Customer-Centric Support: Enhancing the WordPress Product Experience

[00:00:00] Katie Keith: This is WP Product Talk, the place where every week we interview an experienced WordPress product owner on strategies, tips, experiences, failures, and successes of running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses. Uh, I'm Katie Keith, CEO at Barn2 plugin.

[00:00:35] Zack Katz: And I'm Zach, founder of Gravity Kit and Trust login.

[00:00:40] Katie Keith: And today's topic is customer-centric support, enhancing the WordPress products experience.

[00:00:48] Zack Katz: Uh, and this is a great topic because customer support is the only interaction point that we get between our, uh, product owners, ourselves and our customers. And so it's the quickest way to build loyalty, trust. Uh, set a tone for your business.

[00:01:04] Or you can really screw it up and, uh, make enemies instead of customers.

[00:01:10] Katie Keith: And to introduce our guest today, we have a special appearance from Jack Arturo from WP Fusion.

[00:01:17] Zack Katz: Hi guys. Hey

[00:01:17] Katie Keith: Zach. Hey, Jack.

[00:01:19] Zack Katz: Hey Jack.

[00:01:22] Katie Keith: So thanks for coming on and welcome. Um, could you first introduce yourself and talk a bit about what you do For anyone who doesn't already know you?

[00:01:31] Jack Arturo: Yeah. Um, I'm Jack Arturo and I have been working, um, my company's very good plugins and, um, our main plugin is called WP Fusion. Um, it's been around for like eight years now, and, um, it provides a tight integration between WordPress and CRMs and email marketing systems. So if you are, um. You know, selling event registrations with the events calendar or, um, selling subscriptions with WooCommerce subscriptions or whatever.

[00:01:57] And you need get that customer data, um, into your email marketing platform or, um, you know, into Salesforce or into HubSpot or whatever. So you can run reports on that data, send automated emails, um, create tasks and generally automate the sales process. Um, we provide that link, uh, bi-directionally between WordPress and whatever platform you're using.

[00:02:18] Katie Keith: Cool. Well thanks for coming on. And um, so we are gonna be talking about support and how to get it right in a WordPress product business. So anybody watching 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 be great if you've got any questions.

[00:02:37] So, first of all, we'll talk about why is this topic so important for WordPress product owners? And I'll go first this week. Um, say, well, you can't deny that customer support is essential for a WordPress product business. Um, it keeps customers happy, it boosts your reputation. 'cause people talk about companies that have good support, prevents refunds, and helps to gain customer loyalty, which in turn can increase your retention and future renewal rates.

[00:03:05] But many WordPress product owners, more than most industries, I would say. Start off as solopreneurs who were doing all the support themselves, as well as all the marketing and the product development. You know how it's, and this raises many issues for WordPress product owners in particular, is support your main skillset.

[00:03:22] Maybe it doesn't come naturally to you. I bet there's an opportunity cost of spending your time on support instead of growing your business as well. So what should you be spending your time on, um, to grow your business the most effectively? When should you hire people to do support? If you are gonna hire people, should that be in-house or outsource?

[00:03:43] Should you use help desk software? So it's a very important topic for us to discuss here today because of all those questions that product owners have to think about. Uh, Jack, what's your, um, kind of take on the issue?

[00:03:57] Jack Arturo: Um, I actually still consider myself a support technician first and a business owner second.

[00:04:04] 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, I would hire a CEO and just do support full-time. Um, it's, for me, it's the most satisfying part of the business. Um, but yeah, because I think it is so important. Um, I would say that especially with our product, because we are an integration solution, um, it's not like a, a monolithic thing, like an e-commerce plugin where you decide this is gonna be the feature set and this is how it's gonna work.

[00:04:33] And, and that's, you know, my founder's vision for the product. Um, we are constantly adapting IP fusion to the latest tools and um, techniques, and that's all coming out of direct interaction with customers. Um, so yeah, I still spend a lot of my day doing it, um, and I really enjoy it. I was actually just running the numbers before the show, and in the last seven years I've personally sent um, 23,000 replies to 4,600 customers.

[00:05:01] Um, so we have a support team now, but I'm 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 really responsive, um, understanding and um, uh, just very good support and I think that we get a lot of organic traffic and new customers as a result of that.

[00:05:23] Zack Katz: Yeah, I think the word of mouth that comes from having a, a really strong support team, uh, and a support experience is invaluable. Uh, the, the way that word travels, if you have a bad customer support experience versus a good one. Um, you know, bad news travels. I think it's three times as fast or something like that.

[00:05:44] Like people will spread a lot worse, uh, uh, will spread bad experiences a lot more than good experiences, but there, it builds such loyalty and a, such a strong customer, uh, uh, appreciation for you that it's an invaluable marketing, uh, tool, your customer support. Um, and I think that. Uh, because it's the way that we as product owners, uh, inter um, inter interact with our customers.

