Aphorisms 1
I’m traveling this week so thought it would be a good time to share a few aphorisms related to customer care. Like what you read? Reply to this email or hit thumbs up.
An aphorism is a pithy observation that contains a general truth. These are phrases or “rules” that I would use when coaching members of the support team at FullStory. The ones I’m sharing today originally came from Rich Armstrong, my manager at Fog Creek Software.
Photo by Nick Artman on Unsplash, Hinckley, Ohio
“Never put anything in writing that you wouldn’t want the customer to see.”
Have you ever accidentally sent something to a customer that was meant to be internal? Yikes! No worries, this kind of thing happens all the time. Let’s be mindful of our customers and only put things in writing that we would be okay with the customer seeing.
For example, let’s say you just had a difficult call with a customer. Rather than put notes in the ticket that say, “the customer was a real jerk”, you might say, “Had trouble seeing eye to eye—they were clearly frustrated. As a next step to try to make a connection, we’re going to…” If you’re the customer, which message would you want to receive on accident?
One exclamation point
As a general rule, you get one exclamation point per email. Just one.
Using an exclamation point in a customer-facing email is a great way to say “I am not a jerk”. When you use too many exclamation points, the email can take on an uncomfortable tone, perhaps becoming a bit uncanny.
“It’s not my job to convince you that you’re being unreasonable.”
Some customers struggle to cohere to the way that we wish to do support. For example, take this hypothetical exchange:
Customer: I’m having trouble finding new data on my dashboard. Can you help?
Support: Happy to help! It looks like the issue you’re experiencing is due to a recent bug. Would you mind answering a few questions so we can make sure we fully understand your issue? That will help us confirm the fix for the bug will be a fix for your issue.
Customer: Ugh. You’re asking me to do so much work! Can’t you just figure it out?!!!
These situations are really challenging and frustrating because the customer isn’t seeing that we’re trying to help address their concern in a logical manner. What’s going on here?
Very likely, the customer is reaching out for emotional reasons and is trying to provide reasons ex post facto to align with their emotions (everybody does this—it’s extremely common). When you recognize this, it might be helpful to have the following phrase go through your head:
“It’s not my job to convince you that you’re being unreasonable.”
It’s not uncommon for us to start feeling emotional and frustrated in these situations as well. We might think the best way to reply would be to address the perceived irrationality head on, e.g. “Hey look, if you’d just slow down and read what I wrote, you’d realize the answer to your question was in my last email.” The problem with this approach is that this can often lead to a stalemate. The customer isn’t trying to be irrational. They just happen to be having a frustrating experience and they’re expressing that in an indirect way. It’s best to realize that it’s literally not your job to try to convince them of their irrationality. So what is your job?
Rather, it’s best to use Inception-like techniques to get on the same page. Usually, this means applying a heavy dose of empathy and sometimes directing the customer’s focus elsewhere so that they organically come back to the approach you originally suggested. Jumping on the phone can often defuse situations like this because they allow us to ramp up the empathy and really listen to one another. Sometimes having a teammate (or manager) jump in and take over the conversation can have the same result.
Only when both sides feel emotionally grounded are we able to continue a discussion on the basis of logic and reason.
Etc.
I don’t have time to share what I’ve read this week, but I did watch Hamilton last week and absolutely loved it. Highly recommend.