Okay, it isn’t really groundbreaking to have team members take on roles other than those for which they were hired, especially in a startup. Our Ops manager is also HR, our CEO is on snack duty, and our CTO is also the product manager.
In early-stage companies, you’re short on both time and resources, so everyone must jump in and take the reins. But this isn’t a piece about how good we are at multitasking. It’s about a shared responsibility that we all have at Even as customer service representatives.
Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Tony Hsieh, Zappos
It’s a great quote and a ground truth for all companies but to be honest, this is easier said than done.
Some of us have no prior experience in customer service. Our jobs never required us to interact with customers directly. Some of us are also certified introverts (hint: yours truly).
We’re also a pretty diverse team and come from all across the globe (India, UK, Europe) with different work backgrounds (venture capital, AI, media, healthcare) and bring different sensibilities towards customer support.
But all of these work in our favour. We do not enter customer support with the mindset of how it usually works, but how we want it to look like. As customers ourselves, we understand what good and bad customer service feels like. We’ve all felt rage when a customer executive would parrot out something without understanding what we really wanted.
So how do we ensure all of us dig in and actually work towards supporting our customers?
There’s one simple and straightforward answer: we just do it. We divide interaction via email, social media, in-person meetings, scheduled calls among our team members. Everyone is eased into it, one meeting, one call at a time.
And you know what? The whole experience is more rewarding and any inhibitions are short-lived. Talking to our potential customers is eye-opening.
We unlock a treasure trove of information and we realise it is perfectly fine to talk to customers like a human being and in fact, it is preferred.
It helps us to stay grounded. We, sometimes, operate under the false assumption that we know what consumers want and that they will choose this feature over that. One phone call with them, however, puts this assumption of “we know best” to the test.
We can focus on creating a feature that our customers desire rather than wasting time constructing something that doesn’t work for them and having to start over.
Talking to customers is a great way to bring our team closer together because we all start working towards an immediate common cause.
It helps our tech team understand which functionalities work best and create flows that make user journeys easier, and remove any bugs in the way.
Our marketing team understands how customers see and describe our product and we can use their vocabulary to improve campaigns.
Our CEO benefits from having these insights so we can create an awesome product and user experience that will take us through to the future.
We get to talk to amazing people who become our brand ambassadors!
So if you ever decide to contact customer support at Even, it could be one of us! And we’ll do everything to make your experience amazing.
Talk to us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.
Or just say hello at hello@even.in
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