Checking boxes can never fully capture the complexity of our identities. To build an inclusive company culture, however, we need to understand how people from all backgrounds feel about their workplace, so we have to ask the questions.

It’s been just over a year since Help Scout last conducted our first demographic survey and shared the findings publicly.

Last year’s survey was enlightening: Our company, then about 60 remote people, had moved closer to gender parity — 59% men, 41% women and non-binary people. We’d increased the representation of women and non-binary people on our Engineering and Design teams, but it still sat at 13%, and overall as a company, Help Scout was 81% white.

While we still had room for improvement in many areas, we were proud to share our results along with our strategies and learnings as a way to hold ourselves accountable, to add meaningful dialogue to what’s happening around diversity and inclusion work, and to demonstrate our company’s dedication to doing better.

Now in August 2018, we have new data and insights to share and continue the conversation.

Don’t forget the ‘I’ in D & I

Meaningful diversity work is more than just representation and numbers.

While increasing representation of underrepresented groups is a major focus for our company, it’s meaningless if we don’t all feel like we are supported and included. To that end, we added three questions to this year’s survey since it’s essential to know how people from all backgrounds are feeling about their place at Help Scout:

• I feel like I belong at Help Scout.
• I can be my authentic self at Help Scout.
• When I speak up, my opinion is valued at Help Scout.

We wanted to collect this data to identify whether particular groups felt that their voices were being heard and whether they believe they belong at Help Scout.

We also added a few new demographic questions to learn even more about our company. After asking about living with a disability in our 2017 survey, we received feedback that the question could be even more clear — so this year, we asked a standalone question about whether respondents identify as neuroatypical, and another separate question about living with a physical disability.

To get a better sense of family status, we asked our team if they identify as a parent/legal guardian.

Last year’s survey asked respondents whether they identify as “male, female, or trans/genderqueer.” After getting great feedback from the comments on the blog post pointing out that trans people can identify as male or female, we made necessary and more inclusive improvements to that wording. This year we asked if our team members identify as a “man, woman, or non-binary,” along with a separate question about identifying as a transgender person.

Diversity and Inclusion at Help Scout

The results are in

We had 72 teammates respond to the 2018 survey, our largest data sample yet.

New insights

Thanks to the aforementioned new questions we added to the survey, we learned that 14% of Help Scout identifies as neuroatypical. By asking the question and sharing the data, we hope to help reduce the stigma around mental health and plan to conduct trainings around supporting our neurodiverse team.

We also learned that 35% of our team identifies as a parent/legal guardian, a data point that reinforces the importance of meaningful work-life balance, and why we love the flexibility of remote work.

We were also stoked to learn Help Scout is 18% LGBQ. Awesome.

Wins

We moved a bit closer to gender parity, at 57% men and 43% women and non-binary people.

At the time of last year’s survey, zero teammates identified as Black/African-American. This year, we’re at 3%.

We maintained 50/50 gender balance at the manager/team lead level.

And on our Engineering-Design-Product teams, we moved to 26% women and non-binary people, a 62% increase from the past year!

And it’s important to note that while someone might belong to one majority group, they may also fall in another minority group. Again, identities are complex and a survey can’t navigate intersectionality in all its variations — it can only serve as a data point in a multifaceted and ongoing conversation.

How did we get there?

Publishing last year’s blog post helped us attract candidates from underrepresented groups by speaking candidly and honestly about our diversity and inclusion. Our own Chanita Simms recently wrote about how that post impacted her journey to Help Scout.

While many companies still hesitate to share demographic data for fear of being open about their shortcomings, we can’t stress enough how important it is to own it and talk about it.

Being transparent and authentic helps build an employer brand that attracts the kind of team you want to build.

How to Foster Inclusivity at Your Company

After two years of surveys, we now have concrete data to show that the changes we made to the recruiting process were absolutely leading to an increase in women on our Design-Engineering-Product teams. When we launched the search for a new Head of Design, we experimented with adding honest language to the job description:

P.S. — Yes, it’s all dudes. Although we work really hard to build a diverse pool of candidates, we’ve fallen short of our diversity and inclusion goals on the Design team. We’re excited to partner with you to do much better moving forward.

That search, along with a heavy dose of sourcing and recruiting excellent women candidates, resulted in hiring the best person for the role, Linda Eliasen. The data show that when women are better represented in leadership roles, more women are hired across the board. The results on our Design team reinforce those findings — our once 100% male Design team is now 42% women.

‘I belong at Help Scout’

One of the most exciting findings from the 2018 demographic survey came from analyzing the data from the three new questions around inclusion. For each question, over 80% of the company agreed or strongly agreed that they felt like they belonged at Help Scout, they could be their authentic selves, and their opinions mattered.

When the data was spliced to see how underrepresented groups (who historically haven’t felt as included and welcomed in tech) responded to these questions, their responses were actually higher!

What we’re still working on

Over the past two years, Help Scout has remained static in terms of overall race, at 82% white. Considering that we’re a remote-first company unlimited by geography when we hire, we could really be moving the needle here. We have no sugar-coated rationales or excuses. We’ve simply not done enough, and we need to have some difficult conversations about next steps and strategies and will have more to share next time.

