If you want to contest a ticket, do not pay the fine and/or penalty. You cannot contest a ticket once you have paid the fine and/or penalty nor can you request a refund. Skip the Trip! Parking and photo enforcement tickets can be contested online, by mail, or in person within 60 calendar days. If you contest the ticket between 31 and 60. Went to the event box office, was told that the seat for ticket had been sold at around the time my ticket posting got locked down and I would need to inquire with Ticketmaster customer service. Has Anyone Integrated a Google Form into JitBitI would like to use a Google Form as a UI to specify (via dropdown choices) what equipment is needed for newly hired people, which creates a JitBit ticket from that input. Perhaps a better way to achieve this is to create a template for a certain category of ticket (New Hire)? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you. Edited Jun 1, 2018 at 22:46 UTC
·Reply
How to avoid burning out at a customer support jobAs I said multiple times, customer support is a very stressful job. The best thing you can do for your productivity is to take care of your mental health. I believe this is the hardest part about the job and I struggle a lot with this. I wanted to share a couple of tips in this post, which the Jitbit support team and I use to deal with frustration and to avoid burning out. Accept that tickets will never be overSome days, no matter how much you work, you won't be able to achieve the 'inbox zero.' You reply to one email and two new ones come in. This is frustrating and hard to deal with. You just feel helpless at moments like these. The completionist in me tries really hard to reply to every ticket in the queue before the work day is over, but the best thing to do is to resist this urge. Having zero tickets in the inbox may be the best feeling in the world, but it shouldn't be your ultimate goal. The only thing you need to do is to provide the best possible support to your customers, even if it takes them a bit longer to get a reply from you. You can only reply to so many tickets per day without sacrificing the quality. Stop chasing the elusive 'inbox zero' and focus on the things that matter. Transfer a difficult ticket to someone elseDealing with a difficult customer? Don't know the answer to the ticket? First, remember not to take it personally. It's never about you. Second, if you can't deal with a ticket, it might be a good idea to transfer it to someone else. Sometimes getting a fresh pair of eyes on an issue works wonders. When one of us gets stuck or frustrated with a support ticket, we ask someone else from the team to take over the ticket. It saves a lot of time for everyone and keeps you sane. Take breaksI feel like the biggest reason for burnouts is a constant feeling of being helpless and overwhelmed. Taking breaks goes hand in hand with accepting that your job is never over. No matter how hard you work, there will always be stuff left to do. What is the best thing to do when you start feeling overwhelmed? That's right -- take a break. A great rule of thumb is a 5-minute break every 30 minutes. Try to take extended breaks every couple of hours. Check out the Pomodoro time management technique -- it works very well for me no matter what type of work I do. Stop worrying about things that are out of your controlIn customer support (and in life) many things are out of your control. For example, you can't fix bugs in your product yourself -- that's not your job. Is customer getting frustrated about the bug? Nudge your developers and move on. There is no point in stressing out about it -- you've already done what you could. Every time you start worrying about something ask yourself if there is anything you can do to solve it. If there is nothing you can do, just take a break and move on to the next tickets. Make it easy for yourselfThe best way to keep yourself sane is... not answering any tickets at all. Invest in building your knowledge base -- think about what you can add to the help section after resolving each ticket. This is especially useful if your helpdesk software suggests articles from the knowledge base while users are writing tickets (Jitbit does wink-wink). So in many cases, customers will get their answer before submitting a ticket. Another ticketing system software feature you may want to look into is 'canned responses.' You can save frequent answers to canned responses to save you some time typing the same thing over and over again. For example, we have a canned response about not providing phone support and our reasoning behind it. We get asked about phone support a lot and we can reply with a couple of clicks. To recap, here are my tips for dealing with frustration and avoiding burning out:
Read More 'Help Desk' vs 'Service Desk' vs 'ITSM'The IT industry is overwhelmed with abbreviations. ITSM vs ITIL vs SaaS vs DevOPS... Sometimes even technical journalists get lost, confusing 'ITSM' with a 'helpdesk'... So here is how IT guys (are supposed to) see it: Help deskHelpdesk or 'IT helpdesk' is an organizational unit/process, that resolves issues using the 'break/fix' concept. This is often called 'incident management' or 'problem management'. Something's down - let's go fix it. Help desk is 'tactical', not 'strategic'.