[00:06:15] It's really the only thing that we have that we don't control exactly. Like we control our marketing, we control our ads, we control our product to a certain degree. 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, pay per click and SEO and conversion rates and, and, and, uh, build scripts and all this stuff, um, we lose sight of the number one thing that actually matters, which is our customers, the experience they have with our, with our products.

[00:06:45] And, uh, and it's the one place where customers get to 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 customers. And I think that, um, no matter what you're doing for your business, focusing on customer support, focusing on the customer experience, we'll always pay off.

[00:07:09] Katie Keith: So now we've established why it's important. Should we move on to the story time section where we talk in a bit more depth about our own experiences of customer support?

[00:07:19] Jack Arturo: Let's do it.

[00:07:20] Katie Keith: Okay. Let's start with Jack.

[00:07:24] Jack Arturo: Um, 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 time I started this company, I've been working in WordPress for.

[00:07:35] Maybe six or seven years. So I've had a lot of support experiences and I know, um, while running an agency, a lot of times the products that we chose to use were the products that had good support, um, experiences. Even just like something like getting a reply the same day, um, would make us choose one product over another.

[00:07:54] And, um, so I knew that that was a big differentiator in, um, a world where a lot of products do achieve the same functionality in the end. Um, so for us from the very beginning, support was a priority. Um, and even now, like when, when I'm choosing, I mean like for example, we are in the process of switching away from active campaign, um, for our email marketing.

[00:08:18] And a big factor is that, um, if you send a message to their support, you wait two weeks is typical. Um, and wow, I've got a customer who. Yeah, in January we, we pointed out, um, a bug with the API that was easily reproducible, um, in a browser. And, um, by the middle of May they had fixed it. Um, and this is, you know, like one line of code fix.

[00:08:38] Um, so it's this kind of thing. It's like, I, I guess for me, um, yeah, support has always been a part of the products that I choose. And um, and so that's why it's been such a 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.

[00:08:57] Katie Keith: You know, I think WordPress companies often have better support than a lot of other software type companies. In my experience. A lot of the SaaS ones seem to take for ages forever, like you said. And WordPress is generally quite good.

[00:09:12] Jack Arturo: And I think there's probably an aspect of venture capital in that too.

[00:09:15] Um, because we've seen kind of an economic downturn in the last year and um, I know certainly active campaign has taken a 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 people, but imagine, you know, they have a hundred agents and you can save a lot of money, but cutting that down to 50, um, and the customer has to wait a little bit longer.

[00:09:34] Are they really gonna switch away? They have their whole business on this platform or whatever, and a 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 one thing people talk about is how bad the support experience is. Like, I like, I like having a profit that people are excited to use, not one that people say, yeah, it works well, but hopefully nothing goes wrong because then like I'll never get any help with it.

[00:09:54] Um, but, uh, I guess, yeah. It, it, it's a bit of a different mindset because they're in this sort of looking for this, um, SaaS growth bootstrap or, or like, um, you know, going to public kind of mentality. Whereas we're more of in a bootstrapped, slow and steady. Um, we're okay with keeping our support team through a downturn, even if it's costing us a little more.

[00:10:16] So, yeah.

[00:10:18] Katie Keith: So what's your setup with support? You said you do lots yourself still.

[00:10:24] Jack Arturo: Yeah. So, um, we use Level Up, uh, for support like you do, um, and they handle, uh, billing and, um, any kind of technical issue that comes in. They'll set up a test and reproduce it. To confirm it, which is sometimes the most time consuming part.

[00:10:40] 'cause we work with a lot of different plugins. Uh, so that's super helpful and it cuts down on in most of the boring work. Um, but if there's a technical issue, then I'm still the one to fix it. Um, so for example, today, I, I mean this was worse than usual, but I spent two or three hours with one specific customer who, um, he'd exported, uh, 10,000 orders, uh, to his.

[00:11:00] Email marketing system from MemberPress and 90 of them were missing. And so and so the exporters said they were all exported, but when we ran the accounts, they were missing. So that kind of, I mean, I don't know what normal companies would do, but for us, or for me at least, that kind of, for. Introduced an opportunity of, well, we don't have any status tools to indicate like, was this successfully exported or how many were, or, um, what was the timestamp and that kind of thing.

[00:11:28] So that led into an afternoon of building new tools to help everybody understand, um, like what were the points of failure in a large export. And, um, being able to go back and correct individual records that might have an issue one at a time instead of deleting everything and starting over. So that's the kind of thing where I like to be part of the process because, um.

[00:11:46] You know, if it had all just been running by a playbook, we might have just told him delete everything and start 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, we'll never have to do this again once we have these new tools built.

[00:12:00] So for me, that's, that's the process working and that's the part that I enjoy.

