We feel so strongly about finding the best tools and procedures for turning our customer’s conversations into new product features that we convinced a few of our high-profile friends to join us in telling some inside secrets. And they are doing it publicly (if we can get your help voting us in!) as part of the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference’s panel discussion titled “Customer Service is the New RD.”
The current lineup includes:
- Sean Ransom, BatchBlue.com
- Sunir Shah, FreshBooks.com
- Mario Sundar, LinkedIn.com
- Lane Becker, GetSatisfaction.com
The plan is to talk with these folks about the tools they are using to connect with customers and how these conversations are integrated back into the product development process. It’s easy to say you are listening to your customers, but unless you can act on what they are saying and give them what they need it is not a very productive conversation.
But listening is not an easy task when conversations are happening in so many different places. Proving the point, Lane volunteered himself for this panel when he read our description on the conference’s interactive panel picker and submitted a comment. Now we get to meet (and pick the brain of) a really cool guy who’s built an entire company around being constructive with customer feedback.
The SXSW Conference itself is a model in positive customer interaction. Though they receive 1000s of submissions for panel ideas, they review each individually and send a PERSONAL NOTE to each potential panelist. As Hugh at SXSW so nicely put it, “in the inter-connected web world, the more that you can do to provide top quality customer service . . the more likely that your business will survive and prosper.”
We love this conference and are excited to see what the online community helps them develop as their next product; the 2009 show.
And a few of our recommendations:
- And our own resident geeky do-gooder Michelle Riggen Ransom submitted a SXSW panel idea exploring ways folks are using “Social Media for Social Change.”
- And Adam highlights some great choices on his personal blog.
Please remember to add your voice by voting for your favorite panels. It’s a great way as a customer to Always Be Talking!
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Tags: batchblue, Customer Service, freshbooks, get satisfaction, linkedin, SXSW, SXSW09, SXSWi
Last year, Michelle and I attended the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. It was an inspiring experience on many levels, and as soon as we left we knew we wanted to submit a panel for 2008.
And we have! We’ve mentioned many times before that providing top notch customer service is one of the founding principles of our company. We wanted to organize a panel that shows how we (and other companies) are using customer service to help shape the development path of our products (in our case, BatchBook).
Here’s the description:
Customer Service is the New R&D
With forums, Get Satisfaction, good old email support and more, let your early adopters help build your product and create the solution they’ve been searching for. See how boot strapping start-ups (and some past the start-up days) build an online R&D lab to turn 1000+ voices into real features.
The panel will feature some brilliant folks from companies we really admire. Sunir Shah of Freshbooks, Mario Sundar of LinkedIn, and Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction have already expressed interest.
The final SXSW panel lineup is influenced by this online poll, so we’d appreciate your vote!
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Tags: batchblue, Customer Service, freshbooks, get satisfaction, linkedin, SXSW, SXSW09, SXSWi
Providing good customer service is one of the founding principles of BatchBlue. We’re a small team, but our customer base is growing (a good thing!) As we add customers, we naturally get more questions from folks about their accounts and our product.
The way we’ve decided to handle customer service is to have a rotating weekly schedule. Each person in the company works in the email queue for a week at a time, essentially being on call 24/7 for the week they are on CS duty. Our official response rate is two business days, but if you write to support@batchblue.com at 5pm on a Friday or 6am on a Sunday, you’re just as likely to hear back within a couple of hours. Incoming customer email also gets copied to our all-staff email address, so everyone knows what type of questions are coming in or what issues are cropping up. Then, in our Monday staff meetings, we review any trends, resolve any quick fixes, and discuss and prioritize feature requests.
Most of us BatchBluers met about a decade ago while working at Amazon.com, where customer service was also hugely important. There we were empowered to do whatever it took to make the customer happy, from waiving shipping charges, to issuing gift certificates, to re-sending a lost item regardless of its price. It must have cost Amazon a lot of money in the early years to take all these “customer XTC”-inducing steps, but Jeff Bezos is a smart man and he knew what he was doing. I’ve been following Zappos with interest, as they seem to have the same relentless drive to build their business by making their customers happy.
A lot has changed in the world of customer service over the last ten years, primarily that there are many more channels by which to communicate with your customers. In addition to our email queue, support forums and blog, BatchBlue has a twitter account were we post product updates, links to our blog, little bits of company news etc. We’ve recently opened an account with Get Satisfaction, a cool new site that describes itself as “people-powered customer service”. It’s a nice-looking forum that lets customers post questions about a company or product, and other customers or people from the company itself can respond. I think, and many people agree (link is to Brian Solis, one of my favorite new media bloggers and an amazing photographer) that this is the future of customer service: pro-actively going where your customers are talking about you to really understand what their needs are and how you can help.
I’m grateful to be once again working at a company where customer service is such a priority, and that we have tools available to allow us to do the absolute best job we can. Our customers seem to be appreciating it too. Customer (and Small Business Super Hero!) Scott Blitstein recently wrote a very nice blog post about us, and we’re compiling a list of other customer quotes to add to our website. Nothing makes all the hard work worthwhile like hearing from customers that you’re getting it right.
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Tags: Customer Service, get satisfaction, twitter