Help desk is a subset of a 'service desk'. While 'help desk' provides 'help', 'service desk' provides a 'service' (which of course includes 'help' in turn). To put it simple, 'service desk' is a more 'strategic' term than 'help desk'. It's not just about fixing stuff, but also about adding new services and maintaining the existing ones. 'Service desk' is a more broad term than just a 'help desk'. It looks at the company/enterprise needs as a whole rather than being focused on dealing with end-user problems and takes the broader business context into account. The ITIL 3 definition the Service Desk describes it as 'the Single Point of Contact between the Service Provider and the Service Consumer'.
ITSM stands for 'IT Service Management'. It's not just a 'desk' any more, ITSM unites the entirety of all the IT-related activities in an organization. Including planning and designing new IT services, not just delivering and supporting those services. The complexity is increasing, so are the challenges, so are the... abbreviations. Read More How to handle negative customer feedbackCustomer support is not all roses - quite often you have to deal with criticism from your customers. It’s very easy to take it personally and ruin your relationships with a client even further. How do you deal with situations like that? Here is the first thing to always remember: Don’t take it personallyThis is one of my biggest issues. Being a co-founder and answering support tickets is hard because you are too invested in the product. When someone says something like “How can you have a help desk app that doesn’t do X? That’s crap.”, I immediately get angry. As we all know by now, being angry and replying to emails is never a good thing. If there is one thing that will lead you to a burn out in a matter of weeks, it’s this one. Whatever your customers say, it is not directed at you. In the above example, the customer probably meant to say “we are looking for this feature and you don’t have it, so it’s not going to work for us.” But his wording made me hear “you are garbage and everything you do is crap.” In moments like this the first thing you need to do is stop and calm down. Don’t let it get to you. Any feedback is a good thingThink about it. Some person took some time to write their thoughts to you. For free. Even if it’s a rant, it can still be valuable. Customer Support is a free marketing channel. You get so many insights into your customers and prospects from support tickets. If you start looking at your emails from this point of view, you will discover many things about your product. What do they like about the product? What do they hate? What annoys them? What features they do not care for? Many companies pay for customer and market research to get that kind of information. But there is no reason to do that since you have it all in your support emails. You don’t need to ask them to provide you feedback. Write a good responseThere is no reason to be mad at things you have no control over. I know it’s hard, but try to calm down and write a mature response. Be empathetic and polite. Apologize profusely. Basically, make that customer feel bad for writing a rude email to a nice person like you. All the things we talked about before also apply to negative feedback. Here is a checklist for a good email response. Here is your checklist for a good email response. The most important takeaway here is don’t let the negative stuff ruin your day. If you are starting to get mad, take a quick break. You need to take care of your mental state when working in customer support. Read More The Biggest Mistake in Customer Support: Playing for TimeAs I wrote in the very first blog post in our customer support series - Amazing Customer Support Defined - you should always strive to resolve a ticket as fast and in as fewer interactions as possible. It’s beneficial to both customers, and your support metrics. Unfortunately, I often see people forget about this simple rule and, I think, this is one of the biggest mistakes in customer support. When you have 50 tickets waiting in the queue you only desire is to bring that count down to zero. You start to prioritize quantity over quality. Instead of providing customers with comprehensive answers, you start playing for time and asking irrelevant questions, hoping that the client’s next reply will come tomorrow and you won’t have to deal with it today anymore. This is nothing else, but simple procrastination. I’m guilty of it myself. The problem is, the next day you are going to have another 100 tickets in the queue. You end up spending three times more time on a ticket than you could’ve spent if you just write one good reply instead of five half-assed comments. If you think you don’t do that ask yourself these questions:
If you answered “yes” to any of those, you are as guilty as all of us. The biggest takeaway here is you should stop being intimidated by your support queue. Treat each ticket individually and it will do wonders for your productivity and mental health. It’s perfect for your customers too. Read More Zapier Help Desk integration is released with new featuresEver since the start of Jitbit Helpdesk development, we’ve been focusing on keeping the app simple. We believe this is what makes us stand out from the competition – our help desk is not bloated with dozens of buttons, checkboxes, and features that you will never use. Jitbit Helpdesk is a product built for a single purpose – being a ticketing system for email customer support. However, we don’t want to force our users to work in Jitbit in a certain “right way”. We want to keep you in control while still remaining an easy-to-use tool that gets out of your way. That’s why we keep adding a lot of integrations with third-party apps so that you can seamlessly integrate Jitbit into your existing workflows and make them better. And the most important integration of them all – Zapier – has been released today. What is ZapierSimply put, Zapier lets you integrate different apps you use with each other. They support more than 500 apps, and all of them can be integrated one into another. Each app can either “trigger” an action in another app or be triggered by another app. So you can do things like: “When I get a Twitter mention - create a new ticket in Jitbit,” Or, “When a new Jitbit ticket is created, send me a Slack notification.” There’s a lot of possibilities. And Zapier has a much more detailed article on how it works: https://zapier.com/help/how-zapier-works/ As for the price, you can create up to five integrations (they are called “Zaps”) for free. What can you do in Jitbit with Zapier?Jitbit has two “triggers” and one “action” in Zapier. First, you can create a new ticket when something happens in another app. You can set the ticket subject, body, category, etc. All those things can contain data that comes from that other app. So, in our Twitter example above, the ticket body could be the tweet itself. Next, you can trigger some action in other apps when a new ticket has been created or closed in Jitbit Helpdesk. A good use-case example would be sending out “survey emails” after a ticket has been closed. And you can do that starting of today. You can create your own automated workflows from scratch on Zapier, or can get started with some of our most popular automated workflows by clicking “Use this Zap” on any of the examples below: If you tried our Zapier integration before (after all it was in a closed beta for a long time) and haven’t found it useful, I urge you to try it again. We’ve added and rewritten a bunch of stuff. In addition to the new “ticket is closed” trigger we rewrote the “new ticket is created” trigger so that it sends a lot more data about the created ticket. Also, all Zaps are now easy and quick to set up. It takes just a couple of clicks. I’m very excited about this. I also personally worked with Zapier guys closely for the last couple of months, and I have no problems trusting them with our customers – they care about their users and their product a lot. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the Jitbit Helpdesk integration on Zapier, this is a great time to do it. Read More Email downtime on Friday, Sep 23 2016We had an email issue this Friday, September 23rd. Some emails sent to the built-in email addresses ('[email protected]') were not being imported into your helpdesks. The issue occurred approximately between 3PM and 4PM EDT. There’s been a malfunction with the anti-spam and anti-virus modules on our Postfix server, as a result some emails were falsely marked as suspicious and been delayed. We’ve fixed the issues, and the messages sent after 4pm were coming through just fine. The good news is that nothing has been lost. It’s been a long night on this side of the pond, but we were able to successfully recover all the missing emails and they were properly delivered into your Jitbit instances. But some of your incoming tickets came in 3-10 hours late. We are terribly sorry about this and we made sure this never happens again. While trying to improve one side of the problem (tuning anti-spam) we accidentally broke the other. This won’t happen again, since we now a have a backup email server, that launches once there’s even a tiny problem with the primary one. Read More 3 Things to Look for When Hiring for Customer SupportThe process of hiring a new customer support rep is a very complicated subject (and that’s why I’ve been putting off writing about it for quite a while). But in the end, it all comes to picking the right candidate. I’m not an HR manager, although I’ve hired a fair share of people, so I’m not going to tell you about general questions to ask in an interview. You can find that on your own. I will focus specifically on what we are looking for in a support tech. Customer support is not a temp jobGeneral population still views customer support as something like being a waiter – it’s just an entry-level temp job, and everyone is capable of doing it. In reality, not everyone can be a decent support agent (or a waiter for that matter). Does a candidate wants to work in support or is it just a temporary position until he finds something better? This is the biggest thing for me. I’ve seen this too many times, especially in the tech industry. Most of the current support worker have ambitions of becoming programmers, project managers or something else. Here’s where you ask them about their previous experience. If this is not the first customer support job for a candidate, it is an excellent sign. Previous experience in positions that require lots of empathy also counts – waiters, flight attendants, jobs that require working with people or even with animals. Not having previous experience in your industry is okayTechnical support, comparing to, say, programming, requires little prior knowledge and experience. In this sense, most people will be capable of doing it indeed. So do not focus too much on experience in your field. I’ve worked with a very complicated product as a head of customer support on one of my previous jobs. If someone would write a complete manual on it, it would probably take 300-400 pages. It was tough to learn. When faced with a challenge to hire people to help me support it, I focused on just recruiting patient, empathetic candidates, even if they had no previous experience. And it worked out great. Of course, a technical person would get the product a bit faster. But it’s not worth it in the long run. I’d rather hire one person for five years and spend a bit more time training just him than hire two new people every year because the previous ones constantly quit. Hire people who can cope with stressCustomer support is a very stressful job. I’ve repeated this hundred of times, and I will repeat it again. You reply to one ticket, and three new ones come in. No matter how hard you try, your job is never over. This is why hiring waiters and flight attendants is so good. They regularly work under pressure, and they have to deal with a lot of things: never being able to catch a breath, asshole customers, being able to pay the same amounts of attention to multiple people at once, etc. As for the interview questions, the only thing that comes to my mind is “Have you ever had a burnout at your job and how have you dealt with it?”