[00:12:05] Zack Katz: 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 team and I, I try to internalize it every time I say it and not just, uh. Not just say it, but really feel it.

[00:12:17] By the time customers get in touch with us, we have failed them to a level where they have given up. And that is a really unfortunate thing that we, we have an opportunity there. So Jack, you took that opportunity to say, okay, I can improve this so that next time the customer won't have to reach out and it will be fixed and it'll be a, a seamless process.

[00:12:38] And that's where, um, customer support is so vital. For improving the customer experience because every single interaction point is an opportunity missed where we could have avoided them having to get in touch with us. Yeah. Like every, every single ticket is a sign that we have failed them in some way with onboarding, with our user, with uh, interface with our documentation.

[00:13:01] Um, with our feature set, everything kind of come when, whenever you get a customer ticket, it means something has gone wrong. Totally. Yeah. And it's, that can be hard when you're doing the support because it means that you're not hearing all the good positive, you know, moments of wonder that customers have with your products.

[00:13:18] But it also is an exciting thing that you can say, okay, cool, I can see how this can be fixed, uh, with code or with better email, um, drip campaigns for onboarding. Uh, it's, it's every interaction is an opportunity for improvement.

[00:13:34] Jack Arturo: Yeah. And I guess, I mean, maybe not everybody sees it that way. I don't know. I got a, um, level up, sent us a survey this morning, um, with questions like, what is your expectation for the number of tickets the agent will be able to resolve a day?

[00:13:47] And this kind of thing. Like, like, do we need to make the agent work faster? And my reaction to that is like, in a perfect world, the agent won't get any tickets at all. Um, like, yeah, right. We're trying to really get it down to zero. So I, I said like, um, however long it takes, doesn't really matter. Like it's my job to.

[00:14:02] Um, prevent them from coming in and then if they do come in, um, the agent can take their time in replying to them.

[00:14:11] Zack Katz: Yeah. And so that's, that kind of feeds into my story with customer support, which is, um, when I started Gravity View, uh, I really used the initial feedback from the beta period to. Uh, build out the product set and customer feedback, uh, was super vital to saying, okay, this is what we need to work on next, and it's just, uh, invaluable.

[00:14:34] So every time I, uh, have a customer support request that comes in and that I reply to, I try to eke out a little bit more information about what their goals are as a company, what they were trying to accomplish. Uh, beyond just what, what went wrong or what questions they had, like what are they trying to do and how can we make that easier for them in the future?

[00:14:57] And I just love how, um, how they volunteer their time to help us with our products so that we can help them. Like it's a beautiful cycle when it works properly.

[00:15:11] Katie Keith: Yeah, definitely. How do you always get that information though, when you are not the one doing the support?

[00:15:18] Zack Katz: Yeah, that's where the culture of support comes in. And it's hard, um, because it often is seen as creating more work. So that's where, um, you, you know, when you're, anything becomes a, a gamification system when it's your job.

[00:15:34] It's like, what can I do? And can I do X easier to achieve y outcome? Like Jack was saying, like with Level Up support, like he has to say, no, take as much time 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 close all the tickets, inbox zero.

[00:15:52] So you might not want that follow up message from the customer, but that's where training and and encouraging people to have the customer first mindset. Is the way to go and, uh, to say, okay, thank you for sharing that now, now really like, what else? Like give us a bigger picture. What is the, what, what this was, what you were trying to describe this little piece.

[00:16:16] Now let's zoom out and see how, how we can fix, like, how we can help you along your journey for solving whatever problem you're trying to solve with our product. Like, um, it takes training and it takes, uh, determination. It doesn't always happen, but. When it does happen, it leads to really great, um, revelations

[00:16:35] Katie Keith: and you need a lot of capacity for that as well, because when you don't have the capacity to cope with the ticket, it's about getting to inbox zero and just clearing them in a acceptable way.

[00:16:46] But if, if you don't have capacity, you can't realistically go above and beyond in that way and do the learning that comes from each ticket as an opportunity. So it's about somehow finding, investing in that capacity.

[00:16:59] Zack Katz: 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 a single bug that, that everybody has and you just are trying to close the tickets.

[00:17:09] You can always come back later when you're in a slow period, go through your old support tickets and uh, and follow up with them and say, Hey, how are things going? What? You know, following up with, with customers who've already gotten in touch with you to find out what, uh, what else they're experienced, if they switched away from your product to another product, why they've done that.

[00:17:27] Like, it's, it's such a powerful marketing tool. Mm-hmm.

[00:17:35] Katie Keith: So for my story time, I thought I'd talk about the kind of history of support at Barn2, uh, because we've gone from me doing all the support to having eight full-time support engineers. Um, so I hung onto support for a really long time. It was the thing, probably the thing that I found the hardest to.

