MBA2169 Why You Might Be Failing at Customer Support

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Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA show where your business gets better every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and in today's lesson you will learn why you might be failing at customer support. Customer support and customer service is a big part of your business and many entrepreneurs get it wrong. They miss the whole point. Customer support is not about helping the customer or answering questions. Customer support is actually your product or service. It's a part of the product or service. That experience is what keeps your customers happy and keeps them buying. So in many ways it's a retention and sales exercise more than anything else. Now why am I saying this? Why is this so important? It's because this is where people fail is that they design their customer service, their systems, their teams and train their team members not aligned with that philosophy. I'm going to show you how we became the best customer support team in the webinar space, what rules we follow, how we trained our team and how we use customer support to actually make more money. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Many people think customer support is just about making sure the customers have somebody to talk to if they have a question, if they need help, if they maybe even have questions about buying the product or service. And I'm here to tell you that is dead wrong. That's a very over simplistic and an incomplete way to look at customer support. Now I'm super passionate about this and this is why we invested so much in our own customer support in our business. Because I love good support when I experience it, when I enjoy the experience of being served properly, I have so much gratitude for that. I don't forget it. I tell others if it gets me excited. So I want you to think back at one of your favorite moments where you were treated great by a company. Your favorite customer support experience. You might have been on holiday. Disney is known for being one of the best customer support companies in the world. Maybe you had to phone a company to get some help. Maybe you needed to return an item from a store online and or on chat with their team. What about that great experience that you loved? And, and it boils down to one rule. And this is the rule that we follow in our team and we train for and that company that gives great support. At the end of the day, what they do is they make your life easier. They make the customer's life easier. That's it. This is what wows people when they say, oh wow, this is great support is that they're not expecting the company to make things so easy on them. If you go to a really fancy hotel and you're about to check out from that hotel to go back home and they say, hey, we have a limo service waiting outside to take you to the airport. You're not expecting that. You're wowed by that. Like, wow, that's amazing. They're going to take me to the airport. I've never had that experience. And the reason why you're wowed by it is because they make your life easier. They basically put themselves in your shoes and said, hey, you need to get to the airport instead of you Having to haul down a cab or take public transport. We're going to solve this problem for you and make your life easier. So you need to list all the things that you can do for your customers to make their lives easier when they contact your support. I'll give you some examples from our company, Webinar Ninja Software company. One of the most common questions we get asked in our support team or when customers email or chat with support is, how do I change this? How do I change that? How do I make my webinar look like this? Now what most companies do is they try to make their life easier and say, hey, you know, you can easily do this with a help tutorial. Here's the tutorial. And they give them a link to a tutorial or they explain what they have to do on the message itself or on the phone call. And on its surface it seems okay, and that's fine. But does it really make their life easier? A bit. You know, it cuts out a little time for them to learn how to do it on their own. And they kind of fast track the learning process by reading the tutorial. But what we've done is we. We offer the tutorial, but immediately after we send a message saying, if you'd like, I can go into your account and change that for you. This does two things. One, it asks for permission if they can access the account, so that way there's consent. And number two, it gives them the option to not have to do it. Talk about make their life easier. I want this. And then you just did it for me. This puts a huge smile on the faces of our customers and allows us to get amazing reviews and testimonials. And it's taking that step further. It's training your team to allow them to have the autonomy to go ahead and fix things. That means your systems have to allow for that. In my case, our engineering team would have to allow a secure way for our customer support team to have temporary access to a user's account to do something for them and then log out and not have access anymore, and also not to have access to everything that the user has, just enough for them to be able to make the changes. That takes work, takes development. But because our philosophy is make their life easier, and this is part of that, and there's one on the list of the things that we listed, the things that we can do to make their life easier. We built it out, we invest the time because we know it's a good investment. Why do you think many online shops offer free Returns because they know they have to do that. They have to make their life easier to make the experience as close as possible to being in a real store, in a physical location. But I want you to really think deeply and list as many things as possible. I'm talking about 10, 20, 30 things that you can do to make your customers life easier. With customer support, one of the easiest things you can do is to make it faster. Make sure that you are picking up these support requests within minutes. This alone will wow the customer that you're responding so quickly. You're saving them time, making their life easier. One of the things that we listed is sometimes it's actually better to allow the customer to do things themselves than have customers customer service handle it. A good example of this is changing their plan or canceling their account. So many companies make the customer's life so much harder when it's time for them to change their plan, downgrade or cancel. They have to email support or they have to contact somebody or get on a call and it's like they got to get approval from King Charles or something like that. This is ridiculous and it's very short term thinking. People or companies that do this do this because they want a lower churn, they want to keep retention. They think that if it's harder to cancel, they won't cancel. But this leaves a bad taste in the customer's mouth and they won't talk well about you to other people, they won't recommend you and they won't come back when they do cancel. I want to build a business that lasts a lifetime, that lasts generations. And I got to build my reputation today. This is why we decided long ago that when it comes to changing their plan, upgrading, downgrading, canceling, pausing, whatever they want to do, we're going to let them do it on their own inside the account. They don't have to email anybody, talk to anybody. Few clicks, they're done. They signed up on their own, they can cancel on their own. Now I know that maybe you don't agree with it, maybe some people are hearing this like, no, you got to make it hard on them. But my rule of thumb when it comes to supporting my customers is make their life easier. And leaving or downgrading or changing their plan is part of the relationship I have with them. When they leave, when they cancel their plan, it's not by forever, right? They're going to come back one day. There's a very good chance they'll come back. In fact, our data shows over 72% of our customers reactivate at some point. They don't go to competitors. They come back to us because they enjoyed the experience.

