How to easily scale customer support?
It’s week #5 at my new job as a product-manager/customer-support-agent/designer/Spanish-teacher (you know, the normal startup job title) and time is of the essence.
I must be able to cover as much ground as possible with the time I have. So it’s all about being productive.
Don’t worry, this is not a “hacking productivity” article, it’s a very concrete and doable thing you can do for your startup in terms of customer support.
If you’re in a hurry and don’t have time to read this entire post, just go to Helpjuice and set up a knowledge base ( That was a referral link 🤑 )
Ok, so for those who stayed, yes, my proposal is to set up a knowledge base, you know, those centralized repositories of information? We chose to use Helpjuice and not other big fancy platforms like Desk.com or Zendesk.
Why? Because we only needed a knowledge base, not an “integral solution” with live chat, phone calls, ticket system, chatbots, etc.
They also guarantee 50% less support emails, so that’s something too.
DISCLAIMER: We’ve been using it for only a couple of weeks, so we don’t have the numbers yet, but I’ll let you know the results in a few weeks time.
Previously we had a limited FAQ section in our site, with some very general answers to certain issues. According to our Analytics, last year only 2.09% of our signed-in or recently signed-up people used this FAQ. I’m sure more than 2% of our clients contacted support. So there’s a gap we‘re hoping to automate.
In addition to the FAQ we use a cool app called Missive it’s great for customer support because you can collaborate with your team, edit and chat inside mails, draft them together, etc.
I use a feature called canned responses where you can insert pre-filled answers to popular support questions, this really saves up time and lots of repetitive work.
But we still needed something external, for clients, something that could be consulted, searchable, and easy-to-update.
So we super-loaded most of our canned responses and FAQ’s answers with gif animations, keywords, screenshots and created detailed articles in Helpjuice.
To be honest with you the process was long, but beneficial, for both the company and myself.
Company-wise, the wait time for the user is reduced. Also thanks to HelpJuice’s analytics we’ll be able to spot weak points in the product, because we’ll see data of where our users are having the most problems.
And personally, as a newbie, because I used every inch of the badge creator and I now have a good understanding of how it works and what it can do.
I have a long list of support questions waiting to be uploaded. And the more I add the more “intelligent” the knowledge base becomes.
I have to say I’m enjoying it because I know someday soon, all this work will pay off.
It will also help scale support for our steady customer growth for sure.
This is part of a series of articles about my experience at Conference Badge. If you’re interested in knowing how this story unfolds, follow us.