. This is a very specific question, comparing to the generic and vague “How do you handle pressure and stress?”. Burnouts are the biggest danger in customer support. You want to know if a candidate experienced it, knows how to deal with it and, most importantly, knows how to avoid it. Those are the most important things you want to look for in a customer support candidate. You want to find a person who can cope with high amounts of stress every day and not burn out. Also, don’t forget to hire people who won’t quit after a couple of months. I would love to hear about your hiring experience. Do you have any thoughts or ideas? Read More Survey forms in Jitbit HelpdeskI know, product updates & hints are so boring. That's why we do this so very occasionally - only once in 3-6 months. But this one is really worth posting. Customer surveyingOne of the most frequent requests we get here in Jitbit Helpdesk is how to send a customer survey after a support ticket has been closed. While we don't have this feature built-in, you can still add surveys using our 'automation rules' module fairly easy. You will need an account with a free surveying application like SurveyMonkey for example - they have a free plan that allows creating surveys that have upto 10 questions. While we will need only one question - 'how satisfied are you with our support?' that we'll send out to the customer. 'Send survey' automation ruleAfter you have registered at SurveyMonkey (or a similar service, like 'PollDaddy' for example) simply go to 'Admin - Autoation Rules' in the helpdesk application. Create a new rule there, name it, say, 'Sending a ticket survey'. Set the automation rule trigger to 'ticket has been closed', and set the 'action' to 'Send an email to ticket submitter'. Then fill in the email body including a link to the survey you just created in SurveyMonkey. Just like on this screenshot: After you save the rule, every time a ticket has been closed, a message is sent to the customer, inviting him to share his feedback. Read More How to make loyal customersOn average, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase according to White House Office of Consumer Affairs. Simply put, the more loyal customers you have, the more money your company makes. At Jitbit, we have a handful of customers who are very loyal to us. They’ve been with us for a very long time and are very engaged with the company and the product. Recently I started thinking about what have we done differently with them as opposed to regular not-so-loyal customers. Being consistentEvery customer support ticket from our loyal customers has been answered quickly and the issues were quickly resolved. I think this was the essential part – we were very consistent providing exceptional customer support to them. We often went an extra mile and did things that we usually don’t do. Like remote support or installation help. Responding to an email quickly just once or twice is not enough. You’ve got to stay on point with your customer support every single time if you want to get loyal customers. We are treating them as equalsI almost don’t want to call them “customers.” Most of our loyal clients are more like partners to us at this point. They’ve provided so much help and suggestions with our product I honestly don’t believe we would be here today without their help. But it all started with their first couple of support emails with questions and suggestions. We took every feature request seriously. If we have to refuse, we thoroughly explain what are the reasons behind that decision. If we have any questions about implementing a feature, we consult them and ask how to make it better for them. I honestly can’t say that we do this with every customer, but we really should try our best. I know how hard it can be when you get a 50th feature request a day. But the default thinking should be “What if they are on to something?” instead of “This person can’t understand our app better than me and their suggestions make no sense”. Let them know you are doing something specialSpeaking of extra miles, whenever we do something that we don’t do for everyone, we make sure that the customer knows that they are getting special treatment. After all, you’re doing extra work – you want people to know about it. Special treatment, even if it’s something insignificant, makes a difference. Small things like “We usually don’t do it, but I can help you install the app remotely” could easily earn you thousands of dollars in the long run. People tend to remember this. Admit it – you still remember every restaurant where you got a free dessert. We are honest with themThis is almost the same as treating them as equals, but I wanted to make a special point on this. Being honest is crucial for any long lasting relationship. Here is what I mean:
One of the most valuable skills you can have as a customer support agent is creating loyalty. I believe that these four points helped us get those “customers for life” we have today. Share yours in the comments. Read More Categorizing your Support TicketsCategorizing support tickets is the second most important feature of almost any helpdesk ticketing system available on the market today (the first most important being ticket-tracking itself). Categories can be used for:
Improper ticket categorization can result in slower response times, incorrect reporting and user frustration. So lets have a look at some of the ways you can categorize your support tickets: By problem typeThis is probably the most common way to categorize your support requests - by issue type. Convenient for both the end users (they know which category they should put their tickets to) and the helpdesk agents ('by problem type' categorization maps great to the team members responsible for this type of issues). This works great for reporting too, since you can easily see where most problems originate. Here are some examples SaaS software company
This is a less common way to organize your categories, since it does not fit every business and does not scale very well. But it might work for some consulting companies and freelancers.
