Don't hate support tickets.
If you’re desperately trying to find ways to keep your customers from asking for help, you’re doing it wrong.
Every time a HELIX customer asks a question, it tells us that one of three things is happening.
- We’ve forgotten to educate the customer on something important.
- We’ve missed a feature or some functionality that should exist in the HELIX platform.
- Something is broken.
In any case, we can identify a problem, find out why it happened, and fix it. If we’re really good, we can maybe keep that problem from happening again or that question from being asked again.
There will always be customers that want to reach out and touch you. Be OK with that. They won’t read knowledge base articles or watch tutorial videos. or ask your other customers for help. Be OK with that. They’ll want a live human being to take time to listen to them and help them. Be REALLY OK with that!
We’re fortunate that our focus on doing one thing exceptionally well means that we don’t get many customer support requests. When we do, we remind ourselves that these are opportunities not only to learn and improve, but to check in with customers. To chat with them. To be friendly with them. To renew and strengthen our connection with them. Those customers are our new marketing department. They are quite literally part of our team from a sales, marketing and growth perspective, so we will do whatever we can to treat them like we treat each other in the office.
We don’t have 100,000 customers here. We never will. I’m so totally fine with that. We love interacting with our customers and getting to know them. It makes us better and in the end it makes their HELIX experience better.
I know, it doesn’t scale. It doesn’t have to. Last I looked I was not required to build a 100 million dollar hosting company to be happy.
So … don’t hate support tickets. Be thankful for them.