We also surveyed the team and asked what they’d like to learn more about, and many responded that they want to develop more strategies to combat unconscious bias, so we’ll be planning another training very soon. We also want to organize a training to learn more about the barriers and biases for people with different physical and mental abilities in tech.

We’ve added more private Slack channels around identity groups:

• #whoruntheworld — For those who self-identify as women, genderqueer, or non-binary
• #Rainbowscouts — For those who self-identify as part of the LGBQT community
• #POCscouts — For those who self-identify as a person of color

These function as remote versions of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which boost feelings of inclusion among underrepresented people in companies.

In the months to come, we’ll be setting new goals, continuing our recruiting and sourcing efforts, and continuing to encourage our team to expand and diversify their networks. This work is never done, and we look forward to sharing our progress in the spirit of openness, humility and transparency.

This post originally appeared on the Help Scout Blog.

If you enjoyed it, hit that 👏 button to share it with others and enter your email right up here ⬆️ to have thoughtful articles like this delivered to your inbox each week!

Diversity and Inclusion at Help Scout: 2018 Update was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Think about a time in your life when you felt most included. What was going on, and how did it feel?

Now take a minute and think about a time in your life when you felt excluded. What was going on there, and how did that feel?

Everyone wants to feel included. We all want to feel safe. We all want to have that power.

Some of us have more power than others, but as individuals, we can take a number of thoughtful actions that add up to create a better, more inclusive and inviting culture.

As an individual within your company, you don’t need to be in the C-Suite or on the People Ops team to affect the kind of positive change that inspires people from different backgrounds to apply and feel included once they’re hired.

How transparency fosters diversity and inclusion — my story

Exclusion is nothing new for me — in fact, it was my norm for a long time. As a black, bisexual, college-dropout-woman-with-lots-of-opinions, the idea of inclusion was a fairy tale I only read about.

When I applied to jobs, I wouldn’t use my real name — Chanita — on my resume. Sometimes I’d lie and say I had a degree. I never included my LinkedIn or social media in fear of people seeing the real me. I would “code switch” to seem more appealing to the company culture or brand.

That changed when I applied to Help Scout because of this blog post:

Diversity and Inclusion at Help Scout

I’d been a fan of Help Scout for a while, and it was inspiring to see them openly admit their shortcomings. This time, the hiring process was so different — I didn’t change my name on the application; I didn’t feel the need to act like anyone other than myself during interviews. They got to know the real Chanita and it felt fantastic!

9 ways to foster inclusivity

No matter what your role is, you can affect the kinds of change at your company that inspire people from different backgrounds to apply (and thrive once they’re hired).

1. Be transparent

Everyone in the company — leadership and individual contributors alike — should practice transparency. Admit to your shortcomings and encourage others to do the same.

That’s what Leah’s blog post about Help Scout’s demographic data did, and that post is what encouraged me to apply. I could have gotten a rough idea from the team photos on the “About us” page, but for the company to actually come out and say it made a bigger impact, and felt like an invitation for growth.

2. Use inclusive language

Instead of addressing a group of people as “guys,” why not “team” or “folks” or “y’all”? How about trying something fun, like “party people” or “fellow humans”?

Recognize that some commonly used words, like “crazy” or “ghetto” or “females,” can make people uncomfortable. They might not bother everyone, but they do bother some people, and it’s not hard to find other (usually better!) substitutes that don’t exclude anyone. Buffer has a great guide to inclusive language here.

3. Be an ally

According to Valerie Aurora from Frame Shift Consulting:

An ally is a member of a social group that enjoys some privilege that is working to end oppression and understand their own privilege.

Allies speak up even when it’s scary. It sounds simple, but it makes a huge impact. If you have the social capital to say, “We don’t say that here” when someone uses non-inclusive language — and to suggest more inclusive alternatives — use it. Allyship makes underrepresented people feel comfortable and confident.

If I didn’t know I’d have allies standing up for me and championing for me, I would be terrified starting work at a new company where I was the only black queer woman. Knowing you’ll be supported and appreciated goes a long way toward alleviating any fears about being the “only one.”

4. Self-educate

When you don’t know something, Google it. Take the initiative to learn on your own instead of relying on members of that identity group to do it for you. There is nothing wrong with asking questions, but at the same time, there is nothing wrong with finding out things on your own.

5. Switch up your social media scene

Who do you follow on Twitter? Who do you retweet? Which Instagram posts are you liking? Which Facebook groups are you in? What can you do to switch that up sometimes? Resources like #DiversifyYourFeed, POCIT and Colorlines can help, but again, do your own Googling!

6. Amplify marginalized voices

Who is getting credit for ideas in meetings? Be mindful of who is dominating conversational space, and who is getting interrupted. There is so much power in speaking up for people and amplifying voices that may not otherwise be heard.

If you can, support underrepresented peers to speak at conferences, write for blogs, teach customer classes, appear in company videos and so on. If you’re invited to speak on a panel but you and all the other participants are from more privileged groups, consider recommending someone else in your place. If you’re asked to appear on a podcast but you don’t have time, think about whose career could use a boost and suggest them instead.

7. Lean into discomfort

If you belong to an identity group with power and privilege, it can be easier to ignore some of the difficulties other people face. Challenge yourself not to! “Leaning into discomfort” means having the hard conversations, showing up for others and not tuning out the realities of the world we’re all living in.

