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Discover how to enhance the WordPress product experience through customer-centric support. Join us as we discuss effective strategies to improve user satisfaction and retention. Don’t miss this insightful episode!
0:01 foreign [Music] 0:17 this is WP product talk the place where every week we interview an experienced 0:22 WordPress products owner on strategies tips experiences failures and successes 0:28 of running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses uh I'm Katie Keith CEO at barntube plugins 0:35 and I'm Zach founder of gravitykit and trusted login and today's topic is customer-centric 0:42 support enhancing the WordPress product experience 0:48 uh and this is a great topic because customer support is the only interaction point that we get between our product 0:55 owners ourselves and our customers and so it's the quickest way to build loyalty trust set a tone for your 1:03 business or you can really screw it up and uh make enemies instead of customers 1:10 and to introduce Our Guest today we have especially appearance from Jack Arturo from WP Fusion 1:17 hi guys hey Jack hey Jack 1:22 thanks for coming on and welcome um could you first introduce yourself and talk a bit about what you do for 1:29 anyone who doesn't already know you yeah um I'm Jack Arturo and I have been 1:34 working my company's very good plugins and our main plugin is called WP fusion 1:41 um it's been around for like eight years now and um it provides a tight integration 1:46 between WordPress and crm's and email Marketing Systems so if you are um you 1:52 know selling event registrations with the events calendar or signing subscriptions of woocommerce subscriptions or whatever and you need 1:58 to get that customer data into your email marketing platform or you know into Salesforce or into HubSpot or 2:03 whatever so you can run reports on that data send automated emails um create tasks and generally automate 2:10 the sales process um we provide that link bi-directionally between WordPress and whatever platform 2:16 you're using cool well thanks for coming on and um so 2:21 we're going to be talking about support and how to get it right in a WordPress product business so anybody watching 2:27 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 2:34 be great if you've got any questions so first of all we'll talk about why is 2:39 this topic so important for WordPress product owners and I'll go first this week 2:45 um so well you can't deny that customer support is essential for a WordPress product business 2:51 um it keeps customers happy it boosts your reputation because people talk about companies that have good support 2:57 prevents refunds and helps to gain Customer Loyalty which in turn can increase your retention and future 3:03 renewal rates but many WordPress product owners more than most Industries I would 3:08 say start off as solopreneurs who are doing all the support themselves as well as all the marketing and the product 3:15 development you know how it is and this raises many issues for WordPress product owners in particular is support your 3:22 main skill set maybe it doesn't come naturally to you I bet there's an opportunity cost of spending your time 3:28 on support instead of growing your business as well so what should you be spending your time on 3:33 um to grow your business the most effectively when should you hire people to do support if you are going to hire 3:40 people should that be in-house or Outsource should you use help desk software so it's a very important topic 3:46 for us to discuss here today because of all those questions that product owners have to think about 3:52 uh Jack what's your um kind of take on the issue 3:58 um I actually still consider myself a support technician first and a business owner second 4:04 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 4:09 I would hire a CEO and just do support full-time um it's for me it's the most 4:15 satisfying part of the business um but yeah because I think it is so important and 4:20 um I would say that especially with our product because we are an integration solution 4:25 um it's not like a a monolithic thing like an e-commerce plugin where you decide this is going to be the feature 4:31 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 4:38 Fusion to the latest tools and um techniques and that's all coming out of direct interaction with customers 4:45 um so yeah I still spend a lot of my day doing it um and I really enjoy it I was 4:50 actually just running the numbers before the show and in the last seven years I've personally sent um 23 000 replies 4:58 to 4 600 customers um so we have a support team now but I'm 5:03 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 5:10 really responsive um understanding and um uh just very good 5:17 support and I think that we get a lot of organic traffic and new customers as a result of that 5:22 yeah I think the word of mouth that comes from having a a really strong support team uh and a support experience 5:29 is invaluable uh the the way that word travels if you have a bad 5:37 customer support experience versus a good one um you know bad news travels I think 5:42 it's three times as fast or something like that like people will spread a lot worse uh it will spread bad experiences 5:49 a lot more than good experiences but there it builds such loyalty and such a 5:55 strong customer uh uh appreciation for you that it's an 6:00 invaluable marketing uh tool your customer support um and