That sounds adorbs! We’ve sent all sort of things: water bottles, shirts, onesies for babies, pictures drawn by our employees’ kids, that sort of silliness. I think the hand drawn pictures and the onesies get the most adoration.

Great idea!

Great food for thought! We’re going to be trying proactive chat in Q2. We’re installing it within Moz Analytics and will probably only target customers on their first day using the product, though we might provide it for 7 days. It’s going to be framed as an onboarding assistance coach, with the goal of increasing engagement within the product in…[Read more]

This is a tough one so I’d love to hear more ideas. I talked about some of it at UserConf: http://www.slideshare.net/agwheeler/user-conf-aaron-wheeler-final

For showing happy customers, we see how many people rate us fantastic on their exit survey over time (via Surveymonkey): http://www.screencast.com/t/qFtodxQv5M1. We also see how many…[Read more]

Great question! We’ve tried a lot of formats but have settled on half-hour weekly 1:1s between me and each team member, and one 15-minute standup meeting across the team once/week.

Before the 1:1s, I ask each team member to complete a 15Five.com report; check ‘em out. It documents the conversation and helps people think about their workload.…[Read more]

Ooh, I like that a lot @Chase!

I’ve never thought about not having a pending state! Interesting.

Like Jake and Mathew, we use the Zendesk “Pending” state to wait for a response from a customer, typically. We also use it if we know we’ll need to take action on it later, but not for a few days. Furthermore, we have a similar trigger set so that when a ticket is marked “Solved”…[Read more]

Haha, I’ll actually be talking about that particular phone support case, too! I get a lot of questions about it. You’re welcome to use the data; I’m mostly speaking to how we came to that decision and the drop off we saw as part of an overall look at using metrics for decision making.

Oooh, great questions! One of the culture ones I most love is, “On a scale of 1-10, how weird are you?” The justification for the answer is usually pretty fantastic. The actual score doesn’t matter as much, but it’s fun because they don’t know if you’re aiming for higher or lower so they have to be more authentic than usual. We’re usually aiming…[Read more]

Thanks for the comments, guys! We use Mail Chimp for the distribution so they include a web version of the email that makes it really easy to show you: http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=7cfd0aeb7d7d1bf61147f02aa&id=b4a066d5f1&e=c2fca39396.

We’ve been doing them for a couple of years now so there’s been many changes over time. The most important…[Read more]

This is really hard, Tess. I actually did exactly what you said - took a random sample of 20 tickets from the past month and read through them one-by-one. It was tedious and took a whole day. Actually, I haven’t done it yet for the other agents simply because it takes so much time. However, I learned a lot about how that agent did tickets (as you…[Read more]

Not sure if this got posted here yet but it’s pretty great! Hope it cheers everyone up…

It Gets Worse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EJw6oGSft0

Ooo! Thanks Jason! Sharing with my team right now!

Authenticity is so important! And you’re right: at many companies, the customer service teams and community teams are the main places to show off how authentic your company really is. I think transparency is a closely related but distinct value that is equally important.

One of the ways we show authenticity is by letting everyone have their own…[Read more]

We call our support team the Help Team and the social and community teams the Community Team. I’m usually the “Help Team Leader” which essentially means the Customer Service Manager, but it’s a bit ambiguous. Team members are “Help Teamsters.” The formal title has been “Customer Service Expert” and “Support Engineer.”

Titles are really annoying…[Read more]

Looks like things are going better now! Like @alexandra, I love that status page. Going to have to copy cat. =)

We tend to go above and beyond in the same ways that you do, @Alex. We send out “happiness packages” to customers that have had a rough time but that like our company. We also send them to newer customers. There’s a goal that each team member send out two packages per week, which isn’t that many, but it’s still sometimes hard to achieve!

We also…[Read more]

Great question! We convey to customers that we have coverage from 7am-5pm PST, Monday through Friday so that their expectations aren’t too high (sometimes someone has to come in late or we can’t cover a weekend […]

Thanks so much for the support guys! It’s been a crazy couple of days but we’re over one of the main humps and it’s been very well received. On the other hand, we’ve had to make a lot of changes to accomodate not […]

That was so much fun! Thanks for all the activities and the fantastic conference. It was great meeting so many other people who care about customers. And thanks for the great tour, Carter. I learned so much about […]

@Nick and I get into JFK at about 8:15p on Thursday but we’ll see if we can make it to post-dinner drinks! Also, Friday night dinner FTW.