One of the small ways we lean into discomfort at Help Scout is with a # diversity Slack channel (where the above screenshot recommending “party people” as a gender neutral form of address came from!), as well as private channels for women, people of color and LGBTQ+ team members.

6 Perspectives on Diversity in the Workplace

8. Accept critical feedback

We all make mistakes! It truly is a part of life. When someone calls you out for making a mistake, rather than getting defensive: apologize, discuss what happened, try to understand the problem along with the impact, learn from it and move on gracefully.

“I find that when you ask thoughtful, specific questions pertaining to a certain kind of feedback, you can get high-quality answers. For instance, I could ask a team member, ‘hey, are there any words I’ve used in team meetings or in writing that have stuck out to you and caused a reaction? If so, what were they?’

The more I heard feedback about being an ally and changing my vocabulary, the less defensive I became when receiving the information. I also started asking more questions, being more proactive and even giving others feedback based on what I had learned.

It sucks when it’s all on the offended party to initiate a difficult conversation. Good allies don’t wait for the feedback. “

-Nick Francis, Help Scout CEO

9. Diversify your network

Do you know five amazing people within your industry who are either:

• A woman
• Part of the LGBTQ+ community
• In a different generation/age group than you
• A veteran
• A person of color
• Someone with a disability
• Someone with a different educational background than you

If not, that’s my challenge to you: Get to know at least five people you wouldn’t think to communicate with before. Don’t be afraid to spark up a conversation on LinkedIn! Sit next to a stranger at the next conference you attend. Break the ice with someone in a different department and have a fulfillingly random conversation.

Start where you can, and trust that it only gets easier.

Why we’re still talking about diversity and inclusion

I could share plenty of statistics and quotes and powerful images to back up everything I’m saying here — but that’s not what this is about. Honestly, we just need to talk.

Diversity and inclusion are difficult to discuss because lots of emotions are involved any time you’re talking about identities, power and privilege.

But we need to keep talking about diversity and inclusion because frankly, not enough has changed. We have to continue to have these hard conversations because this is how we grow as companies and as individuals.

So let’s continue the dialogue. Let’s own what we know and what we don’t know, help amplify other voices, give credit where credit is due, support one another, serve as an example and set the bar high for everyone we influence.

This post originally appeared on the Help Scout Blog.

If you enjoyed it, hit that 👏 button to share it with others and enter your email right up here ⬆️ to have thoughtful articles like this delivered to your inbox each week!

How to Foster Inclusivity at Your Company was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The companies that are winning today — the fastest-growing companies in history that are dominating their markets, like Amazon, Dropbox, Slack, and Warby Parker — all have something in common: They’ve been able to maintain customer centricity at scale.

If you’re like many scaling companies, being customer centric early on helped make you — but as you mature, you lose some of that focus. It’s a natural gap. Customer intimacy as a five-person company and customer intimacy as a 500-person company are different.

But like everything else, when you scale, you must consciously promote a culture of customer intimacy and put in strategies and systems to safeguard it — otherwise, you’ll lose it.

What is customer intimacy?

Customer intimacy is a measure of your awareness of — and alignment with — your customers’ needs and values.

Customer intimacy goes beyond talking to customers. It’s about a two-way connection: their perception matters. And you can’t be customer centric without cultivating customer intimacy.

Customer intimacy involves a shared understanding of customer problems and needs among all team members: You are aligned on the true needs of the individual customer.

Employees understand the needs and desires of the people they are serving, and this is reflected through increased loyalty, lower churn, less internal strife, more loveable products, and more effective team decision-making.

Empirically, customer intimacy and centricity can be measured by metrics such as word-of-mouth (more), product adoption rate (high), churn (low), and NPS (growing relative score + higher than benchmark for your industry).

Customer intimacy has never been more necessary than it is today either, because growth is only getting tougher: Sales and marketing channels are 50% more expensive than five years ago, buyers have more power than at any other point in free market history, and many markets like software are hyper-competitive.

So why are customer-centric companies winning … even in these market conditions?

• They develop products that stick. They understand their customers so intimately that they can anticipate their pains, needs, and desires … sometimes even before the customer does. From the brand of coffee they drink to their daily commute and dinner last night to their deepest fears and dreams, they truly get the people they design for and serve, making them more likely to develop rocketship products in the first place … and more likely to keep it that way as the market grows and evolves (new customer segments, new competitors) and as needs change.
• They innovate faster. Understanding customers accelerates continuous innovation. In competitive markets, those who continually seek to understand and then solve customer problems are the ones who win. With a shared knowledge of those problems, from CEO to intern, companies are more easily able to innovate. They break through and stay above the noise. They market and sell more effectively. Word-of-mouth certainly plays a role in this, but so does the connection to the customers. It dictates their marketing and sales roadmaps from the where to the how.

11 strategies to maintain customer intimacy as you grow

Maintaining customer intimacy saves you a fortune by doing the hard thing first: habitually talking to your customers and keeping their changing and evolving needs, desires, and problems front and center.

While the following list is far from exhaustive, most of these strategies can be implemented by any company — whether you’re a startup of five people or a company with hundreds of thousands of employees.

