Customer Service
A collection of posts on Customer Service
Nobody wants to hear they’re outdated… stale… or old. That’s exactly what we had to face, though. Throughout the days, months, and years, our Help Center, where we keep up to date articles about Buffer for our customers, had become just that. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton of great content in there. That’s the problem, though. There’s just too much, and the content has started to become less and less reflective of Buffer: the product it is meant to support. There are four of us on the team w
This week on #bufferchat, we were joined by one of Buffer’s Twitter Happiness Heroes, Darcy Peters, as our guest! We discussed the best tools and workflows for support teams, how to approach negative tweets, how to go the extra mile for customers, and more! Catch our weekly Twitter chat, #bufferchat, at TWO times every Wednesday for valuable industry insights and networking with nearly 400 other smart marketers and community managers. Same topic, same place, just at different times – feel fre
Dealing with complainers and haters in social media can, of course, be tricky. What you need is a framework for how to do it right. This is that framework: F-E-A-R-S: You may notice that I didn’t include “be fast” as a specific component. This is because it is axiomatic. Today, nearly 40% of all social media complainers who expect a response, expect that response to arrive within 60 minutes, according to the research I conducted for Hug Your Haters. Yet, the average length of time for busine
If you sell something online or if you run a business with an online presence—even if you’re just having a good time growing your personal brand—you’ll have the honor and the privilege of chatting directly with customers. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week. This always-on mentality is an amazing privilege, and at the same time it can provide some challenges for small businesses. How can you best respond when conversations are happening constantly? And what if they’re not all positive? How do you ma
What happens when you tweet at a company, asking for help with their product? What’s been your experience with mentioning or tagging someone with a large following, looking to connect or engage? In order for companies and brands to excel at responding to their audience in a genuine way, they must first excel at social listening. They tune in to the right conversations, by using the right tools, and then are able to respond, engage, and delight. Having the right tools can be key—as well as kno
Ready to do something really groundbreaking and revolutionary in social media marketing? I’ve got just the thing: customer service. We talk a lot at Buffer about customer happiness, and it’s because we truly believe in it. Here’s how our Leo Widrich puts it: “Customer support is the very rare opportunity to connect to your customers on an emotional level. You can’t do that in any other way.” And while there are a growing number of other awesome companies who feel the same way we do, there’s
If you’ve been venturing a bit in the online marketing world like me, I’m sure you’ve heard the term “marketing funnel” before. To be frank, it was never something that appealed to me. It always seemed like just a way to optimise how many people are giving you money, which doesn’t seem very caring. So when I came across this post by MailChimp co-founder Ben Chestnut about why he hates funnels, I was excited to see that the traditional funnel isn’t the only way successful companies do marketing.
This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, a contributing Buffer Blog columnist. Read more about Greg at the bottom of the post, or read his latest piece on how to build customer loyalty. Why are we, as consumers, so captivated by stories of great customer service? Perhaps it’s because they serve as a much needed reminder that there are still companies out there who care about their customers. Every company says customers are their #1 priority, but stories show us which businesses are ready, will
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” goes one of the most famous quotes in business. And this line has also been one of the biggest problems in doing great customer service. “But you can’t measure it!” is the response I receive from a lot of budding entrepreneurs when it comes to chatting about customer support. And to be honest, it is tough to measure it. Yet the reason we place such huge importance on customer support as we develop Buffer’s social media management suite [https://buff
This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, a contributing Buffer Blog columnist. Read more about Greg at the bottom of the post, or read his latest resource, the complete guide to customer service training. Although delighting your customers (like Buffer) is an important part of creating a business people love, the “evangelists” out there always seem to focus on fluff, and rarely address the far less glamorous side of implementation. That’s because it’s easy to talk the talk, but hard to put gre
“Customers may forget what you said but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Anon Welcome to the first Happiness Report of 2013! Each month we share how we are managing support here at Buffer, as well as take a look at how happy people are when using our product. We walk through what worked well, what perhaps didn’t work so well, as well as mention new things we’re trying as we push to improve how we deliver support and happiness. A look at our numbers in January Digging straigh
This is a guest post by Amar Zagorica from Helpjuice, makers of awesome knowledge base software. More about Amar at the bottom of the post. We respond to 93% of our customer support emails within 5 minutes! Caught your attention, right? That’s one of the beautiful things about knowing and promoting your company’s metrics, they grab attention and draw customers to you. One of the best ways to accelerate your support and provide an exceptional customer experience is to understand what your cust
“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” ~ Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways Well hello there! January has zipped by super fast but there’s just enough time left to share with you our third Happiness Report and dive into how we managed support during December and also how happy people are when using Buffer. We’ll walk through what worked well for the team here at Buffer, what perhaps didn’t work so well, as well as new things we’re tryin
This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, a contributing Buffer Blog columnist. Read more about Greg at the bottom of the post, or read his latest article on measuring customer satisfaction. The customer of today is an infovore. Before doing business with you, a majority of customers will now use the information available on the web to learn about your company and your service quality. Transparency is the way the business world works these days, and it’s forced companies to re-examine their sale
“Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.” ~ Anonymous It’s hard to believe another month has skipped by and it’s already time for our second Happiness Report, where we examine how happy people are when using Buffer. The first one was already super insightful and we made a lot of changes with the learnings from it. Especially with your great comments and suggestions! Before the holidays kick into high gear, we want to take a look back over Buffer support through November – wh
“Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell 4 to 6 people about their experience.” ~ White House Office Welcome to our very first Happiness Report. I’m really excited to share for the first time our experiences of delivering happiness to our awesome customers here at Buffer. Each month we will talk about things we have learned, look at our analytics and introduce new ideas for increasing happiness we will be testing over the next month. Our philosophy for bringing happiness to our use
What does it take to deliver outstanding and above and beyond customer service? The simple answer we’ve found: An incredible understanding of how your customers think. Spending lots of time with your users and customers every day is one of the most important things I believe. Interestingly, a lot of the time, delighting users and delivering happiness isn’t at the top of everyone’s to do list. Seth Godin put it more succinctly then I ever could in a recent post: A few organizations have figured
How well are we doing in terms of customer satisfaction? That seems to be a pretty standard question when it comes to dealing with people who are using your product or service. Satisfaction? I’ve always felt that focusing on “satisfying” someone who is using what you have built is pretty lame. It’s quite demotivational actually. It doesn’t get me excited to get up and “satisfy” that next user who comes in. And neither does the person I have spoken to go away, telling everyone how satisfied they
This is a guestpost by @BeckyNeely, Content Queen at HelpScout, Online Customer Service with a Personal Touch. More about Becky at the bottom. Twitter currently hosts more than 100 million active users. That’s a statistic that couldn’t show the social media site’s meteoric and influential rise over the last five years and better. Given Twitter’s reach, it’s understandable for customers to view it as an accessible forum where their opinions will be heard. Unfortunately, I found that most of the
Over here at Buffer, Joel and I want to provide the warmest welcome and the best customer care we can to each and every person using Buffer. Today, we were just completely overwhelmed by our users chipping in and helping us to let everyone new to Buffer feel welcome and cared for. So today this tweet reached our inbox: How our users responded Joel was just about to get in touch with Elisabeth and offer help or the chance to ask any questions if she needed answers. Yet, what he didn’t know w