how we do customer service
Dear Sir/Madam,
My 'how we build the product' post was really popular, so I thought I'd follow up with a post about 'how we do customer services.'
Great customer service can create big advantages in terms of retaining customers and creating word of mouth for your product. However, to eeek out the most advantage from customer service you need to apply 'filtering' to the feedback you receive. I do maintain and agree that some feedback is really there to be ignored. But, it is determining when and when not to ignore it that is perhaps the tricky part.
The below maybe helpful when thinking about filtering. It's pretty-straight-forward but I think it works.
I also think, hands on customer service can be the best way to get a feel for how iterate and add features to your product. The general principle being, the more people telling you about a feature, the more important you know it is that you should add it.
As always, love to know what you think on this subject and if you have any anecdotes about customer service....?
Kind regards,
Carl
Carl Knibbs
Reader Comments (2)
As ever, I think 37 Signals Getting Real had a great way of putting this in the Forget Feature Requests chapter.
Primarily...
"You can't forget what's important when you are reminded of it every day."
The feedback you can't forget (because you're reminded so regularly) is probably the most important. The best way to procure these reminders is for product owners and managers to spend some time on the frontline for customer support - when you have to answer customer's emails you soon become very aware of what the bugs are and where you need to take the product.
Thanks Ben,
37Signals summarise this stuff so well. Cheers for including the link...
Carl