Customer conversations can take many forms, from informal customer support chats to formal customer research. But they’re rarely acted upon meaningfully unless all team members (leadership included) have the customer empathy and firsthand knowledge to internalize it.

Here are some effective ways to have customer conversations:

1. All-hands customer support

Think about how most people can watch violence in movies without batting an eyelash, but witnessing it in person often leads to stress, shock, and sometimes more complicated and long-lasting psychological issues. Reading and hearing about customer stories, problems, and complaints secondhand is not the same as experiencing them firsthand.

That’s why getting every employee, from CEO to intern, to routinely do customer support is the most effective method for building customer empathy at scale. It gives every team member time to connect and listen to customers, as well as context to understand customers better from firsthand conversations.

Companies like Help Scout, Zapier, and Basecamp make all-hands support a company-wide priority.

2. Visit your customers IRL

Seeing how your customers live their lives and how your products fit into their day-to-day is priceless for fostering empathy and customer closeness.

For most B2B companies, visiting your customer’s office makes the most sense. If you’re a mass consumer company, visiting at home likely makes the most sense. If you’re a car company, driving around with your customer on their commute may make the most sense. Pick the appropriate context and go with it.

Make a point to have team members visit at least one customer whenever they’re traveling on business.

Companies like Intuit and Pinterest make house calls, and Close.io offers good advice for startups planning customer visits.

3. Customer advisory boards (CABs)

A customer advisory board is a go-to panel of your most valued customers who perform the same function as a board of directors, only from your customer’s point of view. They’re forums for reviewing industry trends, addressing mutual challenges or opportunities, and offering unvarnished insights and guidance.

Companies that use CABs include Chrysler, IBM and Wells Fargo.

There is no better way to form a lasting, meaningful, and close connection between company leadership and your most valued customers. Good resources for setting up and running effective CABs can be found here and here.

4. Ongoing customer development

Formal customer interviews allow you to quantify customer conversations into accurate and reliable insights everyone can use to maintain customer intimacy. Software companies that pursue ongoing customer development achieve 30% more annual revenue growth, too. Get key people in marketing, growth, and product to conduct (or at least sit in on) at least 10 customer development interviews a month. Need more guidance on talking to customers more formally? Check this out.

Events

Customer events let your company connect with existing customers (and nothing builds customer intimacy faster than face-to-face contact) — but they’re also a great chance to get new ones.

Customer events can take different forms, but the goal is to bring customers together, let them socialize, network, and learn from each other. The key phrase here is “each other” — the focus isn’t on you.

Invite your customers, but also empower them to bring their colleagues and friends, and reach out to any prospects in the area as well. You may even want to advertise publicly on Meetup and Eventbrite. Bringing current and potential customers together is one of the most powerful ways, if not the most powerful way, to bring in new (and well-suited) customers. In Marc Benioff’s book Behind the Cloud, Salesforce reported an 80% close rate on new prospects that attended one of their city tour events.

5. Customer meetups

For most customers, the draw of a meetup or event is to meet others like themselves. The better you facilitate this, the more opportunity you’ll have to get to know your customers as well. Use these meetups to learn about your customers and cultivate a connection.

If you have the budget, move the location around to different cities. If you don’t have the budget, or don’t have budget approval yet and need proof of concept, then hold them in the city where HQ or a major office is located. When key team members are already traveling, host one in their destination city.

You can also host virtual customer meetups or events with a virtual component to scale without budget, but there’s no replacement for the face-to-face magic that happens in person.

The most successful customer meetups feature a presentation that is either customer-led or led by a speaker who is known and admired by your customers. Mingling is a vital part of holding successful customer meetups. This is essential for your company’s learning, but, more importantly, it’s likely the reason the customers came in the first place — to meet each other. Make time for mingling, and have easily identifiable product experts mingle as well so attendees can ask them questions.

6. Host happy hours/brunches/fitness classes, etc.

Customer events with a more informal spin might include organizing or sponsoring a happy hour. If you’re in the consumer space, maybe it’s a giant outdoor yoga class or a lunchtime coffee break at a new art gallery. Whatever it is, make sure it’s on brand and that people have time to mingle.

Ensure as many team members can go as possible (although be careful not to outnumber attendees) so you can multiply the customer intimacy effect. Don’t overthink this one — nothing fussy or complicated, but keep it on brand. Drift invited everyone at SaaStr this year for a pre-conference fitness class at Barry’s Bootcamp. Nikon hosted a photo party at a hot NYC nightclub. Sephora routinely holds in-store events for their VIPs.

7. Empower customers to hold their own meetups

By empowering customers to host their own meetups, you can foster customer intimacy without spending a ton. It’s also a way to scale globally.

The downside is that maintaining customer intimacy on the company side requires contact with customers, so there is less of that here than if you were hosting. However, you can mitigate this by encouraging local team members to attend as much as possible and to watch out for meetups when traveling.

Most companies that do this well provide a bit of support, at least through their website. Product Hunt is a great example.

8. Host a customer conference

Customer conferences are a great way to maintain customer intimacy, but they require priority from the c-suite and a big investment. Many companies that hold big conferences today started with customer meetups and progressed naturally once they saw the results — Dreamforce is a prime example. There’s a reason Inbound attendees leave as Hubspot groupies.

