randomwisdom5

  • Customer Support Adventures: Angry Customers and Capes

    The world of customer support, is one where patience is not just a virtue, but also a superpower that can make even the angriest of customers happy, and leave them wondering if you practice Zen when you’re not replying to emails.

    It may start with a scathing email with text in ALL CAPS. That’s your cue to get your virtual superhero cape on, and try to transform their uppercase anger to lowercase happiness and relief.

    Drawing from my experiences and observations in customer support, I’ve crafted a strategy to address irate customers. I call it LOVE:

    L – Listen like a pro

    O – Opt for transparency

    V – Venture into resolution mode

    E – Ensure resolution accuracy

    Let us look at the power of LOVE up close:

    Listen like a Pro: Emphathize

    It is important to listen to the user like you would listen to a friend in trouble. This will ensure that you are not simply hearing or reading the words, but also understanding the emotions behind them. This will also help you respond to customers with genuine understanding, and you end up creating a space where they feel heard and valued. This goes a really long way in building trust!

    Opt for transparency : Be honest

    Honest communication sets clear expectations and shows the integrity of your business.

    If there’s an issue or a delay, being upfront about it prevents future disappointment and frustration, as customers appreciate knowing what to expect.

    Sometimes, customers are angry because they don’t fully understand or have misunderstood something. Here, it is important to guide them politely to the facts or offer a clear and concise clarification.

    Venture into resolution mode

    Once you have understood and identified the core issues of an angry or frustrated customer, it is time to steer the conversation towards solutions. Offer clear, actionable solutions, ensuring the customer is on board with the proposed resolution. Sometimes, a touch of humor can act help deflate tension.

    It is true that we may not always have the answers to everything, but the customer will appreciate honesty and effort to find a solution together.

    Ensure resolution accuracy : Follow up

    Finally, it is important to follow up to ensure that the resolution met their expectations, turning an initially stormy encounter into a smooth sailing experience that leaves the customer feeling heard, valued, and satisfied. It’s the final touch that leaves a lasting impression.

    And as always, we must take a moment for self-reflection and analysis. What worked? What could be improved? It is also important to share insights with your team, because every superhero needs a cape-worthy customer service strategy, and maybe a secret handshake for dealing with the occasional supervillain-level frustration.

    In the world of support, laughter is your sidekick, and empathy is your superpower!

    Thanks for reading!

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  • Customer Support Adventures: A tale of Support Wizardry

    Picture this: I’m trying to install the Authy app on my new phone because I lost access to my old one, which had it all set up. I was a little worried as time was ticking, and I needed it ASAP for an important work assignment. So, like any tech sleuth (at least that’s what I like to call myself), I hit up their website’s Support section and start my troubleshooting work, fully aware that I might have to reach out to their support team to recover my account.

    You see, I’m no stranger to the world of customer support – I’ve been in those shoes for more than a year now. So, when I finally reached out to them, I figured I’d get a link to one of their support docs, maybe a troubleshooting guide, and I’d be on my way. Little did I know that I was about to learn a thing or two about how to turn a user’s frown upside down. It was like a crash course in customer happiness, and they certainly left me feeling 😄.

    And now, I can’t help but share what I learnt from that experience and incorporate that into my interaction with users. I mean, who doesn’t want happy users, right?

    The issue:

    I was knee-deep in Authy’s account recovery process before I reached out to their support. Apparently, the account recovery process that I tried following by myself, sent me a recovery email to my email address (it was a partially masked TransferWise email address). The only problem was, I had no idea where that email address came from and I did not remember creating it. I wrote to the support team and provided as much information as I could.

    Not only did they fix my issue, but their responses were eye-opening!

    Here are my customer support takeaways based on the response from Authy’s support team at various stages:

    1. Address user concerns as soon as you can. (Even if you need more details from the user to actually solve it)
      Support team’s move:
      Even though the information I provided, didn’t get them any closer to unlocking my account, they jumped right in and explained to me why the TransferWise account got created and how I can retrieve my (supposedly non-existent) email address from my TransferWise account. They asked me a few questions about my account history, last seen dates, etc.
      Takeaway:
      Instead of requesting for more information, they tackled my email dilemma head-on, and that gave me a hopeful feeling that my account might see the light of day again. We usually need a lot of info to fix stuff, but adding a dash of “Here’s what’s happening” magic, wherever possible, can turn user frustrations into a sigh of relief.
    2. Add a personal touch to your responses.
      Support team’s move:
      Every response I got from the support team, was full of warmth, friendliness. I could sense a genuine concern and effort to solve my problem.
      Takeaway:
      When handling similar support tickets day in and day out, it’s easy to fall into the robot-talk trap. But, a little personal touch can turn a user interaction from “Meh” to “Aww, they really care!” and make them feel more like chatting with a friend who has got your back and less like dealing with a support team.
    3. Always keep the door open.
      Support team’s move:
      In their final email, they told me that I can always reply to this email thread if I have any questions.
      Lesson learnt:
      Making customers feel like they’re part of an ongoing conversation is key. When they know you’re just a message away, it’s like having a friend on speed dial. When customers have positive experiences with the support team, they are more likely to share their positive experiences with others (that’s what I am doing now!), potentially leading to referrals and new customers.

