Competition for the Most Robotic Human

seth
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  • seth
  • Gainsight Employee: ACE
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What’s your greatest clue that you’re emailing a support rep who isn’t thinking of you as a human? Let’s start a thread below of the most egregious violations.

I had two support email conversations recently where the first reply was a bunch of boilerplate questions that I’d already answered. Fuming. Would hate to create that kind of experience through our own customer success program.

 

Next week, I’m joining two Gainsight experts (@lane_h , and @Tori Jeffcoat ) talk about how to make a digital CS program feel -- and actually be -- human-first.

👉 Info & Register 👈

 

Drop your thoughts below about a clue that someone’s being a robot with you!

Director of Community, Gainsight

12 replies

anirbandutta
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Lol...That title though @seth 🤖

It's an opportunity for engagement
alizee
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@seth Generally speaking, I’d agree with yours: asking questions that are covered in the original ask OR suggesting responses that have nothing to do with the issue.

The second one: deflecting the question. It most often ties back to not reading the email, but… some companies have a habit of deflecting tickets by tiring the user. The specialists in the matter are teams who address data subject request as “another ticket” (when they’re legal requests) and seemingly don’t understand what they are doing so much so that you’ll grow tired and give up. 

If you don’t want to make mistakes, don’t do anything. If you want to learn, ask questions and make mistakes.
seth
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Oh what a great one, @alizee -- there are at least 4 things I’m hearing in what you describe:

  1. “We can’t handle that in the same ticket”
  2. “That’s more support that we’re really willing to give”
  3. “It doesn’t matter to us how hard our support is for you; our own processes are higher priority”
  4. Instead of just addressing any of those things directly (e.g., “I’m sorry but I literally don’t have a method to get in touch with the team that handles XYZ”), they just dance around it and exhaust you, hoping that you’d rather give up than do something complex
Director of Community, Gainsight
matthew_lind
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It’s not quite a poor Support reply, but my pet peeve is an organization that mines its Support interactions for Marketing email addresses.
 

Previously I’ve initiated a Support ticket, and before the Support team can even reply, I’m getting marketing emails from that company. It’s a tone-deaf move. If I’m at the end of an open Support ticket, I’m not an ideal marketing target. Treating me as such is likely counter to the company’s desired outcomes.

Making people their best....currently disguised as a CS Ops Architect. How can I contribute to your success?
bradley
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@seth Great to see that Gainsight Customer Success is championing this idea - I know we’re mostly CS folks here but your examples with support raise an interesting question: Any plans to collaborate with the internal support org on this as well to demonstrate how lessons learned could be applied to support and not just CS?
As a customer, the distinction between CS and Support is often just semantics, so a great experience with one team and an abysmal experience with another can be all the more glaring when it doesn’t work. I think it would be pretty powerful if there could be a demonstration if both pillars committed to a human-first experience.

seth
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A highly valid implication, @bradley !

I think our reading of the market is that the average company feels that the ROI to be gained from implementing/expanding a digital CS program (and a human-first one, ideally) is greater than the ROI of making their support teams more human-first. So, our focus with our upcoming content is on the CS side (advising customers towards value/use cases), rather than the Support side (advising customers towards technical fixes/know-how).

I think that one area where Digital CS and Support overlap is self-serve resources like Documentation and Education. I think it’s a verrrry interesting question: What does it take to make those human-first?

  • @neelam_mukherjee Is there anything that you’d say that you do to account for the fact that it’s humans who read our documentation? 😄
  • @lila_meyer @lisa.mirth  Do you have thoughts on some of the ‘most human’ aspects of our Education experience(s)?
Director of Community, Gainsight
anirbandutta
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Some real cues shared by friends on this thread as well

 and on that… you have some neat ‘cultural’ experiments you’ve been tinkering with @seth ? :) 

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bradley
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@seth  thanks for the reply!

Certainly appealing to the ROI value proposition is strong and I’m not suggesting a last minute pivot for my “highly market researched” suggestion :).

The way I think of it is that CS is one step in the overall Customer Journey, and support makes up another part of that, so if the goal is to create a human first experience then it would make sense to share and champion those values with any customer facing team. If anyone would want to be out in front leading that charge, a game changer if you will, I would think it would be Gainsight.

That’s sort of the perspective I’m coming from  - I also agree there’s overlap with support and CS in self-service resources like documentation and education I just don’t think it’s the only overlap. For example, if my CS person has a great use-case for me but I need technical assistance to set it up/get it working but my support experience has all the issues listed in this thread, that stellar CS experience is going to waste.

lila_meyer
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I’d like to think that our Education services and resources are designed with humans in mind in a variety of ways. For example, with instructor led courses, the instructors make time to introduce themselves and the rest of the participants, the instructor checks in with individuals who might be struggling, there’s group discussion, the instructor will stay after class and during breaks to help as needed, we request feedback from attendees after every course, etc. In our on-demand courses, we try to cater to different learning styles and preferences, add a taste of Gainsight culture and levity to what can be otherwise dry topics, ask for feedback at the end of each course, offer a way to reach a human through the knowledge center bot, etc. 

It’s been said above, but I think one of the most important things someone in a service role can do is to read the full question/email from a customer. While we hear and respond to some of the same questions repeatedly, it’s critical to listen for the differences or nuances and make sure to address those, too. Also, expressing empathy when people share difficulties or experience delays, etc., goes a long way toward making people feel heard and taken care of. 

Lila Meyer, Dir. Global Education Services
anirbandutta
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@dshorter do we have a recording for this webinar?

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revathimenon
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For anyone looking specifically for the recording of this session, head here please - 

 

Where focus goes, energy flows.
anirbandutta
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Infact this party continues 

 

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