9. Host customer dinners

Smaller, more intimate dinners are a natural strategy for any B2B company, but they can also work for B2C and can be marketed as a perk. They can be formally organized and routine, or they can happen whenever executives are on the road.

Sophia Eng on Twitter

Any @InVision customers interested in having dinner?🍴#deliciousempathy #InVisionIRL

The goal here is to facilitate honest conversations, build connection and rapport, and let attendees meet each other.

Physical reminders

Customer intimacy isn’t “set it and forget it.” Even if all the necessary steps have been taken (top-down priority, talking to your customers, etc.), keeping that connection top of mind is important during decision-making and meetings — otherwise it can all get lost in the chaos of the day-to-day.

10. Make over your office with your customers in mind

Your office doesn’t belong to you — it belongs to the people you serve. Without them, you cease to exist. So why are 99% of offices all about the company and not at all about the customers? No wonder customer centricity gets lost.

One simple way to fix this is to take pictures of your best customers and post them on walls all around the office — in the hallway, in the boardroom, in the kitchen. Salesforce calls these “hero posters.” What better way to remember the importance of customer intimacy than by weaving the lives of your customers into everyday office life?

“We proactively look for ways we can infuse our customers into our office environment and surroundings,” says Julie Hogan, VP of the Conversational Marketing Customer Team at Drift. “A customer autograph wall, photos on coffee mugs … pictures of the humans and logos we serve. We live the brands of our customers daily … and make that visible in the fabric of our office.”

In addition to displaying customer photos and logos in the office and turning them into swag, you might also create an open invitation for your customers to visit your offices when they’re in town. Have them sign the autograph wall that of course is featured prominently in the office!

(Always seek permission before using customer photos and logos.)

11. The empty chair

It’s easy to lose sight of the people you serve when they’re not physically represented.

Amazon is famous for leaving an empty seat at important meetings. This empty chair symbolizes the most important person in the room: the customer. To make the “empty chair” technique even more effective:

• Use this strategy at every meeting in the company, not just big meetings among leaders.
• Have the manager/executive physically carry the empty chair into the meeting. Everyone in the room will take notice of the physical and noisy action. It’s easier for everyone else to become complacent if they only have to leave room for an empty chair.

Maintaining customer intimacy is easier than you think

It’s easy to say you’re customer centric — it’s an entirely different thing to be customer centric, especially as you scale. Even Jeff Bezos caught investor flack early on for his customer-centric leanings.

But the proof is in the pudding now. And you can’t be customer centric without cultivating and maintaining customer intimacy.

Companies with high customer intimacy have a shared understanding of needs and values, driving a more loyal customer base that has higher customer lifetime values and receives more of word of mouth growth, which greatly improves metrics, investment attractiveness, and revenue.

Implementing these strategies can help — some are aimed at everyone, some at grassroots, and some at leadership. You can start by implementing just one and gradually adding more. Any incremental increase in customer intimacy is better than none; it’s not a zero-sum game.

Not all of these strategies are realistic for everyone, but there are actions you can take regardless of your budget or team size. Of course, you can’t maintain customer intimacy without a company culture that supports it. This means top-down buy-in, and grassroots empowerment. You can start deploying these strategies as a proof of concept within your department first and make the business case to the c-suite after.

You’ll see the value right away with better team morale and clarity, but also in developing better products and features, easier decision-making, faster innovation, and cutting through the noise. And you’ll be able to measure it with more word-of-mouth, better adoption rates, lower churn, and higher NPS.

This post originally appeared on the Help Scout Blog. If you enjoyed it, hit that 👏 button to share it with others, and enter your email right up here ⬆️ to have thoughtful and well-researched articles like this delivered to your inbox each week!

Customer Intimacy: How to Maintain It at Scale was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every day new leads are coming in with their hands raised expressing interest in buying your product. When you combine this with a short sales cycle and aggressive monthly and quarterly goals it’s easy to get lazy.

Don’t do it.

If you’ve been in sales for a while you know that investing the time in building long-term relationships pays dividends in the future. It’s nearly impossible to understand exactly when those dividends will be paid out — but have faith.

Some deals come in pipeline and close in 60 days or so. Others can take much longer. Persistence and really partnering with folks you know are a good fit and your product can impact their business is worth the effort every time. Although you are always talking and measuring your short-term progress and monthly wins … sales is a long-term game.

One of the most tedious parts of sales is all the check-ins and keeping things warm when you know they’re not going to move right away and impact your month or quarter. It’s the grind of sales that most don’t see from the outside looking in. I’m sharing this story as a little reminder that it’s not only your job to put the effort in and have faith, but it’s worth it.

The customer's name and company is changed for confidentiality.

Slate Manufacturing was introduced to me when Mark Jacobs, my POC at another large customer I worked with took a job there. He called me after his first week on the job and told me he wanted to introduce me to the customer service leaders there. Although he wasn’t on the customer service team, Help Scout had such an impact when we worked together previously he said they need to be aware of us. Right away, I thought, hot lead … and it was. But let’s unfold what’s happened since that call in April of 2017:

Summary:
* Approx 30–40 emails since that initial call from Mark
* 4 calls with the team he introduced me to
* Initial scope was SMALL, estimated at 15 Users using Help Scout (I had a feeling if I could prove success it could be much larger. Committed to going with my gut.)
* As of Q1 2018, they’ve confirmed they’re finally coming onboard with their first team of 15 Users. We’re already talking with other divisions that will be coming online in addition to this first group. We’re now at a scope of 50 Users and growing larger after every call.

