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Automattic Customer Success Life

Setting expectations and not rules

In a work environment, particularly in Customer Support, it’s easy to lay down rules and processes for people to follow, to ensure uniformity and that everybody does everything correctly. But my argument is that we should be doing far less of this. In fact, if left to me, I’d tear them all up.

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Automattic Customer Success How To

Customer tickets: how not to sign-off your replies

If you’re working in customer service, how you interact with the customer is critical from tone to the words you choose. One area often forgotten about is how to sign off your replies back to the customer.

This is particularly pertinent if a customer ticket is likely to not be worked on agnostically (i.e. the same person is going to respond more than once).

To give you an idea of what I mean, here’s an example of how a conversation in a ticket might go…

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Customer Success

Turn it off and back on again? What nature can teach us

It’s the biggest stereotype of the IT industry, but we all do it: turning something off and on to resolve a problem. And if it’s not that, we’re clearing caches and other things that may cure an immediate issue, but by doing it and therefore not resolving the root cause, we’re potentially creating bigger problems for ourselves.

Looking at how nature deals in similar situations and with the use of pertinent real-life stories, this post is a reminder of how spending a little more time can reap greater rewards.

Categories
Customer Success

It’s David, not Dave. Why using a name correctly is more important than you may think

As you know, I’m David Artiss. And David is the name I prefer to be called – not Dave. Growing up, my best friend was also a David. And everyone called him Dave, so it was a way of differentiating us. It didn’t help that we looked similar too.

I don’t mind if people do call me Dave, although I may silently judge them for doing so! I think it’s only polite to check with someone before making any assumptions about their name – I always say and write my name as David, so why would you think I’d prefer to be called Dave, unless you knew otherwise?

Categories
Customer Success

My 4 principals of support documentation

Whichever one of my talks you listen to, I make a point of adding in something relevant about how important documentation is. Because, it doesn’t matter which aspect of remote working or customer support you discuss, documentation is there, somewhere, as a point to be made.

To condense everything do, I have 4 basic principals. And the 1st one is the most important of all.