Carragee Consulting

Who should handle the customer’s issues?

We’ve all experienced a time when we just wanted to rant and release our frustration in the company of someone else only to have them propose “solutions”.

When I read Kerem Kocer, blog on “how founders should address Customer Support” I was reminded of this NYTimes article I read last year when I was first introduced the Hug, Help or Heard framework for how to respond to someone who is upset.

If you want your customers to feel “loved” or at least appreciated enough to remain customers it worth spending some thought on how to best address their outreach.

I echo what Kerem’s sentiment that self-service or at fully functional product will be the best customer service nearly every time. “Many founders mistakenly believe that constantly meeting with customers can satisfy these rising expectations. In reality, many customers prefer a functional relationship with the product itself, expecting it to deliver seamlessly without much intervention – product gives, they take, no contact made.”

However, when a customer reaches out to your company, either directly or through social media if they can’t find the right channel you have to decide who should respond to them.

If you run a B2B SaaS business with large enterprise accounts you may have a Customer Success organization who is the customer’s dedicated triage point for issues, training and product awareness. If your product has many users who all pay a low monthly subscription fee it may be impractical to assign CS reps to field complaints and questions.

It seems like every company is trying to make their product documentation searchable through chatbots which when it works well, will resolve a portion of the time when someone needs to be unblocked, or “HELPED” with a known issue. Customer Service is seldom the place that technical expertise and ability to debug true product issues resides. Kerem points out that “Support Engineers should be responsible for resolving ad hoc problems and interacting with customers to understand their long-term vision/expectations in using the product. These insights should then be passed on to the product team so the PMs can create or iterate on a roadmap that aligns with customer motivations.”

If the customer wants to vent and be HEARD then the chatbot is only going amp up their feeling that all their efforts fall on deaf ears.
Your company’s Discord or Slack user channel may be a good place to funnel their inquiry so that other users can validate their experience and let them feel less alone.

If the customer wants the business version of a HUG you may be able to suggest a time when the company has an upcoming conference, meetup or customer appreciation event.

Companies need to be able to distinguish between these different request types {Helped, Hugged, Heard} and triage the customer to the right sort of response.