Timeline of events:
* Call with Mark in April of 2017 talking about how he wants to make intro …then crickets.
* Email to Mark early May … crickets.
* LinkedIn message to Mark in July … let me know he’ll be in touch soon. Then crickets.
* Email to Mark later in July ... he then made intro to team of customer service leaders.
* Good back and forth on initial discovery and strong interest … then crickets. Again.
* Booked initial demo for end of August. Then it was cancelled.
* More check-in back and forth for months where they answered, but timing wasn’t right.
* Finally decided it was time and another demo booked and delivered end of October 2017.
* Bunch of back and forth the months following. Agreed it was perfect fit, but needed to have internal conversations, work through thoughts, etc. Continued to check in and made it clear we’re ready when they are.
* Check-in emails end of January and early February. This resparked the initiative. They let me knowthey’re ready to chat in greater detail again.
* This month we had call to review what onboarding would look like, review payment terms and set go live date for first teams.

It didn’t take much to stay in touch and give gentle nudges over the months. It wasn’t hard or that time consuming, but it required patience and faith. It’s important to make sure you don’t give up on a potentially great customer just because they may move slower sometimes than you’d like. Think of your time and effort as an investment with long-term returns.

If you’re interested in joining a fast growing team that is invested in making sure their customers are successful and you have a passion for the long-game just as much as the short — we’re hiring!

In SaaS sales, it’s important to play the long game. It’s worth it. was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Being consultative (like most say they are when selling) isn’t only about painting the picture of the end of the rainbow anymore. It is about rolling your sleeves up, being a trusted advisor and helping them get to the end of it. This is the value today’s prospects expect when they’re investing their time to talk with someone.

In today’s world … the buyer has the power and more information available to them then ever before.

Customers can learn (all on their own) about better ways of doing things that help them solve pain they’re facing, the best tools for solving these pains and how other companies have approached the same problems. Google is their first trusted guide.

They can then trial products, read help documentation, reach out to others for recommendations, etc.

This wealth and volume of information can be quite overwhelming though. Especially when your options aren’t drastically different from one another, which is becoming more common in SaaS.

Sales’ job today is (or should) be to help prospects make sense of all the noise in the most seamless way possible to help them achieve their desired outcome.

Let’s imagine a scenario. You’re in a brand new city, in a country you’ve never visited, and you’re looking for a French restaurant. You want this restaurant to have great service, awesome atmosphere, and an authentic menu. It’s important because you’re going to propose to your partner at this dinner.

What do you do?

You go to Google and read Yelp reviews and narrow it down to 8 restaurants that all meet your criteria and have the same 4-5 star reviews and similar comments.

• Now you need to find which are closest to you. The ones that are closest to you are 4.5 stars though. Ugh. You don’t want to mess this up by going to 4.5 and not 5 star.
• Once you narrow down this list a bit more you have to find best way to get there. Is it Lyft, train, or bus? What are pros and cons of each option in this new city you’ve never traveled through?
• Do I need to make reservations or can I just show up? Once that’s all set, what’s the dress code?
• When I get there … will we have a good table? How can I secretly let the server know what my plans are and make arrangements accordingly?

This is great, but man it’s A LOT of work and there are a lot of unknowns. A different, and arguably better approach, would be to call your Aunt who grew up in this country, has great taste and knows the area well and just ask her opinion.

She’s your ultimate guide. She can tell you the absolute best place (which may not have even been on your radar), can tell you how and when to get there and can call ahead since she knows the manager to ensure you have the best table and service.

Once everything is arranged she can send you a link to the menu, her recommendations on what’s best and key considerations when arriving.

All of this, in 30-minutes with minimal stress on your end. She helped you determine a clear path to your desired outcome and made it as easy as possible to get there.

She was your sales rep in this case. She organized information based on what you told her, presented it in a digestible way and overall delivered an exceptional experience.

This is what sales is today. At Help Scout we work to provide customers with the most seamless experience possible as they’re evaluating us as a solution. We guide them through evaluation, onboarding and setup as part of our sales process to ensure we deliver and they’re successful. It’s different then the old approach of sell the vision, collect the money and then ship them off to someone else to help them.

If you believe in this new way of selling, are passionate about sales and customer success and are ready to roll up your sleeves and deliver value for prospects you work with we’d love for you to join the team as our next Account Executive! Check out the Account Executive job description here.

Sales is customer success — it’s all about being the ultimate guide was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a small SaaS company, deep understanding of your customers is almost automatic. Developers answer support queries, designers ask customers for feedback, and every crisis is an all-hands one.

Over time, though, most business roles become increasingly specialized, and maintaining close contact with the customer takes deliberate effort. At MailChimp, product teams relied on Technical Advisors to be their conduit to insights and issues gathered from the customers.