Or, if you're using the app in corporate IT
You can also combine these two ways, categorizing the majority of your tickets 'by problem type' and keeping 2-3 private categories 'by client' for your important clients. By productThis one is obvious. If you're a multi-product company, why not organize your tickets by product? We were actually using this process here at Jitbit, when we had around 10 software apps (back in the days when the help desk software hasn't become our flagship software product)
If your helpdesk app does not have a built-in 'priority' field. Getting even more details using custom fields and tagsIf categorizing is not enough, you can classify your tickets even further by adding custom fields (particularly, the 'drop-down list' type) that would allow 'multi-dimensional' categorizing. For example:
In many ticketing apps (including Jitbit's) you can also add 'tags' to your tickets. You might ask, how 'tags' are different from 'categories'? Simple - a ticket can have multiple tags assigned to it. You can use tags for both external and internal tracking. For example, here at Jitbit Software we have a special automation rule, that adds the 'overdue' tag when a ticket becomes past due. Speaking of automation rules...Jitbit Helpdesk is famous for its automation engine, that can - among other features - work with ticket categories. For example, you can assign a category to a ticket automatically, based on keywords and/or keyphrases found in the ticket's subject or body. Vice versa - you can perform various 'actions' based on ticket category - like, 'if a new ticket arrives to Category X - send an extra notification to John Doe'. Understanding category permissionsIn Jitbit Helpdesk user permissions are closely tied to ticket categories. The phrase 'User A has permissions for Category X' means that:
Read More A 10-point Checklist for a Great Customer Support InteractionIts hard to stay on top of your customer support game all the time it can get stressful, chaotic and crazy. That is why I created this checklist for myself to ensure that Im always doing my best with every ticket.
I hope you find this checklist helpful. It certainly helps me to keep my head straight in dire times. Read More Complete Guide to SaaS email follow-upsEmail marketing in SaaS is a hard thing to figure out. What emails do you need to send? When and how often do you need to send them? What should the email subject say? How do you avoid getting into spam? How do you make people open and read the emails? Its been four years since weve added our first email follow-up to Jitbit Helpdesk. Weve kept working on them ever since. In this guide, I want to share everything we know about SaaS email follow-ups. You will also find specific examples you can steal for your app right away. Why do you need email follow-upsThe purpose of email follow-ups is to bring your free-trial users back into the app and engage them. If your users sign up for a trial and you dont contact them until the end, youre leaving money on the table. Email follow-ups are a great tool for reminding trial users about your existence. People have to deal with a lot of distractions and can forget that theyve signed up for your app. You need to send them emails throughout their trial to keep them engaged. Third-party tools vs. in-house solutionThere are two ways you can go about implementing your email follow-ups: using one of the many third-party marketing automation platforms or building an in-house solution. When we were starting out, there were few decent third-party apps and our budget was pretty tight. So, we decided to make our own tool (having good developers on the team helped a lot). The in-house tool offered us the flexibility we needed to start experimenting. However, this approach has drawbacks: It takes a lot of effort to set up your mail server to get a good delivery rate. If you decide to go with your server, your emails will often get into spam. Well talk more about that later. Its hard to manage. Every time I need to remember when we send a particular email, I need to jump into the code and figure it out. We dont have a fancy centralized dashboard to see whats going on. Also, we cant make changes to emails quickly. Adding any reliable analytics to your emails is complicated. You will probably need to use a third-party app, like Litmus, which is pricey. You can try to use Google Analytics to track open rates of your emails, but in my experience it is clumsy and unreliable. You cant A/B test the emails. A/B testing emails is a tricky thing to do. Many marketing automation platforms do offer working solutions, but there is probably no way you can implement A/B testing on your own. However, in-house tools have one advantage. The ability to run complicated SQL queries to get the recipients you need is invaluable. Setting up behavioural follow-ups like “havent logged in for the last two days” or didnt invite coworkers can take a lot of effort if youre doing it with a third-party tool. So, if you want to nerd out with your queries, consider building your own tool. If we were to start doing email follow-ups now, I would go for a third-party tool. Most of them cost around $50 to get started, which will pay off quickly. Here are the marketing automation apps we like: Drip was made specifically for SaaS email follow-ups. Its easy to use. Its new “workflows” feature is fantastic and fun. If I werent stuck with our in-house tool, I would move to Drip instantly. Intercom is a full-stack marketing automation platform. It offers live chat, a help desk and lots more, including email automation. Choose Intercom if you need a fully featured solution, not just email follow-ups. MailChimps intended purpose is to run email campaigns, but nothing is stopping you from using it for follow-ups. Ive included it because it is the only app of the three that offers A/B testing. Also, it may be cheaper because it has a free plan. Avoid getting into spamIf you decide to go with your tool and have your SMTP server sending emails, you will face the spam problem. Spam will hurt your delivery rate thats one of the most important metrics you have. If you send emails and they are not getting delivered, whats the point? You can skip this if youre going with a third-party app. Basecamp has a great article on avoiding SPAM and increasing delivery rate: Giving away the secrets of 99.3% email delivery. Three things from that article helped us immensely:
Please refer to the article mentioned above for more information. HTML email templatesYou want your emails to look nice and pretty. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Email apps lag ten years behind web browsers for some reason. You still have to rely on tables and a bunch of dirty hacks for the layout. I do not recommend doing it yourself. Fortunately, there are a lot of free ones you can use. Campaign Monitor has 24 free HTML templates you can use, along with an excellent WYSIWYG builder. There is an option to download HTML when you finish. I will also attach our template. Its a simple single-column layout with an image header, a call-to-action button, and a footer. Its about as simple as it gets, but it works for us. It looks like this: Download Jitbits HTML email template. Best time to send emailsThe guys from MailChimp wrote an excellent article on this topic: “Insights from MailChimps Send Time Optimization System.” Our data pretty much confirms their findings. Do not send on weekends. No one reads their business emails on weekends. And when they get to work on Monday, your email will be buried in their inbox. Avoid sending on Mondays. Due to the reason above, sending emails on Monday is not the best idea. People are busier than usual on Mondays. Fridays are even worse. We see lower open rates on Fridays. MailChimp confirms: Send during the work day. The highest open rates, according to our research, happen around 10 AM. It drops significantly after 18 PM. Here is MailChimps data that confirms this: Your emails have the best chance of being opened and read if you send them during the work day mid-week. How many emails should you sendYou want to send as many emails as possible without being annoying. There is no magic number. The Jitbit trial lasts 21 days. We send six to eight follow-ups during that period thats one email every three days. You can send more. I think that one email every two days is fine. I couldnt find any research on this topic, so this is based on my personal experience. You can keep adding follow-ups until you see your unsubscribe rate going up. I know that a lot of companies send one or more emails every day during the trial, but that is too much. The last thing you want is someone clicking “mark as spam” on one of your emails. Email metrics you should trackEmail analytics is not easy due to email apps security restrictions. There are three things you can track reliably and easy:
There are many types of emails you can use. You want to try different things to figure out what works for your product. Time-based. An email you send once users reach some time milestone in their trial. “Welcome to the first day of your trial,” Youre halfway through, and You have three days left all fall into this category. Behavioural. You send these emails depending on what users do or dont do during the trial. Think of them as tutorials on the features you think are important to use to get the most out of your product. More on that later. Educational. Something about the problem you help solve with your product. For example, we sell a help desk app, and we send our users articles on how to do customer support better. Transactional. Anything from a user credentials reminder to daily status updates from your app can be used to grow your conversions. In fact, this is the most under-utilised category. Here is a great article from Vero: The Complete Guide to Transactional Email Personal. An email sent from an actual person. Its purpose is to start a direct conversation with a potential customer. We have a great example of this later in this guide. Different types of follow-ups work better for different products and industries. Its a good idea to give them all a try. Key components of a great follow-upAll our follow-ups, except one, follow these guidelines: ![]()
