Customer support done right
(flickr tags: customer support, customer service)
Recently, I’ve had a fairly large amount of contact with customer support from various companies and the response to my support requests have ranged from non-existant to extremely personal. I could write and write about the bad experiences (like when the support person refused to admit my problem was a defect and insisted on calling it a “limitation”), but I’d rather write about the one good experience.
I’ve been using Enso (from Humanized) for a while now and recently it started crashing very frequently. I wasn’t really phased by this, but I dutifully reported every crash using their bug report form. This form is very simple — name, email, problem — and comes up automatically when Enso detects that something went wrong. If I were to assign points for problems encountered vs. steps taken to fix the problems, the score would now be: Problems — 1, Enso — 1.
After every problem I reported, I got an e-mail from someone at Humanized. This wasn’t from some customer support rep working in a customer support factory. This was from someone directly involved with Enso (Problems — 1, Enso — 2); in fact, I could just go to Humanized’s “about” page and actually read a profile of the person I was corresponding with (and in some cases, even see a picture)! Bonus points for transparency — Problems — 1, Enso — 3.
Unfortunately, the first few responses I got went something like this: “We’re sorry you are having this problem. To resolve it, please do a complete uninstall and then reinstall the application.” I was taken aback by this because I usually think of reinstalling as the very last resort to fixing a problem and here they were suggesting I do it every time. Naturally, I resisted. Why would I reinstall if simply rebooting my computer seems to fix the problem? Problems — 2, Enso — 3.
After reporting a couple seemingly (at least to me) unrelated problems, they finally told me that the reason for reinstalling is that I seemed to have a corrupt installation. I was finally convinced by this argument (+1 for Enso) and went ahead and followed the steps to do a complete uninstall/reinstall.
The uninstall process failed (+1 for Problems). However, after reporting all that happened, there were several prompt exchanges regarding my particular problem as the developers at Enso tried to figure out what was going on (+1 for Enso). Every time I was told to do something in order to diagnose the problem, my Enso contact apologized and was very candid (+1 Enso) and sincere (+1 Enso). They even went as far as admitting that mine is the worst case they’ve seen and all their tools seem to have failed in my case. This is probably my favorite line from all the exchanges:
I apologize for even suggesting that you do some of these things; for preference I would sit down in front of your computer and fix it for you, but I can’t really do that.
And this is directly from the developer!
Overall, I really got the sense that everyone at Enso takes problem reports seriously and truly cares about the quality of the product they are creating. The final score is Problems — 3, Enso — 7, but if you factor in my original love of the product, it’s more like Problems — 3, Enso — 1,000,000,000+.
The folks at Humanized are a great example of the fact that user experience doesn’t start or end with the product — it extends into all channels of communication between the user and the company.
