One thing I have learned this past week is that customer support has no international standards. Just recently I was ordering a rather simple meal. At least I thought it was simple. Yes, the dish was correct. However, it was handed to the person on my right and I was given the meal ordered by the person across from me. There was no silverware for half our party and one person waited for ketchup until his fries were cold. When we brought it to our waiters attention he acted as if he had done us a favor by even bringing out the food. Unbelievable. It made me reevaluate my goals for MinuteFix.

Our customers are doing us the favor. They are allowing us to fix a piece of equipment that has probably become a staple of their life. On it are their pictures. They have their music and their work and possibly school documents. It may even sit in a room of their house dedicated just to its use. They are paying our bills and we should never treat them as if we are doing them the favor. And I truly feel like all of us on this team have already adopted that character trait and are showing our customers how truly grateful they are in our eyes.

I also know that there have been some bugs in the past few days since launch. To be expected, for sure. We are still technically in beta and we are working out kinks as fast as we can. So this week we are starting out by doing some more testing, making more bug lists and fixing them one by one. We want to give you the best tools you can have to make your side of the MinuteFix experience as good as it can be.

As always, thank you, thank you, thank you. Your patience and your enthusiasm are never taken for granted.

Think about the last time you fell in love. No, seriously. Take a moment to think about it.

Do you remember how you just wanted to tell everyone about it? Remember how you were just dying to tell your friends, and how that was the only thing you spoke about? People love to talk when they are in love. And it’s not only in relationships. Love is a natural catalyst for talk. When people fall in love with a restaurant, they talk about it.

Likewise, when people fall in love with a company, they will tell others. And the only way to get people to talk about MinuteFix is to give them the best darned support they have ever experienced. Make them fall in love with us and we will be big.

Wouldn’t you agree?

I want to get one thing straight. When a company is based in Michigan one would think that English would be the language primarily used for all correspondence, right? WRONG! I contacted my web hosting company, Web Hosting with TotalChoice, only to get the following message:

Hi,

I am sorry, I didn’t understand what you mean - Are you need drewandbritt.org parked on anotherkindofdrew.com or anything else ?

Thank you.
—
Tina Garrison
Technical Support Team
TotalChoice Hosting

Two things tick me off about this. The first is that all I wanted to do was get rid of drewandbritt.org as my umbrella URL for my hosting package. The domain is dead and I no longer pay for the hosting of that site. I wanted to instead use anotherkindofdrew.com. The second is that for a person named Tina (a very Michigan name, I think) that is just pathetic grammar. If you don’t believe me just read her email to me one more time. Obvious, unapologetic outsourcing. Not to mention no sign of hospitality or real customer service. At this rate it shouldn’t be too hard for us to revolutionize this industry.

I have to admit that on a normal basis I wouldn’t exploit an essay answer or a help session chat unless it was really exceptional. While looking over some past essay answers on the certification tests, I ran across the following response. I am sure you will all know the question without me including it. If you don’t know the question you should hurry up and get certified so we don’t point and laugh at you.

In the lower right hand corner of the screen should be a little computer with lines around it. Hold your cursor over this and see what pops up. If it shows that you are connected, then we might have an addressing problem. If there is a red “x” on the icon, the card is not connected to a signal. We can double check the addressing problem by using the command prompt and running an “ipconfig/all” which will display the technical information about your system’s connection to the internet. If there is a red “x” you can try to connect to a different network - if available. If this doesn’t work, we need to check the hardware itself by using the device manager. You can find this by right clicking on the “my computer” icon, select manage, select device manager, and point your attention to the internet adapters tab.

But what makes this response so good and what could make it even better?

Points of Customer Service Goodness

• Very explicit descriptions
• Visual descriptions (i.e. red “x”)
• Detailed but succinct

Could Also Take Advantage Of

• An entry line like, “Thank you so much for contacting MinuteFix. I look forward to helping you just as soon as we determine the problem at hand.
• Further explanation of ipconfig (i.e ipconfig is a computer term which simply means…)

MinuteFix support is based on chat correspondence. Many of us (if not all of us) use chat services all day long. But if you are anything like me you have created your own sort of language in which your friends and contacts are able to understand you with as little typing as possible. NP, right? Y waste wrds if u don’t have 2? Unfortunately, in that regard, many of our customers will need full sentences with proper grammatical structure. It is a function of our job and will ultimately define who MinuteFix is. To that end I offer some tips on communicating with other people and establishing relationships through chat sessions.

My day is spent alone in an office (of sorts) with nothing more than a cup of coffee and my iTunes to keep me company. Yes, I talk to my keyboard and even to my computer. However, there are times when I must chat with a professional colleague or even talk on the phone to a business associate or a MinuteFix technician. In those cases I have to be sure that my communication is more than if I were just by myself. My communication is key. For those who don’t know I am also a degreed teacher and have been in front of a classroom of 8th graders vocationally. My ability to make world history compelling or at least a bit more than boring had much to do with the way I talked about it. Likewise when engaged in a chat session with a potential investor or a customer my ability to type cohesively and thoroughly has meant the difference between success and failure. The bottom line really is that no matter what form of communication we use to get our job done…it is the key to success.

