Don't Forget Your People

Transcript

1. Don’t Forget Your People Emily Dobervich
2. Non-Development Roles Support, Sales, Marketing…
3. Improv Gimmick • I improvise • Script to find random images on the internet • Had someone else check them for appropriateness • Will be justifying their inclusion on each slide • Or probably just ignoring them
4. Support At TeamSnap • I do 4 hours of front line customer support a month. • My coworkers each do 4 hours of support a month. • My boss does 4 hours. • The CEO does too. • It happened by mistake.
5. Happy Accident • Our support person asked if she’d ever get weekends off. • At the time, weekend support load was relatively low in the 10’s of tickets range. • An additional hire didn’t make much sense. • As the company grew, it was discovered that other benefits to this all-hands approach existed.
6. Sympathy
7. Constant Amazement • Clueless customers • Abusive customers • Annoying customers • Lack of information (Sympathy)
8. Lack of Information Hurts • Customer writes in complaining. • I try to verify the problem. • I can’t reproduce the issue. • Turns out there was an A/B test that had a problem on a certain browser/OS combination. • The notification about the A/B test was sent in an email. To the wrong group address, so not everyone knew about it.
9. Email Sucks Can someone get on fixing that please?
10. I Omitted Something
11. Constant Amazement • Clueless customers • Abusive customers • Annoying customers • Lack of information
12. Constant Amazement • Clueless customers • Abusive customers • Annoying customers • Lack of information • Poor Administrative Tools
13. This Hits Close To Home It’s my fault that this part of customer support sucks
14. Tool Deficiency
15. Manual Password Resets • Users can trigger a password reset email • Support can trigger the same email • Sometimes we need to be able to hand a user a password in a support email • We lacked a single-use password mechanism
16. –Customer “Your site deleted all my data!”
17. Support Accessible Logging • Logs were on multiple servers • Unfriendly formatting • Hard to search by customer • Only developers had access, and would spend at least a cumulative 10 hours a week searching logs for support
18. That’s Ridiculous There is absolutely no reason that logs can’t be customer support friendly.
19. So We Built Something
20. (Paul) Bunyan • Friendlier format • Far easier to search • Support staff can access • Grouped by (user id, ip address, team id, etc…)
21. Then Support Surprised Us
22. –Forgetful Customer “Every time I try to log in, your site tells me that I am entering the wrong username or password. I have to reset my password every single time, even when I’m sure I have my password correct.”
23. Are you sure you know your username?
24. The user tries to log in, and can’t. They reset their password. They completely miss the bit of the email that tells their username.
25. Support Surprised Us • This issue stinks, because you have to (nicely) accuse the customer of being forgetful. And it sucks if you get it wrong. • Our support staff figured out how to use Bunyan to tell if a customer was actually doing this.
26. Forgetful Customer? • Search for the customer’s user id via first/last name in the main support tool. • Look up the chain of events for that user id. • Look at the event chains for the ip addresses associated with the events in the previous chain. • Filter by login failures.
27. In this case the user is bad at typing.
29. In this case the user is bad at typing.
30. Perspective
31. Ultimately It’s About Helping Your People They’ll be happier. You’ll be happier. And everyone, your customers included, will be the better for it.
32. And It’s Cheap It costs very little. And when the extra happiness and efficiency is included, the cost is probably negative.
33. Go Try It
34. ./image-fetcher http://i.imgur.com/Btaa28E.jpg http://fin6.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/7ec1bd9abfe452296e407c75e9199c53.jpg http://cl.ly/image/1h3b3m3Z160M/mondays.jpeg http://www.petfinder.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/99950237-why-cats-meow-632x4 75.jpg http://www.wallscorner.com/wallpapers/cute-kitten-1920x1200.jpg http://data3.whicdn.com/images/28265443/thumb.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3K-zhATIOA4/UrqzLzxfljI/AAAAAAAA0aY/9GpCYr2bimY/s1600/ cat-picture-082-029.jpg http://pics2.brainparking.com/p442/u/a/8053350iau.jpg http://comediva.com/images/stories/2012/confusedcat1211.jpg http://www.weirdhut.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/angry-cat-3.jpg http://37.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lga82j0vQA1qzv52ko1_500.jpg http://scottboms.com/assets/notebook/newton_cone.jpg http://i.imgur.com/V3GORek.jpg Thanks. http://github.com/emily