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So you are bought into this philosophy and you want to make sure that you are making your customers life easier. You have a list of things that you can do to make it happen. What do you do next? Well, first you prioritize this list by impact. I want you to start working on the things that give your customers the best experience and make the most impact. The most impactful things will go further and will go longer and buy you time until you implement the rest of the things on your list. But before you take action on any of these things, you got to get buy in from the team. Anybody who's going to be involved in this, this is probably most of your team, your support agents, your support manager, if you have one, the other people involved that are going to help you make the system better. So in our case, in the software, anybody else on the that's going to make these systems better. So for example, in our case as a software company, it's the engineering team, the product team, the design team. Sometimes you're even going to involve the marketing team because you want the marketing team to show off this amazing customer support as a selling point, as something that is an advantage of joining your offering, being a part of your product or service. You get the buy in, you prioritize by impact and you get going. Plot out your plan of action. Even if you just do one a month, you accomplish one of these things that make your customer's life easier each month. It's going to help your business grow. It's going to help your business have better service and a better reputation and happier customers and more word of mouth. It's going to snowball, it's going to give you momentum, it's going to work. And most of all, you're going to be proud of your company. You're going to be proud of the product and service you offer. You're going to feel like, yeah, I got something great, and this makes it easier to sell. You believe in the product or service. It makes it easier for you to promote, to market. To tell people, you gotta check this out. I got one more bonus tip and I learned this from Nathan Barry, who is the founder of ConvertKit. Every year or so he asks his customer support team, hey, if there were five things that we fix in our software, in our offering that we changed that would reduce your customer support tickets dramatically, what would they be? And these are not bugs. But. But there may be experience issues, things that are confusing, things that are causing customers to ask questions, things that are not clear in the program or in the actual product. The customer support gives that list of five things and they back up by data. They show, hey, we have X amount of customers asking about this one. X amount of customers asking about this one. So it's not just hunches. And then this becomes part of the development cycle for the engineers to, for Nathan and for my company now at Webinar Ninja. And it doesn't have to be software. It could be anything. It could be a physical product, it could be a service, it could be food. You might have a restaurant. People never order this thing that's on the menu or they ask a bunch of questions about this thing on the menu and maybe the menu needs to be rewritten, maybe it needs to be more descriptive, it needs to be reworked somehow. Regardless, it can be improved. Thanks so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. I hope today's lesson was helpful and it helps you build an incredible customer support experience for your customers. If you love today's episode, share it. Let people know on social media, send them over to 100 MBA net so they can subscribe to the show. Also, if you want to grow your email list, get new leads and potential customers, you're going to need a great lead magnet. Something that you offer on your website that's great value in exchange for them to sign up to your newsletter. Like a checklist or a guide or an ebook or a cheat sheet. The only problem is that creating these amazing materials can take a lot of time, especially if you want them to look professional. But guess what? We've done the work for you. If you go to 100 MBA net templates, you could download our already made lead magnet templates so you can create your own guide, ebook, cheat sheet or checklist in minutes. Again, that's 100mba.net templates. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the advantages or fruits of having a great customer support experience for your customers is that even if you're still having some growing pains in your product or service and it's not perfect. If your customer support is great, people will forgive you. They'll actually say, oh, it's not that bad. They'll work with you until you actually improve the product or service so that your service and your product are excellent. But it buys you some time in the beginning because no one has it perfect out of the box. Right out of the gate. You get a chance to earn that credibility and improve that product because your customers are smiling from your service. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.