This is a transcript of our February 2015 AMA with Justin Seymour on providing support to the people who use HelpScout. To find out about future events, join our chat!
| scott | Hi everyone :smile: |
| scott | @channel we’ll be starting the AMA in a min |
| scott | @justin: So is support the most important department at HelpScout? |
| justin | We’ve built the brand around providing great support, so we’ve got to live up to the motto. |
| scott | @justin: How do you work with product when your product is a support product? |
| scott | Got any stories, examples, etc you can share? |
| justin | @scott: I assume you mean the product team, or how we use the product itself? |
| scott | @justin: Let’s start with the product team :smile: |
| justin | We have a small product team, but they’re incredibly receptive to feedback from the front line. Customer comments and suggestions very much drive our roadmap. We meet once a week just to talk about customer tone, specific requests, share use case examples and so on. |
| scott | @justin: How do you decide what goes on the list of topics? |
| justin | Everyone on the team has a very clear understanding of short-term goals, future projects, and where we’re heading with the product on the whole. We don’t have any specific policy or procedure for deciding what goes where on the feedback front. If we feel like it’s a good idea, and it’s something that might be a quick fix or addition, we’ll talk about it. |
| justin | We say “no” quite a bit, and for good reason. Everyone has priorities! |
| scott | Nice :smile: |
| scott | @justin: Do you feel like it’s easier or harder supporting people that do support? |
| justin | Our customers on the whole are absolutely wonderful. Providing support for support folks can be challenging, though, as their demands are often just as high if not higher than our own, when using the product. |
| scott | Do they give you slack cuz you’re in the trenches too? :smile: |
| scott | Got any examples of demanding customers? |
| justin | Totally. I’d say one of the biggest challenges is just working through specific use cases, workflows that might make sense to one group of people, but not to many. Everyone runs support in a different manner, and we can’t cover every little detail in the product, so we rely on people to meet us half way at times. |
| justin | We care more about big roadblock issues than tiny tweaks, as roadblocks often have some effect on other similar use cases, for separate customers. |
| justin | Demanding customers are few, but we get a fair share of “we must have this feature, can you code it for us” type requests. |
| chaseclemons | :wave:Heyo! |
| scott | :wave: |
| justin | Yo! |
| chaseclemons | Sorry for my lateness. |
| chaseclemons | @justin: With customers that demand a certain feature, how do you handle those? |
| justin | We’re pretty straightforward with feature requests. If it’s not on the roadmap now, and it’s not a feature or request that fits in to our product vision, it’s not getting added to the roadmap. With that said, we do listen, and we do like to understand why someone absolutely needs what X feature or update. We make no promises. If support feels like it’s a good use case, it might fit on the roadmap, we’ll chat it over with product and go from there. |
| justin | For the most part, the product team doesn’t see a large amount of the feedback we receive. They’re focused on high-priority stuff, and if we stopped to tackle every little request, we’d be in trouble. |
| scott | @justin: How do you go about understanding why they want something? Is it a bunch of back and forth emails? |
| justin | We’ll often ask someone to just paint us a picture, top to bottom. Help us understand why it’s so important. |
| justin | That could be email, Skype, a join.me session, anything works. |
| justin | Most folks aren’t passionate enough about their request to take the time to do that, though. |
| chaseclemons | From the few feature requests we’ve sent over while using Help Scout, the team has always been open and curious about the idea. I know I’ve talked with @justin several times about the situation behind a request. |
| justin | And it’s always a pleasure! One thing that makes a difference with requests is who is requesting them. |
| scott | What do you mean? |
| justin | Feedback/requests from smart people makes a huge difference. Their comments and suggestions are often well thought out, grounded, and make sense. I know that might sound rough, but it’s true. We all have customers who send mindless feedback, and if you say you don’t, you’re not being truthful! |
| justin | People who are vested in your product always want to make the product better. |
| chaseclemons | Haha – definitely seen customers like that before. |
| justin | People who aren’t vested tend to want more overall, rather than improvements. |
| chaseclemons | Someone who uses Help Scout once every few days is going to have pretty different requests compared to someone that lives in it for eight hours a day. |
| justin | Absolutely |
| scott | @justin: That’s an interesting point about wanting more… So do you ask for why with every request or just some of them? |
| justin | Only the ones that make me curious, the ones that I could see potentially playing an important role down the line. |
| justin | Use case example would be Chase’s recent request for a change to how we handled manual workflows. We didn’t notify anyone else about that update, but it turns out it was something that people noticed, and loved. |
| chaseclemons | :simple_smile: I LOVED that one. |
| justin | Excellent! |
| chaseclemons | By the way, we just shut down our Desk account and went all in on Help Scout. It’s been absolutely fantastic! |
| justin | Boom! |
| scott | @justin: How do you go about understanding why they want something? Is it a bunch of back and forth emails? |
| chaseclemons | Do those types of conversations happen a lot? Or is it mostly reacting to support tickets coming in? |
