How I almost ignored our single best source for customer feedback. | Hacker News Reader

How I almost ignored our single best source for customer feedback.

jacksonfish.com

206 pointshillel49 comments

(Disclaimer: I work for Twilio) You can do this for less money than you think too. For instance, with Twilio toll-free numbers are $2/month+$.05/minute and you can easily program them to have quiet hours or just do simple forwarding with one of our pre-built Twimlets: http://labs.twilio.com/twimlets/

Thanks, great pointer. I'm putting together a service and will try this.

How could I have a toll-free number in the states, another in New Zealand and forward those calls to Skype, a pair of mobile phones and a landline here in NZ?

You could set up a Twilio number for the US, get a local New Zealand number that forwards to the US number, then forward the US number to a "ring on X phones until one of them picks up" twimlet.

The per-minute cost for a call to the New Zealand number would probably be a bit on the high side, but not a major problem, and in the worst case you could just ask for the customer's number and call them back. I assume that the CallerID will get lost along the way.

You'll have it up and running in less than a day, you just need to email support and have them enable international calling on your account.

[disclosure - i work at twilio]

Thanks for explaining this, I actually wrote a blog post (with working sample code) on exactly this topic, because we had some friends in town for Christmas who wanted to call home on Christmas morning without using those really expensive calling cards they were carrying. Basically they called into a U.S. local number with their cell phone, picked from a menu of potential options, and then Twilio dialed to the international number and connected them. Check out my Christmas Eve hack here: http://blog.twilio.com/2009/12/creating-a-custom-internation...

By the way, Twilio rates to New Zealand are 5.2 cents per minute (except for to some mobile lines, which are 47.4 cents per minute - depends on the carrier). http://www.twilio.com/international-calling-rates

Do you use asterisk at Twilio or something else?

Yeah, we use Asterisk among other things.

Not to rain on johns parade but there are a few other out-of-the-box services that offer 1-800 numbers including http://grasshopper.com/ and http://www.ringcentral.com/. We use RingCentral and its horrendously complicated. Grasshopper looks a little more streamlined. Twilio is really pretty easy unless your totally technically inept.

Yeah I didn't mean to imply we were the only option, just maybe the most affordable for a tech-savvy startup.

Well, if you were tech-savvy, wouldn't you just go for a standard asterisk box solution? 1-800 voip minutes are usually around 1 cent per minute or less, depending how many minutes you buy in one shot.

I am tech-savvy, and I've set up 4 Asterisk systems in production. And if I were getting an 800 number for a startup, I'd DEFINITELY outsource it. I'd rather spend my time talking to customers than setting up and maintaining my PBX.

I'm signing up for this. Its time we get a 1-800 number for my online retail business.

I also agree with the article: I personally receive all of our customer calls (which happen like 3-5 times per week). Its a great source of information and it helps our branding that we are a small, customer oriented online retailer.

One day I discussed with her when to give a refund. I told her we had a no questions asked 7 day refund policy. She asked what to do if the person wanted a refund on day 8? I told her to go ahead and give it anyway. There were a lot of situations like this that had to be spelled out. To the letter.

I think it's a fair question. The answer is not obvious: in fact, if it were my business I probably wouldn't give the refund in that case.

She seems good. In my experience, most people doing customer service wouldn't bother to ask and would just follow the procedure. If she asked that before someone actually asked her for a refund on day 8, then she's a keeper. The poster's expectations seem a bit too high.

I think that's the point that the OP is making, though. No matter how great of a customer support agent she was, she wasn't the founder of the company. She can't know how he feels on all matters, his attitude towards things, the perspective with which to treat these incoming phone calls. But he does.

Exactly.

From my experience this article is spot on! The only thing that is missing is the bonus fact that this will save you money on support if you are currently using email. In my experience you can answer questions over the phone 3-5 times as quick as emails. So if you are going to give out your email, might as well give out a phone number as well.

That may be true, but you can batch email up and answer it all at once, two or three times a day. Calls are likely quicker, but the context switching of being interupted at random times throughout the day should not be taken lightly.

You can't copy and paste instructions over the phone.

User groups, when the developer is active, can provide similar benefits.

Two of the user groups I follow have significant developer participation (CONTAM building airflow simulation, and the Sundials suite of numerical libraries). On both, users actually address the developers by name, make feature suggestions, and (in the case of Sundials, which has open code) suggest code fixes. Those groups also have more of a sense of community than the ones where the developers don't seem to spend much time.

I'd go one further and say that everyone (especially engineers) should spend time (either daily/weekly) on customer support (forums, emails, etc.). There's nothing like a customer gripe that gets engineers to prioritize stuff.

Having said that, I couldn't find Jackson Fish's 800 number.

1-888-947-8679 from the top of http://www.astorybeforebed.com/about

Was expecting it on the homepage and not buried under about :)

wow. amazing. you're absolutely right. it's on every page but the homepage. Woops. We just built a new homepage, and I forgot to make sure it was up there. Every other page has it. I've made myself a to-do item to fix. Thanks!

One other point, which you may already be aware of, is that the font size on the image next to the phone number, as well as the links for "about", "contact us", and "legal & privacy" is quite small, and I had trouble reading it. Given your audience is elderly people, it might be good to increase the size of these items -- having to search for a small link to find the phone number mostly negated the effect of seeing a real 888 number for me.

I agree, and luckily that's not necessary. The 888 number is large on every page of the site (except for the intro page for unregistered users). And it will be there soon too.