[00:17:57] Delegate outta everything because I felt like I knew our product better than anybody else. And even though I'm not a developer, I knew about all the advanced use cases and, um, all these random work around like use our plugin with this other plugin to fix any gaps in functionality and achieve different requirements.

[00:18:16] And I thought, how can anybody else know all the differences? Where I press plugins and what works with ours, and so I really didn't want to lose that because I think that's important for like sales and things, because often even when our plugins couldn't do something, by having that extra knowledge, I was able to recommend.

[00:18:34] Solutions that would meet their full needs as that was talking about. And then even if it wasn't just with our products and I didn't wanna lose that, but eventually I kind of had to because it was just growing too much and I was dealing with something like 50 tickets a day and it was taking more than half my time.

[00:18:52] Luckily I could very fast and, um, had lots of. Saved responses. I had a massive Google Doc, which my team still uses, and now actually with common responses in it. So I quickly copy and pasting and personalizing and all of that, but I couldn't keep doing that as the company grew and grew. And so I, um, hired, um, someone from Level Up, which is the.

[00:19:17] Agency that is that, so that Jack mentioned a minute ago, uh, which is they just do support if you don't know them for WordPress theme and plugging companies. So they, all their people are really well trained and know WordPress as well as customer support philosophies and principles and things. So I think it was James Kemp that recommended them to me and I was really skeptical.

[00:19:40] They're based in the Philippines and having had bad experiences of, um. Over overseas outsource customer support from things like banks and other industries. I was really cynical and so, but I contacted Level Up and they sent me some sample responses of one of their guys that they were proposing allocating to Band two.

[00:20:01] And he was just amazing. And I immediately realized that I would be proud to have this guy answering, um, tickets, um, for my customers. And he's still with us now, like four years later or something. Um, and my camera has gone, so I'm gonna switch cameras. I keep overheating. Um, sorry about that. Um, so I started him off as our first support engineer and he's still with us and we've grown.

[00:20:29] As we needed to basically since then. Um, and so now we've got, um, maybe four level up people and four people that I've hired directly, um, when maybe I need a different skill set that they didn't offer or something. But the other thing worth mentioning is the different tiers of support. Because once you get past just having maybe yourself or one person to help you, then you might need to think about what different expertise you need in your support team.

[00:20:59] So we have support on three tiers where tier one is the kind of basic account type queries, refunds, where it's obvious they need a refund, things like that. Tier two is. Advanced, uh, WordPress knowledge level, uh, where they can do advanced products, uh, knowledge questions, troubleshooting but not coding.

[00:21:21] And we also have two tier three support engineers who actually are developers as well, so that their role is to really save our developers time and act as a bridge between support and development so that they will even do things like pull requests. And identifying the exact source of the bug and how to fix it and then push, pushing that through to the lead developer to save them time, particularly on the simpler bugs and incompatibility issues or whatever.

[00:21:50] So we've got quite a complex system. So we've gone from me on my own to uh, this basically,

[00:21:57] Jack Arturo: and it's kind of funny 'cause at first 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 ever do all of this stuff? And these people are doing it way better than me.

[00:22:10] Yeah, definitely.

[00:22:12] Zack Katz: And Katie, how do you help these, uh, people who are outsource or how, how do you help your outsource customer support team feel like part of the team? Or how do you, how do you manage that?

[00:22:24] Katie Keith: The way Level Up work is they don't share support engineers across multiple companies. They allocate them full-time to you and they don't even offer part-time anymore.

[00:22:34] Uh, so this person joins your team. They will join your company Slack. You can put 'em on your. Team page on your website and things they join, like we just started doing team social calls and all the level up people are on just exactly the same as my direct hires. So they're not really any different because of the way Level Up do it.

[00:22:54] It's not like you've. Hire, you've outsourced to a massive agency where there's a hundred people that might end up with one of your tickets. These are dedicated people, but Level Up have put the investment into the training and the, um, policies and all that, uh, which I may not have capacity to. And managing them, they do a lot of performance management as well, which I wouldn't have the capacity to do.

[00:23:18] Uh, so I think it's the same or better as having your own people rather than a compromise.

[00:23:28] Are all your hires are direct, Zach?

[00:23:31] Zack Katz: Yep. Uh, we have two full-time support team members and they, uh, one of them lives in Brazil and another lives in Italy. And, uh, both of them are named Hoffa. So it makes it easy for our customers 'cause whenever they respond, uh, they're responding to Raphael. Uh, and they, I think they both, they don't, our customers don't always know that there are two Rafael's.

[00:23:58] So it's, uh, a seamless customer experience, uh, until, uh, our developer of Vlad or I get involved. Um, it's just Rafael all the, all the way down.

[00:24:10] Katie Keith: That's quite good actually, that the customer, because sometimes there is a bit of friction introduced when people feel they're being bounced, so they won't realize, will they?

