Hi @CrystalShuller,

We’ve definitely come across this decision as well in a few different capacities. The best way I could think to begin answering that question is to first understand why you are concerned about going that route? Why not a hybrid approach with some folks focusing on tech support and others focusing on the Account Management…[Read more]

As someone that has worked on the front lines of support as well as managed the support process and bug escalations, I truly love what they are doing.

I think the biggest obstacle I’ve found in accomplishing what Carolyn has explained here is getting buy in from the development and management team to put more priority on incorporating necessary…[Read more]

Hey @Evan, I didn’t necessarily help with setting a call center up but I was very connected to the logic around why we used a call center versus email/chat support as well as the inner workings of how it was managed. I can also reach out to some of my contacts at iContact that played a more integral role in building and managing our support center.

This is a great question! It certainly depends on a lot of factors. At UserVoice, we’re such a small team that we all pretty much do more than our initial focus of working with customers such as manage the knowledge base, QA test new features or bug fixes, etc. In our own situation the responsibilities grow as you become more knowledgeable…[Read more]

Dog(s)!

@mathew - I’m curious. Do all of your team take advantage of this? Personally I have trouble doing this as I’m regularly focused on customers that need responses. It’s hard to not reply if a customer needs a response. And then to put the additional load of new tickets on the rest of the team seems almost selfish.

@chase - the three day…[Read more]

@MaxSwagler - Laptops all the way man! We could totally have the PC versus Mac discussion but we don’t have to. Macs always win anyway.

Regarding the wrong impression of “take your work home with you”, I think this is a good topic in and of itself. There is something to be said about about the kind of team member that naturally wants to…[Read more]

Max - I have absolutely typed out lyrics in a reply before. Thankfully I’ve caught it each time.
And our Raleigh office all has different preferences on music except for our developer, Joey and myself. When we show up before everyone else we make good use of our massive speakers and subwoofer via AirPlay.

Great heads up on the jams btw! Big fan

I think basic HTML knowledge is important for most people these days. Like CEO Ryan Carson of Learning Tree says in the opening statement of his company’s advertisements you see on YouTube, “Understanding technology and being able to control it is now as fundamental as being able to read and write.”

With that said, there are a bunch of great…[Read more]

@Evan - Yea we hooked him up nicely To be honest though, it wasn’t because we wanted to help the fledgling startup (well a little bit), it was more because at first it was like those discover commercials you see on TV where the person you call for support is actually yourself and you’r so shocked at how easy the conversation went. But…[Read more]

This customer interaction happened just after UserConf. My monitor in the office wasn’t turning on so I decided to hunker down in the quiet coffee shop next to our office.

The chat started out like this:

“Hi! So I don’t like to be “this” guy, but I’d like to think that I might be cool enough to pull this off.

I’m a web app developer and one of…[Read more]