The problem with that is that you are having engineers who cost the company $75+ an hour spending time doing the job that can be done by someone costing ~$30 an hour. Also, you run the risk of annoying your engineers.

It has to be part of your culture (ie when hiring). As for the cost, it pays back in understanding your customer better and getting engineers working on the right things.

I have been part of too many engineering teams working on the wrong things because of a lack of customer interface.

As long as the developers really have the ability to make changes based on the support requests they are receiving.

I've been in the situation where each developer would take a day of the week handling support. But the support requests could be for any of the software built by the entire development team, not just the things that the individual developer worked on.

So then in many cases the developer was acting as an extremely expensive email/call filter. And the only lesson being learned was that some of the other developers weren't very good at their jobs.

The cost of prioritizing the wrong things and ignoring what's important to your customers far outweighs the higher cost of engineers.

Also, consider that engineers can fix problems faster.

Except that "what's important to your customers" isn't necessarily "what's important to the last caller, or the angriest one". That model doesn't really scale beyond a certain number of customers...

"gets engineers to prioritize stuff"

Yes. And jives with Kayak.com founder's Big Red Phone tactic:

"About a year ago, I bought a red telephone with a really loud ringer for the office. Whenever a customer calls the help number on our website, that phone rings. The engineers initially complained about it. They said, "That's so friggin' annoying!" And I'd say, "There's a really simple solution: Answer the friggin' phone and do whatever it takes to make that customer happy. Then hang up, unplug the phone, walk it down to the other end of the office, and plug it in down there."

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/the-way-i-work-paul-eng...

This is dead on. We do Ninite support over email in our personal inboxes. I'd say the one-on-one interaction, not necessarily the phone, is key.

I spend about an hour each day answering it all and I've learned an incredible amount from emailing back and forth with our users.

It's helped us be much more clear in describing what our product does. We'd change a few words here and there and eliminate whole classes of confused emails.

We build relationships with our users so when we have a question about a new product, or how something should work, we can just ask some people. I love split-testing new stuff too, but that just evaluates if a change works. Talking with people helps validate your assumptions behind changes.

I'm sort of baffled when I see people using forums or getsatisfaction for support. You're compromising that important personal connection.

Also, feedback is incredibly valuable information on your strengths, weaknesses, customer desires, etc. Our main competitors have all this stuff out in the open and I love checking it out every couple days.

Nothing wrong with using forums. At some point, the sheer number of support requests can become inundating. Using forums and having the developers keep track of support requests and interfering/interjecting when necessary, poking around, asking questions while the support staff do the majority of the right-out-of-the-FAQ support can work, too. The key is that forums, unlike support tickets, are open sources of feedback. The developers is in the loop, even if not the primary "mover" of the loop.

(Disclaimer: I work for Ringio) You can be up and running with your own 800 number that routes to employees and pops on your screen who is calling (and match it to a Google Contact) in less than 10 minutes, and try it for free with Ringio. http://www.ringio.com

(Disclaimer: I'm a potential customer) You don't tell me how much it'll cost once the free trial is over, which makes my company extremely unlikely to try it out.

Hi Transatlantic... our pricing is very straightforward: $99/mo for up to 4 users and then $25/mo per user if you need more. A detailed pricing explanation is here -- http://support.ringio.com/entries/171337-ringio-pricing-expl...

Thanks. I'm curious why this info isn't in an obvious place. Do you convert better without it?

It's actually also here -- http://www.ringio.com/about/pricing/ in our main website. For us the emphasis since we launched a month ago was to get good feedback from customers, and since it has been free for all to try, it felt unnecessary to be more upfront with the trial.

I think it's really important for the people building a product to spend at least some time doing tech support. Right now, my tech team of three (including me) all "see" every incoming tech support email and we rotate through who's responsible to answer them. Since I have a tech support background, it's obvious to me that this is the best way to both understand what's broken, but also what works and what can be improved in a system. I don't think we'd bring on a dedicated support person until this strategy impinges on our ability to get things done.

What system do you use to answer the support emails? I'm looking into this for my small team (4 of us) but don't want to pay the $30+/month it costs to have each of us setup w/ Zendesk.

Is it just as simple as forwarding the e-mails to everyone?

My main concern is due to timezones I'll probably be asleep when a customer calls.

I'm a bit worried about this too, especially because I sleep odd, always shifting hours.

I think I'm going to setup a Twilio app which tells customers that we'll call them back within 24 hours. The app could ask "When is the best time to call?" and "Please briefly describe the reason for your call". The app could be interruptible if I am awake and available.

you can also specify on the site which hours you are open. We have a dynamic indicator on our site showing when the phone line is 'open'.

That's a great idea, but I'd be worried about people forgetting to call later after deciding not to call while the phone line is "closed".

If you were really enterprising you could put up a form during off hours that let them specify when they'd like to be called back during on hours.

or have voice mail.

Or voicemail. But if you want to really empower your users, let them pick a time to be contacted and then call them then. Voicemail is leave it and forget it and when I call a company and leave a voicemail it feels like a black hole that my message may never escape. Maybe that's just me.

We are based in a far off land, with most of our customers in the US. I just include in my support emails: "If you'd rather discuss anything on the phone, just send me your phone number and timezone and I'll be in touch at a time that works for you". It works well - I normally initiate a few phone calls each day using SkypeOut. We are looking at a SkypeIn number with voicemail to allow customers to make inward calls, but I am pretty happy with the current scenario.

Another great option for this live chat services like Olark. Of course you can also have these routed to your mobile when they offer an app. Needless to say, having the chat requests manned by founders once in a while is great way to keep them checked into reality.

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