Looking back at the last 1.5 yrs since we started Performable, one thing is very clear: the single best decision we ever made was to make customer service everyone’s job.
Everyone on the team is assigned a day on our support calendar when they answer the phones, reply to all emails and proactively reach out to customers to see if they can be helpful. This customer service focus has grown from a company mantra to a company religion. Obsessive customer focus shapes everything we do, from how our dev team builds our product to how we recruit new team members.
Yesterday my co-founder, Josh Porter, gave a great talk at a MassTLC SaaS event that shares our greatest secret weapon, customer driven management.
We’re always looking to do a better job. If we missed anything please let me know below in the comments and we’ll send you an awesome Performable t-shirt.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks David. Great blog post and slide-show. I wanted to note that when you make customer service everyone’s job, it should be clarified (especially with larger organizations) that this is not only limited to the external customer but also internally to the organization between the employees and the departments. As we experienced significant growth we realized that we were doing an outstanding job with our customer service externally but internally we weren’t treating each other, or each department , as good as we were treating our customers. Once we communicated to the staff that each department was essentially another departments “customer,” we started to see major cultural improvements within the organization.
Love it. With all of the amazing tools available to us, there’s no reason not to provide a wow experience. When everyone does customer support (including back-end engineers), it creates a product and experience that’s just so much better.
I found a really great chat client a couple months ago, and now that’s probably 40-45% of all of our customer interactions. Looks like Performable is using the same product.
How much of your interactions are done over live chat now?
Man, you are preaching to the choir! Right with you on this–all the way!
David, this is exactly right. Customer service is a company-wide philosophy, not a “department.” Particularly as technology becomes more competitive, superior customer service becomes a differentiator and is a competitive advantage. When you are an “as service” (e.g., software-as-a-service) you realize that customer retention is the key to high customer lifetime value. When you start viewing your business as a set purchases your customer makes month over month, the economics of delivering Customer Wow are abundantly clear.
We are happy to count Performable as an Assistly customer and we are glad to support your vision of “whole company” support. Like you, we believe everybody in the organization has a role to play in customer service.
And I can also say your team at Performable walks the talk. We are a customer of Performable and just the other evening your CTO jumped in to help us solve a problem at 9PM at night — no prodding or begging required — and totally Wow’d us.
Nice work, Performable team.
Love seeing how other companies do customer service, David! Thanks for sharing.
In the early 90s I was promoted to lead the creative team for a small business-to-business cataloger.
The first thing I did was make the designers spend some time on the phones with customers so they could experience the ordering process their creative was supposed to drive.
The move was not embraced by management. When I asked the creatives what they learned, they said: “That people are stupid.”
I didn’t last long in that position.