The purpose of time-based follow-ups is to bring trial users back into your app and remind them of your existence. Here are all the time-based follow-ups we use. Basic follow-up on the seventh day Three days before the trial ends The trial end Win back' follow-up 90 days after a trial has expired Behavioral follow-upsBehavioral follow-ups are emails you send based on users activity. You can use them to nudge users to do an important thing they need to do to get the most out of your app and eventually convert into paying customers. These are pretty specific to our help desk app, but Im sharing them in full for your reference. When a user hasnt logged in for two days after the sign-up Asking them to invite coworkers Customize design to match your brand Introducing automation rules Automation rules is a very powerful feature of our app, and we want to make sure users see it. Install widget on your website This is our newest follow-up. I wanted to experiment with having an image inside the email. My results are not final, but Im pretty confident it increases CTR. Personal follow-upNow, last but not least, the only personal follow-up we have. I have an entire article about it: “A single most effective SaaS email follow-up youre probably not using yet.” I really recommend that you read it. Here it is: We send this email 30 minutes after the trial sign-up. Note that it comes from me, Max, not from Alex. Unlike the other emails, this one is in plain text and looks like it was sent manually by a real person. All these things help differentiate this follow-up from the rest. The purpose of this email is to start a conversation with potential customers. We were able to fix a bunch of things with our sign-up and onboarding process and engage a lot more users by answering their initial questions quickly. This follow-up has a 1520% response rate, which is crazy. I recommend that you steal it for your app. ResourcesSome extra resources on this topic I recommend that you read: Just Good Copy find more inspiration for your follow-ups The 17 emails we send to engage customers, reduce churn & increase revenue from Baremetrics Behavioral Emails That Keep Customers Coming Back (with Examples from My Inbox) from Unbounce CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business because you dont want to break the law MailChimp Blog has a ton of information about email Autoresponders are Dead: 5 Types of Follow-up Emails from Lincoln Murphy Read More All-hands support: pros and consAll-hands support an approach where everyone in a company does customer support to some extent has been a widely discussed topic lately. The idea is not new. A lot of big companies, like Basecamp, Stripe, Slack and even us, have been advocating this for quite some time. But is it really that beneficial as they make it out to be? Not everyone can do customer supportAll-hands support is basically saying everyone can and should talk to customers equally good. Thats simply not true. Ive worked in a couple of companies where developers had to work on support tickets. And trust me no one had benefited from this approach. Developers think they are too good for the job and sometimes get annoyed by customers. Customers can easily feel the annoyance in the replies (actually, the developers didnt really try to cover it) and get angry very quickly. In the end me or some other customer support agents had to clean the mess after the developers. That leads me to the next point: Customer doesnt always benefitThe big idea behind all-hands support is that it is very beneficial for your customers. They will get faster, better answers right from the core employees the app developers. Thats not the case due to the reasons listed above. More often than not, developers or managers talking to customers do more harm than good. Generally, they are simply not equipped with the right set of skills needed to do customer support on a regular basis, namely patience and empathy. Oh and of course, they have big egos and think theyre too good for the job. And thats fine. It will lead your team to a burnoutBurnouts among customer support workers are very frequent. Avoiding a burnout is probably the biggest challenge in customer support, if you ask me. Eventually, we learn to cope with it. We learn to stay calm and patient even when dealing with total assholes, toxic customers and plain stupidity. I dont mean to offend anyone, but, come on, we all know thats part of the job. Thats one of the reasons we do this job and not someone else. We can deal with it and stay nice and polite throughout the whole thing no matter what for months and years. Other people developers, project managers, CEOs, etc., cant do that for an extended period of time. They will inevitably burn out, this will hurt their productivity, this will hurt your customers and it will cost a lot of money for your company. Divide your customer support into multiple levelsIf you decide to go with the all-hands support model, you need to be smart about it. I recommend splitting hard and easy tickets into two different groups. Let customer support agents handle the easy routine tickets and ask them to pass the complicated ones to the developers as they need help. That way everyone can remain effective: customer support wont