Supporting customers gives CEOs a reality check

Its amazing: you learn so much about the problems your customers have using the product. You're used to seeing the great customers, the ones who figured it all out, the ones who love your product. In support, you see the poor messaging, confusing pricing, the bugs. It can be a little bit harrowing.

But you also see the people who love everything you do. People write in to say how much they love your product and how much they rely on it, and how much they tell people about it.

Anyway, I recommend it to all, and I plan to keep doing it for years.

exposing a CEO directly to your users is a great idea for all the reasons given, but it can be distracting if they seize on a randomly chosen user's idea as the Next Big Thing which Must Be Implemented Now because it resonates for some reason.

users' ideas and suggestions are great in aggregate, but any given one can be totally the wrong thing to adopt just because the CEO searchlight happens to pause on it and it's given disproportionate attention.

I've justed received a package from DHL. After more than two weeks of trying to get help from DHL support, I gave up. That is, I gave up on their support, not on getting my package. The initial problem was my fault: I'd supported a Kickstarter campaign ages ago, and the result (two Parallella computers...) finally shipped. To my old office address, where it was rejected, and returned to DHLs depot.

DHL support insisted the local courier still had it, despite the fact the local courier had a signature that said otherwise. Then they went quiet. They stopped replying to e-mail entirely.

So I made DHL execs provide support.

I signed up for LinkedIn Premium, and spent half an hour scouring LinkedIn for the highest ranking DHL execs I could find (no easy job - the number of SVP's they have is staggering), and mailed 3 of them with my gripe.

I didn't really expect much help, but two of them grabbed the opportunity to defuse the situation and find out more about what had gone wrong, and fix it. Between them they got the right people looking into the matter, and assorted customer care people both at DHLs headquarters in Germany, and their local (to me) team in the UK were told that a certain SVP wanted to know what was going on and be kept informed. 4 business days from I bypassed their entire support organization and about 5 levels of management (at a guess) the package finally arrived at my desk.

It's great that they cared. But I went this route because I found no other way to get hold of anyone. When support first ignored me, I e-mailed their press contacts, their sales teams, and every other address I could easily find on their site. Nothing. Total silence. My frustration was intense, and I'm sure other customers must have fallen through the cracks too.

If said execs, which did include a person in charge for a large division of their support team, had spent any time "on the floor" answering support requests, I suspect they'd have a very different picture of their organisation, and maybe my rather unusual approach wouldn't have been necessary.

(so I'm going to take this approach whenever I get inadequate support from now on...)

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/11/23/99270...

An hour with your front line support --or bothering to read through or even solicit their thoughts-- can do just as much for you, multiplied by however many support members you have. If anyone knows the flaws of your product, it's the guys and gals on the front lines that have to make excuses for it every day.

>A support rep can only go so far. Support agents often don't have the visibility in an organization to go back and fix bigger process problems. Only you can.

Speaking as someone who has done support before, and will likely continue to do so in the future in one way or another: you've got this all backwards. If anyone knows how screwed up a process is in your organization, or how broken your product is, it's the poor saps like us that are tasked with carrying those processes out and supporting those crappy products. Support agents don't lack "visibility." They lack authority and autonomy to handle issues on their own without fear of reprisal for not using the proper openers and closers and not keeping all calls under 12 minutes so they hit that magic 5 calls and 10 chats an hour marker. For all the talk of "horizontal" and "flat" organizations, most support shops have a very clearly defined hierarchy and strict control over lateral movement that blows up the very "gold mine" you're chasing after.

>When employees see their CEO on Support, they realize it's absolutely essential for them to go above and beyond call of duty to make sure their customers are more than just satisfied.

If you want "above and beyond," be prepared to compensate for it: more-than-COL raises, PTO, TOIL, year-end bonuses, above-average salaries/wages. You're the CEO. You'll go above and beyond because at the end of the day your compensation is tied directly to how well the business does financially. Front line support? We get paid the same amount no matter how easy or rough the day was, no matter how "above and beyond" we went. If anything, going "above and beyond" just means "this call will take me an hour," which means "my metrics are totally fucked for the rest of the day and possibly the week." And that could mean losing your job. Or it could just be justification for denying a raise or promotion.

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Overall, I don't think you'll really get the experience you're looking for as a CEO. Unless you insist that your support manager treat you like any other front-line support tech, with all of the same metrics, and expectations, and "rough" customers, and "in-house" problems, and hours, and compensation, and fear of reprisal, you're going to miss things by simple virtue of the fact that what you're experiencing simply isn't what actually occurs on a day-to-day basis.

We've found that for ourselves, we are able to create a better product when our whole team has a real connection with customers and what their needs are- and our culture is better when we understand that we're all there to make things work for the customer.

The corollary to helping out with support every now and then is to work every job within the company every now and then.

I attend trade shows with sales and work the booth. I write blog posts and design email campaigns. I use our product every day. These things really matter.

They matter even more when you start to scale. When I'm in the midst of a horrific customer support incident with another company, I often wonder how often their CEO has used their product, or dealt with their own support.

This is my project that I'm working at to try to get companies to improve their customer service offering, while at the same time try to help consumers by providing them with a platform for recommendations and issue resolution.

To the HN negativity contingent: I know it's not as beautiful, or feature-rich as the competitors, but I'm just a one man team ;)