Unsung User Experience Heroes — Visible Toll Free Tech Support Number
If you have a consumer software product and you charge money for it, you should have a visible, toll-free, tech support number on every page. I’m not sure how to state this more plainly. Your job in creating a great customer experience is to make the customer happy, not to lower your support costs. Lowering your support costs should be done through the hard work of polishing every rough edge and speed bump in your product until everything flows smoothly. Burying the phone number only frustrates customers who are in genuine trouble. Great, simple, personal customer service is an opportunity to reinforce your brand — one way or another.
Don’t have a dedicated customer support person? Good news, route the calls to the engineers and the managers and those rough edges will get polished even faster. Nothing motivates a team like personal experiences with customers experiencing frustration with something they built. Every road block you put in the way of that customer talking to someone who builds the product is detrimental to the hurried improvement of your product. Remove the roadblocks, make your product better, and your phone will ring less and less.
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korviev
October 24, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Hillel, you make the naive assumption that these companies care about their customers. These days the owners of companies (primarily private equity) have long range vision of about 2 years. The true customers are the next private equity firm to whom they can next sell the entire company.
Here’s how it works, you buy a company that has a product that people want or like, lower the costs of operating the company (generally by layoffs or outsourcing). This then raises the bottom line and makes the balance sheet look attractive to new buyers. You then sell it to the next sucker before anybody realizes the whole thing is unsustainable. Lather rinse repeat.
Consumers? Yeah, right.