Don't Let Customer Service Crush You

The guys talk about how they are scaling up their awesome customer service without adding headcount and their journey from email customer support, to chat support, and back to email support. They also discuss how to deal with informational silos and if they should transition Honeybadger to an invite-only luxury brand.

Links:
Intercom
Help Scout
Honeybadger

Full Transcript:
Announcer:          

Never forget that you have the tools to build a life on your own terms. Forget the haters. This is Founder Quest.
 
Josh:               

So our topic is customer support.
 
Starr:              

And how how it was maybe murdering us-
 
Josh:               

Eating us alive.
 
Starr:              

Eating us alive, devouring our souls. Maybe we might be doing to fix that. Our old system, the system we've had for years and years. We've been using Intercom. And Intercom put this little widget on your website. It looks a lot like a live chat widget, and just encourages people to enter in whatever problems they have and then you reply to them and they can see it right in the website, or they can get an email or whatever. And we really liked this when we set it up. Years ago, we thought it was really cool because we got a ton more interaction with our customers and were really enjoying that and everything. So why are we looking to change this? What was going on?
 
Josh:               

The way Intercom works in the in-app widget is it really is a chat system. So it's basically live chat, right? From a user's perspective, you assume that someone's going to reply immediately if they're there. And I think it'll say when people are offline or something then it'll let you email. But really for in our day to day it was kind of like whenever a support request comes in, we're thinking, okay, there's someone sitting there waiting for a response so we need to drop everything and answer it right now.
 
Starr:              

Yeah. We would get people just saying, "Hey, what's up?"
 
Josh:               

Yeah, "Hi."
 
Starr:              

And it's six hours later, "Hello. Hello, customer."
 
Josh:               

Yeah, actually, the one offs were kind of ... I might actually miss those a little bit just because someone just says, "Hey." And then I'd often just reply with some emoji waving symbol or, "Yo." In the beginning, like you said, that was really good because it put us ... When we were first figuring out a lot of things, we were first figuring out who our customers are. I think one of the reasons we really liked it was that it put us in much closer contact with people on a real time basis so we could chat back and forth and just be ...
 
Josh:              

It was a little bit more informal and we could just talk to people. And I think we talked about that in the past on this show. How that was good for getting customer feedback and getting to know people. But what we found lately as we've grown and scaled is that it's begun to cause a lot of interruptions, and I guess I would say anxiety in our day to day support process. The way our support process works alongside all the other things we do. And that's probably, we're going to go into that. But basically we didn't have a support process really, which doesn't help.
 
Starr:              

Yeah, because when you know that somebody thinks your support system just being this live chat thing. Then there's a lot of pressure for you to respond to things super quickly. And that can be good sometimes. Sometimes you get some really awesome wins because you're able to fix somebody's problem right away and all that. But sometimes you get bogged down in these super intense support questions, and it's really distracting to, at any moment you could be pulled into one of these lengthy discussions of a thing. And it may or may not actually be honestly. Our system works pretty well. Right? So it's honestly, a lot of times it's just some mis-configuration or something, but there's something weird going on that's preventing people from just seeing that there's some obvious mis-configuration problem. And so, yeah, so you just ended up going down this rabbit hole for half a day.
 
Josh:               

Yeah. And those more of your typical customer support things. That's kind of what customer support is for. Right? But the way we handle support at Honeybadger is again, we're small, small team. We're a technical product, so we like to give high quality support and that usually involves supporting developers. So we are developers on support. We don't have any dedicated support operator or anything like that at Honeybadger, which would normally be able to buffer between some of the more technical questions and the less technical questions. What happens is if you're a developer and you're trying to actually get development done, you're in the middle of whatever your project is, some deep thought or something. And then a support requests comes in, and if everyone's on call for that, you're basically constantly just expecting to be interrupted throughout your day.
 
Starr:              

Yeah, it's like one of those psychology experiments where they watch you as you go about your day and then somebody administers random shots to you.
 
Josh:               

They zap you, yeah.
 
Starr:              

Yeah. And you never know when it's coming. So you just live in this state of expectation.
 
Josh:               

Yeah. The customers who are listening, I don't think you guys are like electric shocks. I mean some of you are, but-
 
Starr:              

I kind of feel sometimes that when I'm doing support, it's almost like I'm doing some whiteboard interview or something where somebody's like, "Okay, here's the problem. And fix it, go." And you're doing this blindfolded. It's like you're a veterinarian and you're trying to fix some problem with an elephant but you can only see two inches of it at a time. Right? It's like you can look at the elephant through a rubber hose from 10 feet away. And you have to ask the elephant, "Well, move the rubber hose over this way for a little bit, so I can maybe see through here."
 
Josh:               

Yeah. You go, "Move it over to Active Record."
 
Starr:              

Yeah, yeah. It's can you squeeze your Gemfile file through the rubber hose?
 
Josh:               

Check the Postgres adapter. Yeah, obviously we don't have access to our customer's code or applications. We have a history of maybe even over supporting our customers, and that's kind of like, we like to do that. We like to actually sit down...