Communication, in our case, isn’t just typing though. It is about chatting directly to the customer with empathy, compassion and, above all, interest.

The other key I want to address today is about establishing relationships. When we use the word relationship, we are often describing a relationship of personal nature. But in the case of MinuteFix we are referring to a connection made between ourselves and our customers in order to accomplish a specific task. When I was teaching I had a relationship with my students that gave them incentive to hear me out in the first place. When we each get on a chat session with a customer we must first approach them relationally so that they are immediately engaged in our assistance.

Communication and establishing relationships will be the essence of our job and will ultimately mean success or failure.

Listening is something that most of relate to the conversation only. Someone speaks and we listen. How does it translate to chat conversation though?I have been thinking about this for a few weeks now and I think I have come to the conclusion that there is no translation necessary. The same basic tenants should remain in place. When a customer is chatting to us about their complications we listen to them (or read, rather). But we still owe them our full attention. So to remind myself of what it means to listen I have compiled a collection of a few basic reminders that will enable me to be the best Certified MinuteFix Technician I can be.

• Attention, acknowledgment, appreciation, affirmation.
  The four A’s of effective listening!
• Say what you see.
  There is nothing wrong with saying, “I see that you are quite frustrated with this problem. I can certainly understand…..”
• Don’t react; respond.
  Emotional reaction is good but can often hinder the listening process.
• Problem or predicament?
  Problems have solutions; predicaments have options.
• Visualize your own frustrations.
  Think about times when you have been frustrated. Empathize.

There will be times when customers will be upset. The MinuteFix Certified Technician community is highly trained, and from our conversations we are delighted to see the enthusiasm and professionalism coming from the community, I know we all have a love for technology and helping people, a requirement for providing great fixes for everything we can possibly fix. There will be times when customers will be frustrated by the technology problems they are facing, making them less productive.

As you know, great Customer Service is almost as (if not more) important than technology knowledge. MinuteFix will change the tech support market by not only providing on-demand support for any problem but also by bringing together the best, sincerest and happiest people together to provide its service. We must talk to our customers like they are our best friends, and keep in mind that they are coming to us when there is a problem, not when times are splendid. Being kind and understanding will make us big.
All MinuteFix Certified Technicians are provided with the MinuteFix Session Manual which talks extensively about providing great customer service. There, you will learn that there are ways to talk to a customer to help them feel better.

I was reminded of the importance of customer service only a few days ago. I recently flew to Europe with Air France. When I arrived I found that my suitcase had been broken in transit rendering it unusable. AirFrance was prompt to offer to pay for the damage but that wasn’t what stuck with me. I’m not writing this blog post to talk about an exchange of cash, but rather to talk about something more important: my feelings and how AirFrance cared about them. And it was as easy as a few words.

Let me show you what I mean. I received this letter in the mail yesterday from Marjorie Bucknor, Customer Relations Representative at AirFrance (I have highlighted any direct references to feelings):

Notice how Marjorie uses empathy to help ease the pain:

“I know this must have been extremely frustrating and disappointing for you.”

In the second paragraph, she uses empathy again:

“”…we realize how distressing such occurrences can be.”

In the last paragraph, she admits that they have broken our trust and their promise of providing me with a great travel experience, and she makes it clear that they are aware of it:

“”We value your business and look forward to future opportunities to server you and win back your confidence.”

Remember that delivering great customer service is about communicating well. It’s about treating the customer like you would a great friend, for being able to say “I’m sorry” even though you didn’t cause the problem. MinuteFix is building the next greatest tech support community and it will be treating our customers well, and it will be through words how we will make a difference.

We are here to help you deliver the world’s best customer service. We want to hear from you and are always available to talk. We’re very serious about customer service, and because of that, we are always available. By email, by chat and by phone.

The first question we should all ask ourselves is,

There are actually two types of customers. There are internal and there are external.

External Customers - People we deal with on live chat sessions or through remote desktop assistance. They are customers in the traditional sense of the word. Without them there would be no revenue.

Internal Customers - That category is a bit more tricky in that it includes co-workers, colleagues and others inside the company. You are internal and I am internal. We rely on each other for services, products and information in order to get our job done more efficiently.

Ultimately the relationship between the external customer and the internal customer is what forms the customer chain. Perhaps if you just sit at home behind your keyboard, answering questions and helping people with their problems but rarely see the light of day or hear from us directly it is easy to feel like your work has no impact on MinuteFix as a company. But if you look at the bigger picture you will see that without you we would not have a product to market or distribute and therefore would have no customers which, in turn, would mean we would have no revenue. In some form or another we all provide something for everyone else. Each interaction between us (whether in a blog post or on the forum or on the Wiki) is an important link in a chain of events that will eventually end up at the external customers’ feet.