[00:24:18] Zack Katz: Right. And it's nice. One of the things that's nice about having them, uh, in different time zones is that they get to cover different time periods. So we have, uh, one eight hours in Italy and then eight hours in Brazil. It covers a, a large portion of our, uh, user base.

[00:24:37] Jack Arturo: Katie, do you have most of the day covered as well, or are you like me, where you're still operating based around the time zone you live in?

[00:24:45] Katie Keith: Um, we're kind of like Europe plus a few hours on either side. Okay. Um, the Level Up ones are very good at doing what is actually quite anti-social hours for them. They understand that they need to have some overlap with American time, which wouldn't be natural for them, but I don't think we have anybody working past midnight there time.

[00:25:05] But I do feel bad sometimes. About the hours they do. So we have more than just eight hours a day coverage, but not by any means. 24. Right.

[00:25:16] Zack Katz: And we have a bit

[00:25:17] Katie Keith: on weekends too.

[00:25:19] Zack Katz: That's one of the biggest things that I think that we can improve upon, uh, is to, even with that time zone coverage, there's still a gap that can result in like a, you know, 18 hour period where somebody's emailing support.

[00:25:35] Uh, we're replying within 15, 30 minutes 'cause we're, you know, somebody, uh, somebody's available and then they reply one final time. But we've logged off. And then there's nothing for like 10 hours. And that must feel really bad as a customer. And, uh, it's always tough when there's, there are gaps like that that, um, you know, when reality of our businesses makes it harder for our customers to get there.

[00:26:01] Jack Arturo: I'm definitely guilty of jumping in at 8:00 PM on a Friday just 'cause I see something there. Like I check on my phone, I'm like, oh, this is really easy fix and I don't wanna 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 look at getting more coverage.

[00:26:16] Zack Katz: So what kind of things are you doing, Jack? Uh, to, from a like technical standpoint when it comes to customer support? Uh, like what tools do you use? Um, how, how are you trying to make it easier for customers to find in their own, like self-help, uh, solutions? Uh, can you tell us more about that?

[00:26:36] Jack Arturo: Um, yeah, uh, I've been working a lot on that over the last couple years, so.

[00:26:42] For one thing is, um, uh, in adding documentation to the plugin, um, wherever it might be applicable, um, and linking back to the docs on our website and also trying to, um, like proactively detect things that might cause problems. Um, we have some features that rely on JavaScript. And if you're using WP Engine or JS Optimize or whatever, these kind of optimized plugins that mess with JavaScript, um, we proactively put a little notice saying, Hey, like, be careful with this.

[00:27:11] Or if there's a problem, try deactivating that first. And I think a lot of companies would just wait for you to put in a ticket and then say, oh, I see you're using an optimization plugin. Can you try turning that off? But, um, yeah, for me it's worth putting in a little bit of extra work to get ahead of that.

[00:27:26] Um, things like we have some issues with WP Engines. We try to detect that in advance and let people know. And then even, like, I've spent some time earlier this year on our search, uh, form, when you type in. Uh, the topic, or sorry, our support form when you type in the topic for your ticket, um, it pulls up relevant documentation, um, based on the keywords.

[00:27:46] And 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 seeing like, yeah, um, not everybody but uh, say 10% or something of people were beginning to enter a ticket and then finding the resource they need and didn't submit one anyway. So it was just kind of, um.

[00:28:03] Yeah, like make sure as much as possible 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 down the wrong road, um, to try to avoid the support touch.

[00:28:20] Zack Katz: And what are you using for your support desk?

[00:28:23] Jack Arturo: So we were on Help Scout for many years, and it was, it was good. Um, but I never used the chat widget. I never used the documentation thing. I really just wanted like a nice looking multi-user. Um. Support email inbox and they kept adding all these fancy features, um, which was fine until they tried to double the price.

[00:28:46] So, um, and especially 'cause now, um, so we added, uh, level up, uh, to support the support team was the first person to join in 2020. Um, and now I have, uh, another person who's doing kind of what Katie described as tier three. Um, so with the Help Scout pricing going up to was like $50 a month per user now or something, or 75.

[00:29:07] Something like that. Yeah, it's gonna, yeah, it's gonna go up to like 50 or 75 at the end of August. Um, it gets expensive. It's like, you know, 200 bucks a month, um, when we're not using most of the features. So yeah, just this week I've, um, moved to Free Scout, which is a self-hosted. A support desk, um, solution and, um, it's, it's pretty good.

[00:29:28] Uh, now that I've been using it for one day, I've found a lot of things to improve. Um, yeah, I, I've sent you some things. I don't know if I mentioned, like, them stripping the CSS out of the support tickets so we lose like the nice table. Uh, so. It's kind of open a can of worms. I'm gonna probably spend a few more hours this summer tweaking it to get it the way I want, but it's nice to have full control.