I think that 6:07 uh because it's the way that we as product owners 6:13 interact with our customers it's really the only thing that we have that we don't control exactly like we control 6:19 our marketing we control our ads we control our product to a certain degree 6:25 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 6:32 pay-per-click and SEO and conversion rates and and build scripts and all this stuff 6:37 um we lose sight of the number one thing that actually matters which is our customers The Experience they have with 6:44 our with our products and uh and it's the one place where customers get to 6:49 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 6:55 customers and I think that um no matter what you're doing for your business focusing on customer support 7:02 focusing on the customer experience will always pay off 7:09 so now we've established why 7:14 why in a bit more depth about our own experiences of customer support let's do 7:19 it uh Kate let's start with Jack um 7:25 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 7:32 time I started this company I've been working in WordPress for maybe six or seven years so I had a lot 7:37 of support experiences and I know um while running an agency a lot of 7:43 times the products that we chose to use were the products that had good support experiences even just like something 7:49 like getting a reply the same day would make us choose one product over another and 7:55 um so I knew that that was a big differentiator in a world where a lot of 8:01 products do achieve the same functionality in the end um so for us from the very beginning support was a priority 8:08 um and even now when I'm choosing I mean like for example we are in the process 8:13 of switching away from active campaign for our email marketing and a big factor 8:19 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 8:26 in January we we pointed out um a bug with the API that was easily reproducible in a browser and by the 8:34 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 8:40 I I guess for me um yeah support has always been a part 8:45 of the products that I choose and um and so that's why it's been such a 8:51 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 8:57 you know I think WordPress companies often have better support than a lot of other software type companies in my 9:04 experience a lot of the SAS ones seem to take for ages forever like you said and 9:09 WordPress is generally quite good and I think there's probably an aspect of venture capital in that too um because 9:16 we've seen kind of an economic downturn in the last year and um I know a certainly active campaign has taken a 9:21 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 9:27 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 9:32 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 9:38 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 9:43 one thing people talk about is how bad the support experience is like I like I like having a profit that people are 9:48 excited to use not one that people say yeah it works well but hopefully nothing goes wrong because then like I'll never 9:54 get any help with it um but uh I guess yeah it's a bit of a different mindset 10:00 because they're in this sort of looking for this um SAS growth bootstrap or like um you 10:06 know going to public kind of mentality whereas we're more of a bootstrapped slow and steady 10:11 um we're okay with keeping our support team through a downturn even if it's costing us a little more so yeah 10:18 so what's your setup with support you said you do lots yourself still 10:24 yeah so um we use level up uh for support like you do 10:29 um and they handle uh billing and um any kind of technical issue that comes in 10:35 they'll set up a test and reproduce it to confirm it which is sometimes the most time consuming part because we work 10:40 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 10:46 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 10:53 but I spent two or three hours with one specific customer who um he exported uh 10:58 10 000 orders uh to his email marketing system from member press and 90 of them 11:04 were missing and so and so the exporter said they were all 11:09 exported but when we ran the counts they were missing so that kind of I mean I don't know what normal companies would 11:15 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 11:22 like was this successfully exported or how many were or um what was the time stamp and that kind of thing so that led 11:29 into an afternoon of building new tools to help everybody understand um like what were the points of failure 11:35 in a large export and um being able to go back and correct individual records it might have an issue one at a time 11:40 instead of deleting everything and starting over so that's the kind of thing where I like to be part of the process because 11:45 um you know if it had all just been running by A playbook we might have just told him delete everything and start 11:50 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 11:58 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 12:05 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 12:10 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 12:18 customers get in touch with us we have failed them to a level where they have given up and that is a really 12:25 unfortunate thing that we we have an opportunity there so Jack you took that opportunity to say okay I can improve 12:32 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 