Customer Service “Bender”

by toddynho on July 20, 2009

I’ve been on a Customer Service “Bender”, you could call it, for the last year or so.  Believe it or not, I actually don’t like talking to people.  I’m not a jerk, I just like to do my own thing while working, and stuff like customer support takes away from “me doing my own thing” - it’s an interruption.  Since launching BuySellAds.com, and since we’re trying to claw our way to the top without any outside cash right now, this means that I am very involved in customer support every day.  For me, it’s hard for me to work on anything if I don’t believe in it and if I don’t have any passion to contribute.  Simply put, I had to figure out how to become passionate about customer support at BSA.  Once I got down to it, it was really just a matter of me being passionate about growing the business, not being a jerk, and discovering that I actually DID enjoy talkiing to people once I found satisfaction in being able to solve their prooblems.

Finding passion in customer support quickly became more than just “customer support”:

  • Being involved in customer support allowed me to build relationships with our users, which, if you look around online for reviews of BSA it is the main driver for people who leave positive reviews about our company online.
  • In an effort to make customer support more efficent the BSA application became more efficent and usable as well.  It’s obvious, but still important to note.  Since fixing a bug, changing messaging, or making a certain feature work better can reduce the volume of customer support, and therefore, reduce the customer support “interruption”, these things get fixed, tweaked, and improved very quickly at BSA.

Somehow, the BSA business continues to grow, but I’m still spending the same amount of time doing customer support.  Yes, I do have help now, but our inquiries per active user continues to go down month after month.  This is directly related to us fixing stuff, continuously improving the application, and more importantly EDUCATING users as we reply to support tickets.  When we reply to a ticket the goal isn’t to ask a stupid question just to put it off and get it out of our queue - the goal is to have such a good response that they don’t need to ask for any more help.  It seems obvious to work this way, but I think you would be surprised how many organizations use certain techniques in support to “procrastinate” a bit.

What sparked inspiration for this post was a something I just read from Seth Godin’s blog:

“My rule of thumb is this: every person you turn away because your product or service isn’t right for them turns into three great customers down the road. Every bad sale costs you five.”

… which brings me to my last point in this rant, Being honest in customer support is always the *best* answer.  At BSA we do our very best to be very direct with people, and, we find that this always yeilds the best results even when it might not be the answer our users are looking for.

If I were to rewind the tape and start BSA again today like I did just over a year ago, I would chose to be as involved in customer support as I have been and am now.  If you asked me this a year ago when I actually was starting BSA, I might not have answered the same.  The past year has really showed me how valuable quality customer support can be - it’s a huge opportunity, really.

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jQuery Conference Boston 2008

by toddynho on September 29, 2008

I attended the jQuery Conference yesterday in Boston. It was rainy and crappy outside, which made for a great day to talk about JavaScript. Overall, I thought that the conference was great, I enjoyed the division of an Advanced Track and a Beginner Track, but I still would have liked to see what was going on over at the Beginner Track since there were some great speakers on the agenda. My favorite speaker was Mr. Resig who talked about the State of jQuery and made an announcement that Microsoft will be including jQuery in its .NET distribution and Nokia will be integrating it into their widget development platform. While the reaction from the crowd about Microsoft might not have been very warm, I think this will be a good thing for jQuery. It means more people looking at the code and more people working to improve and further develop the framework, blah blah blah. So, good stuff overall.

I also really enjoyed Kevin Hoyt’s talk about using jQuery with Adobe AiR apps.  It was a nice intro to AiR which I have just not had a chance to look at until now.  I was annoyed when I heard that Aza Raskin wasn’t going to be there for his talk about using jQuery in FireFox extensions, I was very much looking forward to that.

The conference was on $50 and you got a free t-shirt too, can’t beat that. I also ran into my buddy Frederick from W3EDGE.  Now, how long do you think it will take me to convert HubSpot’s YUI over to jQuery??? ;)

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Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing / Mac vs. PC Spoof

by toddynho on September 22, 2008

Check out this video inbound marketing video from HubSpot.  Funny stuff:

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SEOMoz, here’s your own official Fail Whale

by toddynho on August 12, 2008

OK, so as you can see, I have only two posts on this blog both about fail whale’s… these people just need to keep their websites up so that I don’t have to make anymore fail whale’s.  Feel free to copy the image, but please do link back to WebsiteGrader.com for me ;)

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GMail Fail Whale

by toddynho on August 12, 2008

Yesterday when GMail went down, my friend Dan who sits on the other side of the tree next to my desk said “hey Todd, you should make a GMail fail whale”.  So, I did.  Dan posted the image on his blog and I also emailed it to TechCrunch since they had a story going on the GMail outage.  Luckily, TechCrunch picked it up, and credited us for the image.  The story was also picked up by the Washington Post (who syndicated from TechCrunch) and has resulted in a little bit of traffic.  Not bad for some unintentional link bait.  Thanks to TechCrunch for publishing the image and crediting us with a link back to WebsiteGrader.com!

Here’s a screenshot of the imge on TechCrunch:

GMail Fail Whale as seen on TechCrunch

GMail Fail Whale as seen on TechCrunch

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