[00:29:50] Um, we can put in as many users as we want. And now, um, I'm starting to build a lot more process automation around the support process. Um, so for example, we have a public feature request board. At the moment, if a customer requests a feature in support or has a, an issue that turns out to be a feature, um, a support agent has to go over to our website.

[00:30:08] Create the feature, um, add the customer as a user and subscribe the user to the feature request so we can notify them when it's complete. So, um, we're just now working on a, um, integration for the help desk software where we could one click, um, create a feature request from the support ticket, add the customer to the request for notification, um, and then put a link to the feature request back into the ticket.

[00:30:31] And, um. We have Jira integration now too, which Jira we use for, um, tracking tasks and also managing, um, pull requests and documentation. Um, so now we can take a support ticket and the agent can in one click, um, say, uh, this issue is a technical issue. Here's the steps to reproduce it. Please fix, and it will go into Jira, get auto assigned to the next available developer.

[00:30:54] And then when the Jira developer, um, it's automated in Jira 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 ticket and a free scout and reactivates it and tells the support agent to let the customer know, um, that the issue solved. So this is like, it's kind of it boring, um, but it's stuff you're spending a lot of time on just like manually copying out.

[00:31:16] Um. Oh, okay. This is a technical issue. It's gotta go on the issue tracker. This is feature request. It's gotta go on the request tracker. And now that's mostly automated with one click. So that's, um, I think gonna save a lot of time.

[00:31:28] Zack Katz: I found that following up with customers even years later about a, a, um, a feature that they wanted or a, a bug that was so obscure that we couldn't deal with it at the time, but we finally fixed it.

[00:31:43] Uh, following up with customers is magic. It, it makes people so happy with you and it, it blows their minds and they, they say, thank you so much. I can't believe you remembered. Mm-hmm. So keeping track of, they, they

[00:31:56] Katie Keith: were on the list all the time, weren't they? Of course we remembered. But yeah, we send personal, if anything, on the feature request, we contact 'em personally as well as sending a newsletter to everybody or something.

[00:32:09] Zack Katz: Yeah, we just integrated, uh, we just migrated to Free Scout this week as well. Um, it seems like there's a, a mass migration happening due to the changing in pricing. And, uh, we had a developer create a GitHub integration for us, similar to the Jira integration because we keep our, uh, feature requests, we keep our bug track, uh, tracking all in GitHub, so.

[00:32:31] Uh, it makes it easy to link an issue to in GitHub to a ticket and help in Free Scout. And when the issue is closed in GitHub, it reopens all the issues in Free Scout and you can email them all and let them know that it is completed. So that's gonna be really a huge enhancement for our customer support team.

[00:32:50] Yeah, totally.

[00:32:53] Katie Keith: One thing I like about the support software, like all these, is that the customer doesn't know you are using it from the customer's perspective, it is just email or something. Mm-hmm. Um, I hate, again, normally non WordPress systems, that it's all about the tickets and you've got, actually some WordPress themes have this.

[00:33:12] You've got to log in and there's like a. Ticket system, and it feels like you are trying to jump through their hoops. I like the ones like Help Scout where the customer just. E replies by email and it's just an internal tool for us. It doesn't need to affect the customer.

[00:33:30] Jack Arturo: And I like using email first, but um, now with Free Scout, we're also adding a support dashboard.

[00:33:37] Um, and that will be embedded in our website sometimes as a person requesting support. I like that because I'm not a hundred percent sure I didn't lose your reply in spam or something. Um, we do a lot of work with CloudFlare, for example, and when I open a ticket with them, I can check in their dashboard and see that someone's looked at it and what the status is.

[00:33:54] So I'm kind of interested or excited to integrate that more. It's 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 see all of their tickets, the statuses and that kind of thing. Um, so like, we'll always stay email first, but, um, I, some people have asked for that in the past and we weren't able to provide it.

[00:34:13] So I think that's, um. A good thing to happen now as an option.

[00:34:17] Katie Keith: Interesting. So they can do email, but there's a central record if they want to access that.

[00:34:22] Jack Arturo: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:34:23] Katie Keith: Yeah,

[00:34:24] Zack Katz: yeah. I'm excited about that too. And I think that it kind of fits into the meet customers where they are mindset, where I, I love email first, uh, and I'm terrible at email.

[00:34:37] So providing both modes for customers. Um, same with live chat, if customers prefer live chat. At, at some point there, we want to be able to provide phone support. If somebody doesn't wanna write or can't write they, and they prefer to speak to somebody in person. Uh. Our, our goal is to make customers happy, and if customers really hate writing emails, uh, what, how else can we serve them and how else can we help them be successful with our products?

[00:35:08] Jack Arturo: Yeah. Like, um, here, hanging out with Will Middleton from Lifter L, he's in Berlin for the week and he was on a call for like an hour last night at like 9:00 PM and I was like, oh, that's, that meeting is running late. And it's like, no, I'm just helping a customer get set up with their course. And like, but I was overhearing them and the customer's loving it.