12:38 and that's where um customer support is so vital for improving the customer experience 12:43 because every single interaction point is an opportunity missed where we could 12:48 have avoided them having to get in touch with us like every every single ticket is a sign that we have failed them in 12:55 some way with onboarding with our user interface with our documentation 13:02 um with our feature set everything kind of comes when whenever you get in a customer ticket it means something has 13:08 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 13:14 good positive you know moments of wonder that customers have with your products but it also is an exciting thing that 13:21 you can say okay cool I can see how this can be fixed uh with code or with better 13:26 email drip campaigns for onboarding uh it's it's every interaction is an 13:33 opportunity for improvement yeah and I guess I mean maybe not everybody sees it that way 13:38 level up sent us a survey this morning um with questions like what is your expectation for the number 13:45 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 13:52 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 13:59 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 14:05 agent can take their time and reply to them 14:11 yeah and so that's that kind of feeds into my story with customer support which is um when I started gravity view 14:18 uh I really used the initial feedback from the beta period to uh build out the 14:24 product set and customer feedback uh was super vital to saying okay this is what 14:31 we need to work on next and it's just invaluable so every time I uh 14:37 have a customer support request that comes in and that I reply to I try to 14:42 eke out a little bit more information about what their goals are as a company what they were trying to accomplish uh 14:49 Beyond just what what went wrong or what questions they had like what are they trying to do and how can we make that 14:55 easier for them in the future and I just love how um how they volunteer their time to help us 15:03 with our products so that we can help them like it's a beautiful cycle when it works properly 15:11 yeah definitely how do you always get that information though when you're not the one doing the support 15:18 yeah that's where the culture of support comes in and it's hard um because it often is seen as creating 15:24 more work so that's where um you know when you're anything becomes 15:31 a a gamification system when it's your job it's like what can I do can I do X 15:37 easier to achieve y outcome like Jack was saying like with level up support like he has to say no take as much time 15:44 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 15:50 close all the tickets in box zero so you might not want that follow-up message from the customer but that's where 15:57 training and and encouraging people to have the customer first mindset is the 16:03 way to go and uh to say okay thank you for sharing that no no really like 16:10 what else like give us a bigger picture what is the what what this was what you 16:15 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 16:20 along your journey for solving whatever problem you're trying to solve with our product like 16:25 um it takes training and it takes uh determination it doesn't always happen but when it does happen it really it's a 16:32 really great um Revelations and you need a lot of capacity for that 16:37 as well because when you don't have the capacity to cope with the ticket it is about getting to inbox zero and just 16:43 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 16:51 the learning that comes from each ticket as an opportunity so it's about somehow finding investing in that capacity 16:59 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 17:05 a single bug that that everybody has that and you just are trying to close the tickets you can always come back 17:10 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 17:17 things going what you know following up with with customers who have already gotten in touch with you to find out 17:22 what uh what else they're experienced if they switched away from your product to another product why they've done that 17:27 like it's it's such a powerful marketing tool 17:35 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 17:42 doing all the support to Having Eight full-time support engineers 17:48 um so I hang on to support for a really long time it was the thing probably the 17:53 thing that I found the hardest to um delegate out of everything because I 17:59 felt like I knew our products better than anybody else and even though I'm not a developer I knew about all the 18:05 advanced use cases and um all these random work around like use our plugin with this other plug-in to 18:12 fix any gaps in functionality and Achieve different requirements and I thought how can anybody else know all 18:19 the different WordPress plugins and what worked with ours and so I really didn't want to lose that because I think that's 18:25 important for like sales and things because often even when our plugins couldn't do something by having that 18:32 extra knowledge I was able to recommend solutions that would meet their full needs as that was talking about and then 18:39 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 18:46 was just growing too much and I was dealing with something like 50 tickets a day and it would take more than half my 18:52 time luckily I can type very fast and had lots of