Jump into the Support Time Machine with Mathew Patterson to visit six sites of historically horrible customer service in this month's Supportive Podcast. For the full episode, search for The Supportive in your podcast player of choice.
Help Scout
Technology, Information and Internet
Boston, MA 19,753 followers
🧑🏽💻 Customer Support Platform for Growing Businesses | Try for Free
About us
Help Scout is designed with your customers in mind. Provide email and live chat with a personal touch, and deliver help content right where your customers need it, all in one place, all for one low price. The customer experience is simple and training staff is painless, but Help Scout still has all the powerful features you need to provide great support at scale. With best in-class-reporting, an integrated knowledge base, 50+ integrations and a robust API, Help Scout lets your team focus on what really matters: your customers. Help Scout is trusted by 12,000+ customers in over 140 countries, including Buffer, GrubHub, AngelList, and Timbuk2. Try for Free 👉 https://bit.ly/HS_FreeTrial
- Website
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https://www.helpscout.com
External link for Help Scout
- Industry
- Technology, Information and Internet
- Company size
- 51-200 employees
- Headquarters
- Boston, MA
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2011
- Specialties
- Web applications, Email, Cloud, Help desk, customer support, customer service, Shared Inbox, Knowledge Base, Live Chat, and customer experience
Products
Help Scout
Help Desk Software
The only customer service platform growing businesses need to deliver great customer experience. Trusted by over 12,000 businesses in 140 countries. Get started for free.
Locations
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Primary
100 City Hall Plaza
5th Floor
Boston, MA 02108, US
Employees at Help Scout
Updates
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31 years. That's how long it has been since Billy Joel (not on LinkedIn) released a pop album, despite selling out hundreds of concerts in the interim. What works for Billy probably won't work for your company - you need to keep moving. In this article, Mathew Patterson explores the pain and gain of change.
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What are you smiling about? A smile can brighten someone‘s day, but in the wrong context, the same smile can be confusing, upsetting, or confronting. Cultural differences determine how your smile is interpreted. For customer support staff, understanding how different cultures expect you to behave should shape how you help them. In this article Mathew Patterson explores how AI might struggle to adapt to cross-cultural support: https://lnkd.in/g7SnDbjs
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As much as many of us in the U.S. would like to deny it, fall is on the way. In fact, retailer algorithms are already trying to convince us that we need a new cozy blanket, even though our ACs are still working overtime! 🥵 While it may not *feel* like fall yet, retail stores have it right — it’s time for teams that need seasonal help to start thinking about what that might look like this year. If this task is on your to do list for after Labor Day, we have a couple of tools that might help: ➕ Customer Support Hiring Calculator: https://lnkd.in/gh9EcQ8p 💬 Customer Service Interview Builder: https://lnkd.in/g8tzXr-m Use the hiring calculator to help determine your staffing needs. Then, use our interview builder to fill the spots. It includes many helpful resources, such as a job description library, an interviewing guide, and a database full of relevant questions to add to your list. Good luck out there, and may the pumpkin spice ever be in your favor. 🍂
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What does a smile from a stranger mean? Well it quite literally depends on where you're from! Norwegians and Pacific Islanders might have very different interpretations. In this edition of The Supportive Weekly, Mathew Patterson is thinking about the way customer support should be shaped by cultural understanding. If you enjoy it, why not subscribe to the email newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gP7eGp9H
Cross-Cultural Customer Service
Help Scout on LinkedIn
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Email subscribers not only get first notification when new episodes of The Supportive Podcast (https://lnkd.in/gYRxJ7tZ released, but they also receive some bonus content. In the email for this month’s episode (about how support teams can better work with product managers), subscribers also heard from: Irene Liakos Phil Gilmore Sara G. Phil Oye They each answered the question: “What’s one thing you’d tell support leaders to help them get their ideas/fixes/features onto product roadmaps? ” Here’s what Phil Oye said: "The best way for Support teams to get their ideas onto the roadmap is to clearly communicate the scale and the impact of the problem customers are facing. How many? How severe? Ideas are cheap. There may be many solutions to the problem that customers are facing. Should we even solve this problem (vs all of the other competing problems)?"
The Supportive Podcast: For customer-centric leaders of today and tomorrow - Help Scout
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How To Write an Auto-Reply Email (with examples): How often is the first response your customers get from support an old, unloved automated response that was probably last edited when Charlie‘s finger was still recovering from a bite? Mercer Smith has collected 6 examples of effective auto-reply emails from verbose to simple, from companies like Zapier, Appcues, and Goldbelly. Some key lessons: - Inform them that you've received their email and are looking into it. - Let them know the hours during which your team works. - Help them understand how long they can expect to wait. - Provide other ways of contacting you, if you have them (chat, phone, carrier pigeon). - Personalize the content with information that you are likely to have about the customer, and provide fallbacks that make sense and sound natural. - Assist them in troubleshooting their issues on their own if they'd like to by sending links to documentation and other resources. - Give tips about additional information they can send along that may make it easier to solve their inquiry. For more: https://bit.ly/3OzrWH6
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#ProTip from Help Scout customer support pros: When you’re creating new tags and custom fields, make sure your whole team is on the same page! Discuss as a team to prevent confusion (i.e. duplicate meanings, embarrassing typos) later. As one example, our support team uses a standard naming convention when we create a new tag for conversations related to a status event: status-year-month-day. This keeps tagging clear and consistent, even during stressful times in the queue. For more on how you and your team can get the most of of tags and custom fields, check out this deep dive by Kristi Ernst Thompson: https://bit.ly/4argWGV
Help Scout Using Help Scout: Tags and Custom Fields
helpscout.com
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Here’s a question coming in hot from the Support Team Mailbag: “Do you have any examples of how different support teams manage their queues and structure their inboxes? I’d love to see what other folks are doing!” Great question! There are a lot of ways to set up your mailbox and manage your queue. Some support teams make use of assignments to give ownership of each conversation to a specific person. However, at Help Scout we take a slightly different approach. If you’d like to get a peek into our queue, check out Sarah-Mei E.'s response on the blog: https://bit.ly/3WNh6nc
Support Team Mailbag: Managing the Queue - Help Scout
helpscout.com
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“Canned” replies have a (deservedly) bad reputation — but crushing individuality into a single corporate voice is not their only use. (Don’t do that.) There are many situations in which having a well-crafted explanation of a tricky point is helpful for the support team to use, edit, and build on. Former teammate Elyse Mankin shares one example: “Saved replies are helpful for the in-between time when we're validating whether or not information is needed in Docs.“ If something hasn’t earned a permanent place in your knowledge base yet, a saved reply is the perfect place for it to live, be improved on, and eventually moved over. For more tips: https://bit.ly/45d7iqn
Help Scout Using Help Scout: Saved Replies
helpscout.com