[00:35:25] It was like, like, what do you suggest I do for this? Or do you like the title of this? And, uh, I don't have the capacity to do 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, and work through a solution with 'em and, and Will loves doing that kind of stuff.

[00:35:39] Um, so it's a win-win. Yeah. I, I, I'm starting to think about like, how can we make that happen, uh, for dead fusion?

[00:35:47] Katie Keith: Yeah, I know that's something we haven't got quite right yet. We even have saved responses for when the customer requests a phone call politely explaining that all our support is provided by email, but that's not customer first.

[00:36:00] And I'm aware of that. And I've noticed one thing negative with Level Up people is that there is quite a reluctant to do calls 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 about it. How we can implement that because some customers do want to just, they always say, oh, just hop on a call and I'll screen share with you to explain the problem.

[00:36:24] And it doesn't feel right to say that we don't do that, which is how we currently

[00:36:29] Zack Katz: are. Right. One thing that I do is provide, uh, in our onboarding flow for our products, we have a schedule, a consultation call link that goes directly to my calendar and people can book a 20 minute call with me. Uh, for, to answer any questions that aren't answered by other things, and that people might not want to create a support ticket 'cause they don't know exactly what their question is.

[00:36:53] Like, that's one thing that, that is tough is like, how do 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 email to be, uh, understandable for, for somebody who's unfamiliar with the problems you're trying to solve. So. I've 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 Kit products were the right solution, but they were all grateful.

[00:37:21] When I said, actually, it sounds like you're trying to do this other thing. Here are a couple plugins that are gonna be better suited for you. And they're all, they're all very grateful that they didn't spend the time trying to figure that out themselves. They also, uh, now have a positive experience and a better understanding of what we do.

[00:37:40] So we don't do customer support calls at the moment, but we do do consultation calls, um, for pre-sales.

[00:37:48] Katie Keith: What's the demand for those? Because I can imagine it could become overwhelming.

[00:37:52] Zack Katz: Thankfully, not much at the moment. Uh, not many people choose to do recall.

[00:37:56] Katie Keith: Pro promote it and where you put it as well, doesn't it?

[00:38:00] Zack Katz: Yeah. We, we sh we have that included in all our flows. We, customers probably see it two, three times, uh, during the course of buying the product and, and setting it up. Um, and thankfully not many people are interested in talking on the phone, uh, like an, like an elder, millennial or whatever. Like who talks on the phone anymore?

[00:38:20] Well, I guess I do, and a few of our customers. Um, but it's really just nice to have, uh. As a backup, and when it does get too busy, then I'll consider having, uh, one of our CU customer support team members take, uh, take that as part of their responsibility as well. So.

[00:38:40] Katie Keith: Yeah. One thing I've been considering lately is how we can improve, um, sales through support.

[00:38:46] Because if you have multiple products or even addit multiple tiers of your main product, in theory, the people doing support could be doing upselling, where they identify that that's appropriate. Um, and I've been talking to my support team about whether to, for example, um, set them all up as affiliates and give them a small commission if they.

[00:39:08] Sell or plugins or something like that. Um, do either of you do anything like that?

[00:39:17] Jack Arturo: I will do it personally. Um, we don't have multiple products like you do, but we have, um, plans that have more features. I am a little bit hesitant to have other people do it, especially on a commission basis, because I don't want the customer to feel pressured in any way. When they're contacting support or to feel like they have to spend more money to get a resolution out of support.

[00:39:40] Um, I've had that experience with some SaaS companies and it's unpleasant, so I think it could be done correctly. But, um, it, it's hard to, like, if you're incentivizing the agent to sell, then they might, um, default to selling rather than solving, and that's what I wouldn't want to happen.

[00:39:58] Katie Keith: Yeah, they're definitely training around that and monitoring to check it's being done appropriately.

[00:40:02] Yeah.

[00:40:04] Zack Katz: Yeah. One has to be extremely careful with the incentive structure that one puts in place. Uh, because it corrupts the system. Uh, so if, if the goal is to optimize for anything like, you know, smash that subscribe button by the way, on, on YouTube, like, so, so the goal is to have more subscribers? No. The goal is to help WP product owners, uh, uh, know what to do with their businesses and learn things.

[00:40:34] And so like, what is the incentive to the support team? The incentive should be. Somehow structured so that it's about customer outcomes and more money isn't the structure that I think is appropriate there. Yeah. But then the feedback, rating score doesn't fully reflect, uh, the customer experience either.

[00:40:54] 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 then you click it and it goes to like, shouldn't you buy this person a coffee or a television or like. It, it, it asks whether this person should get a bonus for how well they responded to you, like a tip.