However, Civvy Ornellas, MailChimp’s Senior Manager of Support Product Analysts, remembers that, “As the company began to grow, it became too much of a burden for the Technical Advisors, and some of the communication began to break down.”

In 2015, the opportunity arose for Ornellas to take on a new role as the first Support Product Analyst. The plan was to give her the time and resources to facilitate communication between the people designing and building the products and the frontline teams who worked directly with customers.

Initially that meant a lot of emailing back and forth, but the role quickly expanded as people realized the benefits of faster knowledge sharing and closer cross-team connections.

Ornellas joined MailChimp in a technical support role before moving into the Quality Assurance team, giving her a deep understanding of both the customer perspective and the internal workings of MailChimp’s products as she moved into the Support Product Analyst role. I recently spoke with Ornellas about her team and how they forge stronger connections between customer-facing and product teams.

What does a Support Product Analyst do?

Day to day the work of a Support Product Analyst might include:

• Attending product meetings to understand product implementation details and provide relevant customer insights and concerns.
• Communicating with the Technical Advisors on upcoming product changes and how they may impact customers.
• Reporting relevant issues and feedback from Support departments to the product teams for their review.
• Meeting with frontline team members to help them collect and share customer feedback more effectively.
• Gathering and analyzing data to build a more comprehensive understanding of customer behavior and product usage.

Each Support Product Analyst is “embedded” with one or more MailChimp product teams, to help them build their knowledge of that particular area and to form relationships that allow for honest communication.

Each analyst is responsible for communicating about their particular product areas, and the team as a whole is a resource for all areas of MailChimp to gain easier access to customer knowledge.

To reduce the burden on Support staff to collect and collate information during their busy work days, MailChimp implemented two simple options:

• A simple internal form that submits Support team questions, insights and concerns directly to the Support Product Analyst team, who then combines that with other data to build a clearer picture.
• A check box in the help desk tool that allows Support staff to flag any given conversation as relevant feedback, which the Support Product Analysts review, too.

Now a team of 10 (and still looking to hire), the Support Product Analyst role has expanded significantly. The SPA team sits between the product teams (approximately 22 groups) and the Technical Advisors who are themselves a resource and bridge to the various support teams. Ornellas jokingly refers to her team as “double agents” — working diligently for both sides.

Benefits of a Support Product Analyst team

Ornellas is proud of the results her team has achieved in improving the speed at which MailChimp’s product teams can address issues with their products:

“We resolved 103% more issues over the last year, compared to the prior year.”

By making it easier for Support teams to collect useful information, packaging that information with relevant data, and communicating it effectively to the people who can take action, the release process is significantly shortened.

Beyond issue resolution, Ornellas sees other key impacts of her team:

• Creating a better relationship between product and service teams, leading to products that better meet customer needs.
• Giving a voice to parts of the company that may struggle to be heard, which leads to more informed decision making.
• Improving the customer experience by helping turn their feedback into product and service improvements.

One challenge for the Support Product Analyst team is that much of their work is almost invisible to the company. When they use data to convince product teams to move a release date to a quieter window, or successfully prepare the customer service reps for possible tricky scenarios, the end result is that everything continues smoothly.

Finding ways to report on their successes and measure the impact is an ongoing project.

Who makes a good Support Product Analyst?

At Help Scout we talk a lot about career paths for customer service folks, and

a Support Product Analyst role is a great fit for the right kind of support person. When hiring for her team, Ornellas looks for people who are:

• Comfortable dealing with data, and who can separate their personal feelings from what the data shows
• Excellent communicators in person and through text
• Strong relationship builders
• Technically competent at troubleshooting and able to understand and talk with people across the organization, from lead engineers to non-technical frontline staff

Working effectively with customers requires many of these skills and brings the additional benefit of deep product knowledge. Of the 10 people currently on the Support Product Analyst team, nine came from the broader MailChimp support organization.

Applying MailChimp’s Support Product Analyst model to your team

You may not be at MailChimp’s scale, but you do still need to know more about who your customers are, how they think about you and your service, and what problems they run into. Here are a few guidelines to consider.

Be deliberate about communication

When teams get busy, they tend to spend less time sharing knowledge. Make communication a formal part of your team’s job descriptions, and give them guidance on how to do it (for example: regular meetings, reports, emails, etc.).

Don’t underestimate the value of relationships

Assigning specific people to be the conduits for specific areas of the product will help, even if it’s just during one meeting a week.

Identify your best communicators

Who are the people on your Support team who could be future Product Support Analysts? And who on your product teams are most interested in accepting customer input? Make them your flag bearers for communication.

Be data-informed

The earlier you can collect data, the easier it will be to show the value of an analyst role. Determine what information would create better product decisions, and task someone on your Support team with collecting and reporting it. Then create time for them to perform the role.

Build the bridge you need

How wide is the gap between the people building your product and the customers using it? Unless you are deliberate about bridging that gap, it will grow ever larger.

At MailChimp, the Support Product Analyst role seems to be the right answer, and it’s a handy model to follow as you plan your own approach.

Start building that bridge today!

This post originally appeared on HelpU. If you enjoyed it, hit that 👏 button to share it with others, and enter your email right up here ⬆️ to have thoughtful and well-researched articles like this delivered to your inbox each week!

