You Are Your Own Help Desk

I love Seth Godin’s mind. It’s wired like a pretzel, and he can be counted on to come up with some really interesting ways of looking at marketing.The other day, though, he had a very straight forward rant about telephone help lines, and some tart observations about the impact your help desk has on customers’ perception of your business.

I think everyone has horror stories about telephone support services. My own happened only last night, which is why Godin’s post hit me right in the funny bone <not>. The real irony, though, is that my tussle was with Microsoft’s support service.

As I’ve been declaring all week, I love Microsoft products. But last night I had to phone to get my Windows Live One-Care subscription re-activated because the renewal that I’d paid for 24 hours before hadn’t “taken,” and I was completely exposed to the digital world.

Two hours later, I had spoken to nine people, and sat listening to “ignore” for the rest of the two hours. (The only upside: I got 100 pages of manuscript line-edited).

Of the nine people that spent three minutes each speaking to me, half referred me back to technical support and everyone I spoke to in technical support told me I needed to deal with Billing & Subscriptions. Billing & Subscriptions, as it happens, haven’t answered their phone in the last 24 hours. I left three voicemails (and as I post this, another 24 hours later, they still haven’t returned my calls). The central Microsoft Support line, when it wasn’t referring me to Technical or Billing, was telling me I needed to speak to the Canadian Support Line, which also wouldn’t answer, and the connection would switch back to the USA Support Line…and around we’d go again.

With every single person I spoke to, I outlined my adventures to date, warning them that I’d already been referred to every possible department. And with all but the last two people, they would immediately refer me on to someone else…usually one of the departments I’d just been bounced from. It was like talking to robots. It didn’t seem to matter what I said, they’d simply repeat (on endless loop) that I need to speak to xx, until I just had to give up and agree to be transferred out of their life and off their radar screens.

To be fair, I must also add that the last two people bent over backwards to sort things out for me, and the final person (hi, Rich!) was patient, empathetic, and actually DID solve the problem. Which proves that a business really is the people it employs.

So while I still adore Microsoft products, I have to add the qualifying clause: “So long as I don’t have to deal with their support department.”

The other factor that prompts me to write this post is my day job. You may have already caught up on the post that talks about my day job imploding (I’m still here, and it looks like I’ll be here for another couple of weeks, at least, but there’s no guarantees – no-one seems to know anything much).

What I didn’t put in that post is what my day job actually is. I am (was) the correspondence coordinator for the President and CEO of the regional health authority, which employs(ed) 30,000 people. Healthcare being what it is across North America, there were more than a few complaint letters and emails that landed on the President’s desk, and she was constantly dealing with internal fires, too.

I learned a great many things about dealing with unhappy customers from her.

How does this affect you, the anchored author?

You are your own help desk, whether you realize it or not.

You have, or will have, readers, booksellers, librarians, the media and various other members of the public coming to you with problems you need to sort out. Anything from “My book has upside-down pages in it” to “the prize package didn’t arrive in the mail like you promised” to “the press kit didn’t arrive and we need your biography now!” will land on your desk. Whether the problems are really your fault or not, or even something you can directly fix yourself, or not, the public considers them yours, and you must deal with them.

Your publisher, agent, the marketing firm you’ve hired, are all your internal customers. If they have a problem they bring to you, you must deal with it.

If you have a day job, the chances that you have a secretary or assistant to front for you are next to zero. You have to deal with negative shit yourself.

How you deal with it will leave an indelible impression upon the person doing the complaining. If they’re happy or pissed at the way their complaint gets handled, it goes towards building your brand and your image. If their complaint was dropped or ignored, they’ll remember that long after they’ve forgotten the warm glow they got from reading your novel. And worse: They’ll tell everyone they know.

Hey, Seth Godin and I have both just bitched publicly about customer support lines, and both of us named the company we were dealing with.

How many people are bellyaching about the run around they got last night to their coworkers today?

How much do you want to bet I will be venting my spleen at lunchtime? (And the whole office – what’s left of it – is heading out for lunch today, so my story will be heard by nine other people at least.)

If you handle the complaint well, a good outcome will be that the complainant won’t tell anyone else about the problem. They’ll be happy with the service they got from you, and will continue to buy your books.

The very best outcome is that they’ll be so pleased at the speed and efficiency with which their problems were addressed, that they’ll tell everyone about their happy experience.

Remember: Your first commandment is to feed & nurture your readers.

Everyone is a potential reader.

Help desk strategies

1. Respond to every complaint.

Doesn’t matter if you think it’s unreasonable, or a waste of good oxygen to deal with the crazies of the world. Your complainant doesn’t think he’s crazy, or that she’s being unreasonable. They’re upset, and that’s the only thing that matters for right now.