    In conclusion, as customer support agents, our aim should not only be to resolve issues, but also to create memorable experiences that resonate long after the support ticket is closed. That requires the perfect balance of empathy, expertise, and efficiency. A big thank-you to the Authy support team for being awesome at what they do and for teaching me to be a better customer support agent.

    Thanks for reading!

  • My WordPress Journey

    The Origin

    I have always liked documenting my day – what went well, what can be improved and my thoughts in general. It all started with my love for stationery – pencils, coloured pencils, pens, highlighters, Post-It notes, envelopes, notebooks, diaries and the list goes on. I reserved a small part of my allowance to collect and hoard any of these I could get my hands on and scribbled down bits and pieces of my thoughts with coloured pencils and markers. During my mid-teenage years, I found the feeling of a pen gliding across paper quite satisfying. This slowly culminated into a habit that I came to value over time. Once I started college, I couldn’t continue journaling regularly but with more and better access to the internet, I got drawn to blogs and spent my commute reading about cooking, travelling or DIYs.

    The Genesis

    What my commute looked like

    The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

    – Jeff Jarvis

    As I continued reading blogs, I wondered – if I use some of my commute time to note down my thoughts in a blog of my own, I could continue journaling digitally without the hassle of carrying my stationery everywhere – that seemed like a good idea, but the only problem was that I didn’t know how and where to begin. I noticed that a lot of the blogs I came across were created using WordPress. A quick Google search revealed to me an interesting world of content publishing. One of the top results of my Google search was wordpress.com and while browsing through the website, I found my answer to where to begin. The easy part was done and now I needed to focus on the how.

    The initiation

    Signing up with WordPress was pretty straight-forward and I was all set to write my first blog in minutes. I could see a lot of sections and settings on my WordPress admin screen, but the ‘themes’ section caught my eye. I was so amazed by how easy it is to change the look and feel of my blog that I did not write a single post that day. I was completely occupied with trying out different themes for my blog. Once I zeroed in on a theme, I wanted to explore all the other admin screen settings/sections to understand what else can be customised. Some of the sections and the settings within them were self-explanatory, some had links to detailed descriptions/documentation and some answers were ready to be discovered on Google. One of the professors at my university used to tell all his students – “I have been studying and teaching this subject for over 9 years, yet I may not have answers to everything you ask me. But I have one important skill – I have mastered the art of Googling – and that is a good starting point.” Over the years, I have come to understand that it is a very handy skill to have.

    I did eventually write blogs but since they were more like notes to myself, I just saved them as drafts. Exploring WordPress as an admin made me realise that I can customise a lot of aspects of my blog’s appearance and also organise my posts – thereby my thoughts – into categories and revisit them anytime – something that is not easy to achieve with the traditional pen and paper. That just opened up a myriad of questions for me about what else could be achieved. Whenever I had a thought or a question about WordPress, I would search for it on the internet and one such search led me to the WordPress.com Support Forum, where anyone could ask questions about WordPress and anyone who knew the answer, could provide a solution. Well, it was time for me to explore this gold mine of information.

    The inspiration

    I started going through the forum topics and observed that most of the questions were being answered within minutes! I wondered – these must be full time WordPress employees, probably working in shifts or having offices across the globe to be able to answer questions so promptly. Shortly, I realised that I was wrong when I came across this amazing article that answered a lot of my questions and introduced me to the WordPress Community, Open source philosophy and WordPress.org. I understood that there are mainly 2 types of contributors/volunteers – those who are sponsored by businesses that use WordPress, and passionate individuals who, despite having full-time jobs, dedicate their own time to help out by sharing their knowledge with others. Community support drives the WordPress ecosystem. It felt so good to see contributors with different levels, areas of expertise and background come together to help make the product better, thereby instilling in me the desire to be a part of the WP community by becoming a contributor.