| justin | We do a bunch of outreach every month. We’ll go through our list of customers, fire off a few check-in emails, and take it from there. As we grow, and as our roadmap changes, we want to make sure we’re on the right track…working on the right things. There’s no better way than to talk to some of your more vested, or heavy users to see how things are going. Anything getting in the way? Is there a process or workflow that sucks for you? What could be better about X feature for your use case? |
| justin | We’re super curious. We want to know how people are using the product, and that requires a lot of chat. |
| scott | @justin: Can you share an example of a check in email? What do you say? |
| justin |
Cookie cutter: |
| chaseclemons | We used a similar email doing some Basecamp research. Customers love when they get to talk about how they’re using your app. |
| justin | I’ll change it up based on the customer, thinking about who I’ve been in touch with in the past, who has emailed in recently and so on. |
| chaseclemons | And all those emails are tracked in Help Scout? Or is there a separate CRM for those? |
| justin | We put everything in Evernote so the whole team can see, sometimes we’ll record the conversation. |
| justin | One of the best parts about being in the queue all the time is simply the relationship building that come with it. |
| justin | Makes these check-ins easy. |
| scott | Have you ever been surprised by one of these conversations? Good or bad. |
| justin | There are some use cases that blow my mind, and I’m wanting to help, but you can’t always push change even if it’s for the better. Example, 15 Users and 54 mailboxes. |
| justin | What in the world is going on with 54 mailboxes? |
| justin | That can’t be productive. |
| scott | That’s a lot of mailboxes per user |
| chaseclemons | Whoa – 54? That’s crazy. |
| michaelg | rofl |
| scott | Did you find out what they were doing with it? :smile: |
| chaseclemons | You get a mailbox. And you get a mailbox. Everyone gets a mailbox! |
| michaelg | “helpscout’s come to life” |
| scott | You get 5 mailboxes! |
| michaelg | “it’s making its own mailboxes!” |
| michaelg | “send help!” |
| scott | Make sure you’re at inbox zero with all of them :smile: |
| justin | They have conversations coming in, going out, things getting done, but it’s not orderly and it’s not efficient. And to some extent, they’re okay with it. You can only offer a solution and hope that they’ll take the advice. |
| chaseclemons | Speaking of mailboxes, what happens when Help Scout goes down? How do you handle support then @justin ? |
| jszotten | I was curious about that too |
| scott | /giphy inception |
| chaseclemons | http://media.giphy.com/media/aImJnc9F8Omzu/giphy.gif (669KB) |
| justin | If the app is totally down, we’re dead in the water as well, so you won’t be hearing from us until service is restored. I’ll usually open the phone lines in that case for inbound calls, but we Tweet about it, and post frequently to our status page. |
| justin | Luckily that rarely happens! |
| justin | When the service is down, we queue up all incoming emails. |
| justin | As soon as it’s back online, those messages are delivered. |
| chaseclemons | Saw that happen with my ISP. It’s a local company that uses it’s own products. So when they went down yesterday, their website was down, email, phone – everything. That’s gotta be rough on them. |
| justin | Worst case scenario for us, for sure. |
| chaseclemons | Thankfully y’all are rarely down, like you mentioned. :simple_smile: |
| michaelg | it’s all part of the plan- people can’t complain about the product being down if it’s down for you, too. |
| chaseclemons | @justin: With the status page, is that updated automatically when you go down? Or is a manual process? |
| scott | I’m sure they’d find a way to complain :wink: |
| justin | It’s a manual process right now, we’re working on automating the initial updates. We’re also getting reading to push in-app notifications when there’s a status event. |
| justin | StatusPage.io is the bomb. |
| chaseclemons | In-app notifications would rock for that. |
| michaelg | haha i like statuspage.io’s pricing |
| michaelg | Enterprise -> “CEO’s Phone Number Support” |
| chaseclemons | Hah – that’s awesome. |
| scott | @justin: What’s your favorite part of using the HelpScout product? |
| justin | It’s beautiful. |
| scott | Got any tips or tricks living in it all the time? |
| justin | I mean, from a design perspective, I think it makes it wonderful to use. |
| justin | Design team obsesses over pixel perfection on everything. |
| chaseclemons | We compared Help Scout to the Apple design of support apps. It’s so easy to live in, which makes going back to any other app feel like you’re going back to Windows 98. |
| justin | And when you’re using a product for 8+ hours a day, it’s got to work on the UI front. |
| justin | Nice! |
| chaseclemons | And I mean, Nick’s stylish hair is a nice selling point. |
| justin | Also true. |
| justin |
One tip to make things flow would be redirect options: http://docs.helpscout.net/article/228-redirect-options Action buttons in Help Scout contain a linked dropdown menu with various redirect options. These options allow the User to specify where they’ll be redirected |
| justin | Not many people change the default, but it’s a huge time saver based on your workflow. |
| scott | What’s an example of how you’re using it? |
| chaseclemons | I think everyone on the Basecamp team has it set differently depending on how we like it. |
| justin | I have mine set to go back to the folder, because I’m all over the place. |
| justin | If I’m powering through the queue all together, I’ll set it go to the next oldest, active (default) just to prevent extra clicks. |
| chaseclemons | Anyone got any last minute questions for @justin ? Otherwise I’d say we can wrap things up. I’m sure he’s got some customers waiting on replies! :simple_smile: |
| scott | Thanks for hanging out with us @justin! :simple_smile: |
| justin | Just a few! Slow today :simple_smile: |
| justin | Anytime, always a pleasure. |
| justin | Thanks for the AMA! |
| chaseclemons | You rocked it! Thanks so much for hanging out with us! |
| michaelg | :confetti_ball: :thumbsup: |