2. Don’t wait.

When you get a complaint, regardless of the severity, shape, form or reasonableness of the complaint, do not wait to act. Act now, even if it’s a simple phone call or email to let them know you received the complaint, but will need time to research the concern and get back to them. Don’t use auto responders to do this work. Make it personal.

Don’t leave them hanging in a vacuum, or let them think they’re being ignored.

3. Resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Even if you get back to the complainant right away to tell them you’ll take care of it…make sure that you do take care of it, as swiftly as you can. Don’t leave them waiting for weeks unless you really do need weeks to resolve the issue, in which case, keep them posted on progress.

In my day job, the policy is that a complainant must be called within hours of receiving the initial communication. The concern has to be looked into and emails responded in full within three days and letters with ten days. And I hussle to make sure these deadlines are adhered to. From feedback that I’ve received here and there, I know how much of a difference it makes to the complainant if the matter is looked into and taken care of quickly.

4. Never, ever, ever be negative.

Even if the complainant is 180 degrees wrong, never hit back…especially in writing. Never say they’re wrong, or exaggerating. In situations like this, don’t focus on trying to fix the problem (that may or may not exist). Instead, focus on what the complainant wants that would make them feel better. You’d be surprised by what a complainant considers a positive outcome. Often they just want to make sure that their grievance has been heard. Other times, a simple acknowledgement that they’ve been inconvenienced is what they need.

Learning what the complainant really wants may take some discussion, but discussion has its own benefits: It lets the customer feel they have been heard…but only if you follow-up appropriately. Which means that you must:

5. Listen

You’ll have to drop your defensive stance to really hear what the customer is saying. That’s exactly what I didn’t get from seven out of the nine people I spoke to last night. All those seven wanted to do was get me off their line and out of their hair. They weren’t listening. Not properly.

Listening properly will allow you to hear why the customer is unhappy, how they’ve been inconvenienced, and points you towards how to fix it.

6. Apologise for the trouble you’ve caused.

Even if it was your publisher or the bookseller or the postal services that screwed up, apologize anyway. It’s your career, your image that is on the line, and the customer feels slighted. Apologize for the problems they’ve experienced, even if you just can’t bring yourself to apologize for the (alleged) screw-up itself.

7. Compensate them for their troubles and/or losses.

This is not an admission of guilt, nor is it buying the customer off. They’ve been screwed around by bad luck, crappy coincidence or someone else in your system who has also let you down (and you should deal with that later, too). If there’s a nice way to compensate them for the hassles they’ve endured, do it.

If they’re out of pocket over the matter, compensate them for the expenses they’ve covered.

A signed copy of one of your books, or an electronic copy, if you’re dealing with an e-customer, bookmarks, gift coupons, etc, all can serve as compensation and a nice apology. So can sending them a free copy of your next book, hot off the press, even if it’s six months later (and this will earn you major brownie points). Vary the form of compensation according to the severity of the complaint or problems the customer has received.

Make sure you spell out to the customer that the compensation is purely for the troubles they’ve gone through, and that’s all. There’s pretty ways to express this, and you’re the writer. I’m sure you can figure out how to say it.

8. Make sure they’re happy with the results

You’ve endured enough telephone support that you can probably feed the script back to me yourself. “And is there anything else we can do for you this evening? No? Thanks for shopping with The Great American Widget Company and have a nice day….”

(You’ve got no idea how close I came to laughing in their faces last night when they recited this to me. I didn’t, because they’re just doing the job…but that’s all they were doing: rote script reading, and day dreaming about their upcoming coffee break and deconstructing their date from last night….)

I’m not suggesting you get this bland and generic, but the idea behind the script is a good one. Make sure the complainant is 100% happy before you shut down communications with them. Address all their issues, even if it ends up costing you money. Anything you pay out now to fix the problem will be reaped in goodwill further down the line, so you don’t really lose in the end.

9. Keep an eye out for complaints that don’t look like complaints.

These are trickier. You might have a reader on your blog leave a wishful-thinking comment that hints they’ve had an unhappy experience. You might get fan mail that spends paragraphs raving about your latest book, with a passing comment about having to wait three weeks for it to arrive in the mail. A reader at a conference mentions she could never find your book on the shelves of her local B&N, and you happen to know that store did order them in.

Big, or building, problems can announce themselves in just these subtle ways, and if you’re watching for them, and follow up on them, you’ll perhaps be able to head off serious trouble.

And if you “fix” the un-problem for the complainant, you’ll impress upon them that you really do care what happens at the reader end of your business.

First appeared on Anchored Authors on July 12, 2008

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