    The Interval

    In the next four years, due to personal and professional commitments, I couldn’t put in much time towards contributing to WordPress – I had my final year project, landed a job as a Junior Software Engineer fresh out of campus, had rigorous 3 month long on-the-job trainings, project deliverables, shifts and a total of 2.5 – 3 hours of relentless commute from home to office and back everyday. At some point, it felt as if I go home just to sleep. But, I got the opportunity to work on multiple languages, and frameworks like Java, SAP, VB.Net, Javascript and ReactJS. My blogging/journaling became less frequent and more than 3 years passed by unbelievably fast. On top of everything else, in 2020 we were hit by the global pandemic making it necessary for us all to stay indoors and work from home became the norm. It was a scary and uncertain time but on the flip side, I realised that I could use my time saved on commute to continue learning and exploring WordPress.

    The Resumption

    A lot of new features had been added to WordPress in the span of 4 years – especially the new and improved editor (Gutenberg) and I needed to get up to speed. I read up on the updates as much as I could and tried out some of the new features on my blog. I revisited the article on how to contribute to WordPress and started sifting through the WordPress.org support forum topics wanting to answer user queries and help them solve issues. There were a lot of development-related questions on the forum that were out of my scope at that point, as my understanding of WordPress was primarily as a user and not a developer. This, along with my software development experience of 4 years made me want to understand WordPress from a development perspective. In order to do that, I set up WordPress on my trusty old Windows laptop using WAMP, created a local test website and started exploring the code base, https://codex.wordpress.org/ and https://developer.wordpress.org/. I also stumbled upon WordPress Core trac – a ticket tracking system for WordPress development, but was quickly intimidated by the tickets. I did not want to overwhelm myself, so I planned a step by step approach. I started experimenting with the Twenty Twenty theme’s code on my test site to understand how themes work and how to customise them. In the process, I discovered one of the most interesting concepts – Hooks – that enables developers to extend the core WordPress functionality without modifying the core files.

    My First Achievement

    As I became more familiar with the core code, I felt comfortable enough to read through the forum answers, and some of the open and closed trac tickets to learn and absorb information from the conversation threads and patches submitted by others. It was still a bit intimidating to see the number of seasoned developers and experts involved in making WordPress what it is. I also observed other beginners like me were patiently guided by the more experienced members with constant feedback, ideas to improve, encouragement and appreciation. There was learning every step of the way. This served as a big confidence boost for me to pick up and start working on one of the Good First bugs – here is the link to my first WordPress Core patch!

    I spent the next few weeks, checking my ticket every few days, excited to find out if my patch has been reviewed. One day, I received an email announcing that my patch has been included in an upcoming WordPress release and I was listed as one of the new core contributors as my contribution is now a part of WordPress Core! That one email made me so happy, motivated, excited, and also made me wonder why I hadn’t started contributing earlier. That’s when I remembered a quote I read a few years ago – “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now”. Now that I got the ball rolling with my first contribution to WordPress, I wanted to continue on the path, keep the momentum going, learn and share as much as I could.

    The Support

    With renewed motivation, I hopped back on to the support forum. I started out with simple topics, trying it out on my local test site first, looking it up on the internet, making sure I understood the question, and redirecting users to the correct support forum/resource, wherever applicable. My exposure to the Core code along with my exploration as an admin user played an important role in helping me troubleshoot issues, especially with knowing where to look for answers. Before I replied to any of the topics, I would test my findings/solutions on my test site to make sure I am not missing anything. Many of the users are not technically inclined, so it became important that my replies are understandable. That seemed like a pretty easy thing to do before I actually started typing my first reply. Soon, it became clear to me that writing a good reply is not all that simple. After all, my motive is not just to come up with a solution, but to make sure that I provide some value to the users by making my answers accurate and easy to understand. For this reason, I would write and rewrite my replies, reading it multiple times from the point of view of the reader. I would spend a couple of hours every week (and still do) going through the forum, answering questions.

    When I came across a forum topic related to free third party plugins (BuddyPress, CPT UI, WooCommerce, Elementor, etc. to name a few), I would sometimes install them out of curiosity to reproduce an issue or just to see how they work . When I learnt that I could create my own e-store on my test website for free, with WooCommerce, I quickly installed the plugin and set up my store, added products, shipping costs, taxes, placed orders as a customer, created manual orders as the store owner. In the process, I found a bug and headed on to WooCommerce’s GitHub to report an issue. I found that it was already reported by another user, but open and unassigned. Satisfied with all my (pretend) e-store business that day, I went to sleep. While preparing tea next morning, I suddenly realised that I don’t have to wait for someone to fix the bug when I can try it myself. I poured myself a hot cup of tea, got to work and submitted my fix, which got approved and was rolled out in a month!

    I recently replied to my 100th support ticket and I still get excited every time users finds my answers helpful. Every success, no matter how small and every obstacle, no matter how big, makes me eager to continue this journey of learning, sharing and contributing.

    Thanks for reading!