Saved responses I had a 18:58 massive Google doc which my team still uses and now actually with common responses in it so quickly copy and 19:05 pasting and personalizing and all of that but I couldn't keep doing that as 19:10 the company grew and grew and so I um hired someone from level up which is 19:16 the agency that is that so that Jack mentioned a minute ago which is they 19:22 just do support if you don't know them for WordPress theme and plug-in companies so they're all there people 19:28 are really well trained and no WordPress as well as customer support philosophies and principles and things so I think it 19:35 was James Kemp that recommended them to me and I was really skeptical they're based in the Philippines and having had 19:42 bad experiences of um over overseas Outsource customer support from things like Banks and other 19:49 Industries I was really cynical and so but I contacted level up and they sent 19:55 me some sample responses of one of their guys that they were proposing allocating to farm too and he was just amazing and 20:04 I immediately realized that I would be proud to have this guy answering tickets on for my customers and he's still with 20:11 us now like four years later or something and my camera has gone so I'm 20:16 going to switch cameras they keep overheating um 20:22 sorry about that so I started him off as our first support engineer and he's 20:27 still with us and we've grown as we needed to basically since then 20:33 um and so now we've got um maybe four level up people and four people that 20:38 I've hired directly um when maybe I need a different skill set they didn't offer or something 20:44 but the other thing worth mentioning is the different tiers of support because once you get past just having maybe 20:51 yourself or one person to help you then you might need to think about what 20:56 different expertise you need in your support team so we have support on three tiers where tier one is the kind of 21:03 basic account type queries refunds where it's obvious they need a refund things 21:08 like that tier two is kind of advanced uh WordPress knowledge level where they 21:15 can do Advanced products Knowledge Questions troubleshooting but not coding 21:20 and we also have two tier three support Engineers who actually are developers as 21:26 well so that their role is to really save our developers time and act as a 21:32 bridge between support and development so that they will even do things like pull requests and identify the exact 21:39 source of the bug and how to fix it and then pushing that through to the lead developer to say and time particularly 21:46 on the simpler bugs and the scene compatibility issues or whatever so we've got quite a complex system so 21:53 we've gone from me on my own to this basically and it's kind of funny because at first 21:59 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 22:06 ever do all this stuff and these people are doing it way better than me yeah definitely 22:11 and kitty how do you help these uh people who are outsourced or how do you 22:18 help your outsourced customer support team feel like part of the team or how do you how do you manage that 22:24 the way level up work is they don't share support Engineers across multiple companies they allocate them full time 22:31 to you and they don't even offer part-time anymore so this person joins 22:36 your team they will join your company slack you can put them on your team page on your website and things they join 22:43 like we just started doing team social calls and all the level up people are on just exactly the same as my direct hires 22:50 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 22:57 to a massive agency where there's a hundred people that might end up with one of your tickets these are dedicated 23:02 people but level up have put the investment into the training and the policies and all that which I may not 23:10 have capacity to and managing them they do a lot of Performance Management as well which I wouldn't have the capacity 23:17 to do um so I think it's the same or better as having your own people rather than a 23:24 compromise are all your hires are direct to that 23:31 yep uh we have two full-time support team members and they uh one of them 23:38 lives in Brazil and another lives in Italy and uh both of them are named 23:45 Hoffa so it makes it easy for our customers because whenever they respond uh they're responding to Raphael 23:53 our customers don't always know that there are two Raphael's so it's a a seamless customer experience 24:01 uh until uh our developer Vlad or I get involved um it's just Rafael all the way 24:08 down oh my good actually that the customer because sometimes there is a bit of 24:13 friction introduced when people feel they're being bounced so they won't realize will they right and it's nice 24:19 one of the things that's nice about having them uh in different time zones is that they get to cover different time 24:26 periods so we have uh what eight hours in Italy and then eight hours in Brazil 24:32 it covers a large portion of our uh user base 24:37 Katie do you have most of the day covered as well or are you like me where you're still operating based around the 24:42 time zone you live in um we're kind of like Europe plus a few 24:48 hours on either side um the level up one's very good at doing 24:53 what is actually quite anti-social hours for them they understand that they need to have some overlap with American time 25:00 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 25:07 sometimes about the hours they do so we have more than just eight hours a day coverage but not by any means 24. 