spend as much time dealing with complicated issues and the developers get to work on actually interesting problems. Its a win for everyone customer support has more time, developers are occupied with interesting issues and talk to customers directly, while the customers will have faster and better resolutions. Essentially, all-hands support resonates a lot with support by founders, that I have covered twice by now: Support by founders and Support by founders revisited. The borderline is: not everyone is equipped to work in support and you should not force people do it. If you still decide to go with it, be careful and avoid burnouts. Read More How to WOW your customersTwo years ago in the very first post of this customer support series of articles Amazing customer support defined I have put WOW moment as the top priority for a great customer support interaction. The first time I heard the term WOW your customers was from Tony Hsiehs Delivering Happiness a great book that changed the way I look at customer support. Here is how it defines it: When a customer experiences WOW, you are giving them a pleasant surprise. You are exceeding their expectations. You are addressing their needs thoughtfully and in unexpected ways. It is an expression of your authentic interest in the person who seeks your services, not just in the transaction. As you can see its pretty abstract, much like most of the other articles on this topic. Today I wanted to share some actionable advice on how to WOW your customers the specific stuff you can try today. Why do you need to WOW your customersHumans tend to remember experiencing strong emotions pretty well. If you make them say WOW, they are going to remember this for a long time and you will get a very loyal customer. WOW moments create a long lasting loyalty. Thats what youre going for. However, WOWing someone is a tough challenge. Especially over email. You cant do it in every single support ticket. But you should always try to. WOWing is all about greatly exceeding expectations. And here are a couple of ways you can do that. Act faster than they expectThis is actually quite easy because people have low expectations for email response time. 24 hours response time is considered fast by many people. So if you keep it down to two hours or less, which is very realistic, you will WOW a fair share of customers. Its not just about the response times. Heres my favorite example of acting fast, something I personally do quite often. If a customer submits a bug report that I know is easy to fix, I just go ahead and fix it right away. Most of the time it takes just 10-15 minutes. That never fails to impress. Basically, if a customer wants something that takes less than 20 minutes, just do it now. Save them some moneyIts better to get a loyal customer on a cheaper plan, than an upset customer on an expensive plan who will churn in the next three months. Offer free upgrades. Give a discount even if they dont ask for it. It doesnt have to be a big one even a 5% discount could go a long way. We often let customers use cheaper plans, even if they do not qualify for it. We also give a 20% discount to all returning customers. Things like that contribute to our low churn rates and do wonders for our lifetime value. Automate your WOWsWOW moments work better when they are personal and intimate. But you can try automating them. They definitely wont work every time, but, you know, its free, so why not. A good place to look for opportunities to add your WOWs to is your automated emails. For example here is what we have in our purchase confirmation email: Hey Bob. Thank you for purchasing. Every morning we read our new customers names aloud, in front of all our employees. Your name will be in that list tomorrow morning. Thanks. We really do try to read their names by the way. Most people understand that this is an automated email and just ignore it, but every once in awhile we get a customer who is delighted that he gets a special treatment from us and that didnt cost us anything. Do something crazyInstead of exceeding expectations, you can do something they do not expect at all. Send a pizza to their office. Send a handwritten note. Give away a popular book in your industry as a gift. Meet them for coffee. Just surprise them. You cant WOW people in every single support ticket, but you should always look for opportunities. Its not that hard when you put some practice into it. Some of these moves have worked reliably for me for a long time. If you have any moves yourself, Id love to hear those in the comments. Read More Join now for updates. Creating your account only takes a few minutes.Join Now
About Jitbit Software
Similar VendorsAbout Jitbit SoftwareJitbit Software makes top-class helpdesk software - both 'hosted' and 'on-premise' versions - that anyone can afford. Our ticketing system helps hundreds of startups and companies to handle their support pains. This is the CSS that will be included for all tabs for this vendor page. Your content contains a http link. It's recommended that you use https instead. Are you sure you want to save? View the guideline here!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |