elder Millennial or whatever like who talks on the phone anymore well I guess I do and a few of
38:22
our customers um but it's really just nice to have uh as a backup and when it does get too
38:28
busy then I'll consider having one of our customer support team members take uh take that as part of their
38:34
responsibility as well
38:39
yeah one thing I've been considering lately is how we can improve um sales through support because if you
38:47
have multiple products or even addition multiple tiers of your main product in
38:52
theory the people doing support could be doing upselling where they identify that that's appropriate
38:59
um and I've been talking to my support team about whether to for example um set them all up as Affiliates and
39:05
give them a small commission if they cross sell our plugins or something like that
39:11
um do either of you do anything like that
39:17
I will do it personally um we don't have multiple products like you do but we have
39:23
um plans that have more features I am a little bit hesitant to have other
39:29
people do it especially on a commission basis because I don't want the customer to feel pressured in any way when
39:35
they're contacting support or to feel like they have to spend more money to get a resolution out of support
39:41
um I've had that experience with some SAS companies and it's unpleasant so I think it could be done correctly but
39:47
um it's hard to like if you're incentivizing the agent to sell then they might default to selling
39:55
rather than solving and that's what I wouldn't want to happen yeah they're definitely training around that and monitoring to check it's being
40:01
done appropriately yeah yeah one has to be extremely careful with the incentive structure that one
40:08
puts in place uh because it corrupts the system uh so if if the goal is to
40:16
optimize for anything like you know smash that subscribe button by the way
40:22
um on YouTube like so so the goal is to have more subscribers now the goal is to
40:28
help WP product owners uh know what to do with their businesses and learn
40:33
things and so like what is the incentive to the support team the incentive should be somehow
40:40
structured so that it's about customer outcomes and more money isn't the structure that I think is appropriate
40:46
there yeah but then the feedback rating score doesn't fully reflect uh the customer
40:53
experience either and there's also they're the they're the ones where you can say like how is your customer support thumbs up or thumbs down and
40:59
they you click it and it goes to like should you buy this person a coffee or a television or like it it asks whether
41:06
this person should get a bonus for how well they responded to you like a tip and that just feel like that oh it's it
41:14
feels so dirty to me and it's like just pay here right yeah you pay your people
41:19
well like what is going on here normally you click one thing and you get
41:29
off right and so we have um I have in the past had a system where
41:35
like people submit a you know thumbs up or thumbs down and then we have a follow-up survey a day later asking
41:41
about their customer support experience and if they wanted to provide any feedback um I think the goal is to make it so
41:47
that people can share their experience without feeling like they're hurting the customer support
41:53
representative like I don't want to get somebody fired I don't want to get somebody punished uh or scolded
42:00
um but keeping track of the actual experience the customers have is is
42:06
important and it's kind of hard to deal with with a bit of nuance uh so that
42:12
they feel like they're in a safe space and can share yeah
42:17
so we normally finish at about quarter two so shall we move on to uh the best
42:23
advice to new product owners so Zach what would be your top tips around support
42:29
my top tip is use customer support requests as a gold mine and uh mind that
42:37
stuff uh so uh how do you mind this when you have so much information how do you
42:42
keep track of it well make sure you tag your customer support tickets uh with
42:47
all bunch of keywords so you can come back and find it easier later um
42:52
use them we have a testimonials tag for example our use of cases tag that our marketing person goes in there and
42:58
follows up with people who obviously are having a great time with a product or are doing something really cool that we
43:04
want to highlight um use it as you know the base of your marketing language for your SEO like
43:12
customer support stuff the questions that they ask are the questions that people are typing into Google use that
43:18
it's all gold that's my advice
43:24
okay and or WordPress product owners
43:29
um yeah I mean it is gold I guess I would say when you're just getting started I
43:34
held out really long on um hiring anyone to do the stuff that
43:39
could have really easily been outsourced like the billing support um upgrades downgrades cancellations partial refunds that kind of thing
43:47
I would say um like if you can um get someone to handle that or use a
43:52
payment Gateway like paddle or lemon squeezy or something that can handle that for you because that can be a bit of a drag but then keep your finger on
43:59
the pulse of support or stay in support for as long as you can um I know even like companies with
44:05
hundreds of people and multi-million dollars in Revenue some Founders still like I'm gonna spend Friday afternoons
44:11
working one-on-one with customers and it's it's still a valuable resource it's a gold mine no matter how long you've
44:16
been in business um your agents might have been doing something the same way for such a long time because that's the way it's always
44:22
been done and only you as a Founder can sort of see like ah this is how we can improve the product or the process or
44:28
the communication or marketing or whatever um so yeah
44:35
yeah and we've got a comment from Amber who's liking the idea of using it to create website content yeah I get so
44:43
excited when somebody in support gives me an idea for um a keyword or a use
44:48
case we haven't covered yet I'm like wow we can create whole tutorials around this and I didn't even know people used
44:54
our product for that use case so that can be a really big marketing opportunity
45:03
so my top tip would be to make support as efficient as possible because with a
45:10
small amount of thoughts there are huge opportunities to do that uh canned pre-saved content is an obvious way to
45:17
do that um when and there's so many different tools that you can use for that even if
45:22
you just use what to help Scout or whatever you're using or a Google doc or um there's other there's various tools
45:29
just for doing that as well um I even have things like um the Mac keyboard shortcuts for all
45:36
our product names and thanks for contacting us and those sorts of things right where I just type it yeah
45:43
that's pretty impressive yeah [Music] product cable takes forever to apply no
45:49
Commerce quick view Pro I just do wqv and it types it and I've encouraged the
45:55
support team to do the same even for individual phrases and let me know if you have any more questions or those
46:02
sorts of things could LMK or something so yeah think about how
46:07
you can really reduce the time create knowledge base articles and documentation for common questions and
46:14
FAQs and things because every ticket really should be an opportunity to
46:19
reduce future support as we touched on earlier and help the customer to help themselves and you can get faster and
46:26
faster and therefore not have to have such a big support team right
46:32
well thank you so much Jack uh for joining us uh next week we're going to discuss paid
46:40
advertising for WordPress products which is a something that not everybody does
46:45
and some have great success I convinced Jack to get into it uh and
46:53
sorry about that Jack but we'll find out from Drew Griswold next week uh how to
46:58
make that work better
47:08
a minute um hit like subscribe all the help learn nice things for us and we will see you next week bye everyone
47:16
bye