25:16 so we have a bit on weekend too that's one of the biggest things that I 25:21 think that we can improve upon uh is to even with that time zone coverage 25:27 there's still a gap that can result in like you know 18-hour period where somebody's emailing support uh were 25:35 replying within 15 30 minutes because we're you know somebody somebody's available and then they reply one final 25:42 time but we've logged off and then there's nothing for like 10 hours and that must feel really bad as a 25:50 customer and uh it's always tough when there's there are gaps like that that 25:55 um you know when reality of our businesses makes it harder for our customers to get there I'm definitely 26:01 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 26:07 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 26:14 look at getting more coverage so what kind of things are you doing jack uh to from a like technical 26:22 standpoint when it comes to customer support uh like what tools do you use 26:29 um how are you trying to make it easier for customers to find their own like self-help uh Solutions uh can you tell 26:35 us more about that um yeah I've been working a lot on that over the last couple years so 26:42 for one thing is um uh in adding documentation to the plug-in 26:48 um wherever it might be applicable um and linking back to the docs on our website and also trying to 26:55 um like proactively detect things that might cause problems um we have some features that rely on JavaScript and if 27:02 you're using WP engine or JS optimize or whatever these kind of optimized plugins that mess with JavaScript 27:08 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 27:15 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 27:22 it's worth putting in a little bit extra work to get ahead of that um things like we have some issues with 27:28 WP engines we try to detect that in advance and let people know and then even like I've spent some time earlier 27:34 this year on our search form when you type in the topic or sorry our support 27:39 form when you type in the topic for your ticket it pulls up relevant documentation based on the keywords and 27:46 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 27:53 seeing like yeah um not everybody but say 10 or something that people were beginning to enter a ticket and then 27:58 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 28:06 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 28:13 down the wrong road um to try to avoid the support touch 28:20 and what are you using for your support desk so we were on help Scout for many years 28:27 and it was it was good um but I never used the chat widget I 28:33 never used the documentation thing I really just wanted like a nice looking multi-user um support email inbox and I 28:40 kept adding all these fancy features um which was fine until they tried to double the price so 28:48 um and especially because now um so we added a level up uh to support the support team was the first person to 28:54 join in 2020 um and now I have another person who's doing kind of what Katie described as 29:00 tier three um so with the help Scout pricing going up to was like 50 a month per user now 29:05 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 29:12 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 29:19 week I've um moved to free Scout which is a self-hosted support desk um 29:24 solution and um it's it's pretty good now that I've been using it for one day 29:30 I've found a lot of things to improve um yeah I've sent you some things I 29:36 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 29:44 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 29:50 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 29:57 support process um so for example we have a public feature request board at the moment if a customer requests a 30:02 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 30:08 create the feature add the customer as a user And subscribe the user to the future request so we can notify them 30:14 when it's complete so um we're just now working on a integration for the help 30:19 desk software where we could one click create a feature request from the support ticket add the customer to the 30:26 request for notification and then put a link to the future request back into the ticket and um we have jira integration 30:33 now too which studio we use for um tracking tasks and also managing pull 30:39 requests and documentation so now we can take a support ticket and the agent 30:45 Canon one click say this issue is a technical issue here's the steps to produce it please fix and it will go 30:51 into jira get Auto assigned to the next available developer and then when the jira developer um it's automated endure 30:58 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 31:04 ticket in the free Scout and reactivates it tells the support agent to let the customer know um that the issue is 31:09 solved so this is like it's kind of boring um but it's stuff you're spending a lot of time on just 31:15 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 31:21 request tracker and now that's mostly automated with one click so that's um I think Gonna Save a lot of time 31:28 I found that following up with customers even years later about us 31:34 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
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