[00:41:11] And that just, I didn't see that. Oh, it's, it feels so dirty to me. And it's like, just pay your Right. Yeah, you pay your people well. Like what is going on here?

[00:41:22] Katie Keith: So normally you click one thing and you get a whole survey and you're like, I did not sign up to spend 10 minutes on this.

[00:41:29] Zack Katz: Right. And so we have, um, I have in the past had a system where like people submit a, you know, thumbs up or thumbs down, and then we have a follow up survey a day later asking about their customer support experience and if they wanted to provide any feedback.

[00:41:45] Um, I think the goal is to make it so that people can share their experience without feeling like they're hurting the customer support representative. Like, I don't want to get somebody fired. I don't want to get some, somebody punished. Uh, or scolded. Um, but keeping track of the actual experience the customers have is, is important.

[00:42:07] And it's kind of hard to do with, with a bit of nuance, uh, so that they, they feel like they're in a safe space and can share,

[00:42:16] Katie Keith: yeah. So we normally finish at about quarter two. So shall we move on to, uh, the best advice to new product owners? So Zach, what would be your top tips around support?

[00:42:29] Zack Katz: My top tip is use customer support requests as a gold mine and, uh, mine that stuff.

[00:42:37] Uh, so, uh, how do you mine this? When you have so much information, how do you keep track of it? Well, uh, make sure you tag your customer support tickets, uh, with all bunch of keywords so you can come back and find it easier later. Um, use them. Uh, we have a testimonials tag, for example, or use of cases tag that our marketing person goes in there and follows up with people who obviously are having a great time with a product or are doing something really cool that we wanna highlight.

[00:43:05] Um. Use it as, you know, the base of your marketing language for your SEO, like customer support stuff. The questions that they ask are the questions that people are typing into Google use that it's all gold. That's my advice.

[00:43:24] Katie Keith: Okay. And Jack, what's your top tips for WordPress product owners?

[00:43:28] Jack Arturo: Um, yeah, I mean, it is gold.

[00:43:31] I guess I would say when you're just getting started. I held out really long on, um, hiring anyone to do the stuff that could have really easily been outsourced, like the billing support, um, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, partial refunds, that kind of thing. I would say, um, like if you can, um, get someone to handle that or use a payment gateway like paddle or lemon squeezy or something that can handle that for you, because that can be a bit of a drag.

[00:43:58] But then keep your finger on the pulse of support or stay in support for as long as you can. Um, I know even like companies with hundreds of people and multimillion dollars in revenue, um, some founders still like, I'm gonna spend Friday afternoons working one-on-one with customers, and it's, it's still valuable.

[00:44:14] Resource. It's a gold mine. No matter how long you've 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 been done. And only you as a founder can sort of see like, ah, this is how we can prove the product or the process or the communication or marketing or whatever.

[00:44:30] Um, so yeah. Yeah.

[00:44:36] Katie Keith: 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 excited when somebody in support gives me an idea for, um, a new, a keyword or a use 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 our product for that use case.

[00:44:56] So that can be a really big marketing opportunity.

[00:44:59] Jack Arturo: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:03] Katie Keith: So my top tip would be to make support as efficient as possible, because with a small amount of thought, there are huge opportunities to do that. Uh, canned pre save content is an obvious way to do that. Um, whether, and there's so many different tools that you can use for that. Even if you just use what did help Scout or whatever you are using, or a Google Doc or, um, there's other, there's various tools just.

[00:45:29] For doing that as well. Um, I even have things like, um, the MAC keyboard shortcuts for all our product names and thanks for contacting us and those sorts of things like where I just type it shortcuts

[00:45:42] Jack Arturo: for each product name. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. I wonder how much time that save.

[00:45:47] Katie Keith: Product table takes forever to type WooCommerce Quickview Pro.

[00:45:51] I just do WQV and it types it and I've encouraged the support team to do the same, even for individual phrases. And, um, lemme know if you have any more questions or those sorts of. Thing could just be lmk or something. So yeah, think about how you can really reduce the time, create knowledge base articles and documentation for common questions and FAQs and things because every ticket really should be an opportunity to reduce future support as we touched on earlier, and help the customer to help themselves and you can get faster and faster, and therefore not have to have such a big support team.

[00:46:30] Right.

[00:46:32] Zack Katz: Well, thank you so much Jack, uh, for joining us. And uh, next week we're going to discuss paid advertising for WordPress products, which is, uh, uh, something that not everybody does and some have great successful. I convinced Jack to get into it, uh, and. Sorry about that, Jack, but we'll find out from Drew Griswold next week, uh, how to make that work better.

[00:47:04] Katie Keith: Yeah. Um, well, thanks to Jack again and thanks to post status and the WP Minute. Um, hit like, subscribe, all the helpful and nice things for us, and we will see you next week. Bye everyone. Bye.