How MailChimp Bridges the Gap Between Support and Product was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I recently read this excellent article by Hudl on their tips for building usable Sketch Libraries — and was relieved to find that I’d been following a similar path in creating our UI Libraries over at Help Scout. So for those of you deep in the trenches, I wanted to share a couple of additional things that have made my life immeasurably easier when creating and maintaining our shared components.

But first, read Hudl’s article. I’ll wait.

Embrace “nested” Libraries

Whilst it’s a conceptual nightmare, nested Libraries (as popularised by Pablo Stanley) are a godsend. Hudl detail how you can use them to share colors for masks, which I would strongly suggest building into your own Libraries— this is our primary usage. But in addition to color, you might consider also putting generic icons, OSX elements (radios, dropdowns etc), avatars and regularly-used building-block components (see Guides, below) into a nested Library.

Whilst there’s definitely a bit of extra work required in creating scalable, re-sizable, well-named Symbols — it’s worth it. When your team are all using the same avatars and colors across the board to create pixel-perfect UI, you don’t just get the benefit of maintainability, but also the beauty of consistent screenshots and PR images, too.

The rule of thumb for me is that if I ever use anything more than once, I’ll make it a shared element.

At a macro level, I strongly recommend naming building block elements, like color, prefixed the with ↳ symbol. This makes dealing with the Overrides panel so much easier further down the line, especially with larger more complex Symbols.

Padding and guides as Symbols

Hudl’s ‘spacing block’ is a great idea — which we take one step further in our more generic Symbols with padding and guides. These operate as visual aids to help designers know how to align and resize Symbols, and can additionally be used to signal measurements to developers.

Of course, these guides are also Symbols — so they can be turned on and off in the Overrides panel, and are also named using the same convention as colors (above) to make it clear which parent object they belong to.

Example usage guides

Interestingly if you copy a Symbol from a Library file and paste it into a new document — that Symbol will be duplicated into your new file rather than remain linked to the Library. This small, but pretty significant quirk can be the difference between your team effectively using shared Library components, and everything falling apart into a mess of duplicated Symbols after a couple of months.

So as an effective workaround, we put an Example Usage.sketch file next to the main Library, and use that as an area to document specific patterns and common usages. Better still, when anyone copy/pastes from that example file, the Symbols will remain linked. It’s also a nice proof-of-concept to be sure your Symbols are as generic and usable as possible.

There shouldn’t be a single Symbol in your Library (with the exception of Base components) that aren’t represented by example usage.

As a final touch, we also export all Example Usage Artboards into a folder, which also sits alongside the Library. This serves as an up-to-date reference of the UI for anyone who doesn’t have Sketch installed (or just wants a quick peek) and is used for documentation, below.

Version control & documentation

It’s important that your Library remains the single source of truth, even for those who don’t have Sketch — this is where GitHub comes in handy. We pull the master Library, Example Usage.sketch and all exported example images (above) into a team GIT repository and update it when necessary. Not only is this good practice from a versioning standpoint, GitHub also comes with Wiki’s — which we use to store up-to-date documentation.

In GitHub we create a bunch of Wiki pages that reference the raw image files, produced from the example usage flow from before. This is incredibly handy because any time a new export is pushed, the Wiki automatically shows the latest version of the file — no caching, updating of stale image files or off-site documentation! Just make sure you reference the image like below:

![Example Usage](https://github.com/.../blob/master/Examples/Forms.png?raw=true)

I also find it useful for the Pages in GitHub Wiki to match the same structure as pages in your Example Usage file — for ease of maintainability.

Smaller tips & tricks

I’m sure there are hundreds of tiny tricks and plugins that people use to keep their sanity, but here are a couple that I continue to find useful:

Multiple text layers

Quite often our Symbols contain two or more text layers to allow for different states, like a placeholder and input value that both have different attributes (like color and weight). In the Overrides panel, we simply put a space in the input that’s not needed. This, combined with nesting (like the State layer, below) allows for one Symbol to extend to multiple uses.

Type. Don’t bother

Sketch is horrible at typography. Like, Keynote bad. You may disagree, but I’m willing to die on this hill. So whilst it might help address obvious situations like the placeholder thing above, I don’t share type patterns (h1, paragraph etc) in any of my Libraries as they make scaling and overflow incredibly difficult to manage in nested Symbols. I’m only saying this so you don’t feel bad about skipping type too.

Library thumbnails

Even though it’s trivial, custom Library thumbnails are a nice touch. Just make sure the first Artboard of the first Page in your Library is 600x480.

Finally, keep it simple!

For me, creating Symbols is like coding. Everything makes perfect sense when you’re in-the moment smashing out code… but without careful consideration up-front, everything can quickly become very complex after even a brief period away from the codebase. The same applies to Libraries — so the key to success is to keep it simple.

This means being extra mindful not to over-complicate your Libraries with Plugins, weird naming conventions or by hacking/leveraging Sketch quirks. I can’t stress this enough. Not only will it over-complicate matters and make collaborative usage difficult (Libraries need to be easy for anyone to pick up and use effectively), but there may also come a time when you might want to move away from Sketch.

If the key to successfully using your Library is locked away in your head, or requires some kind of on-boarding, setup or installation process — you need to work harder at simplification.

Want to see all this in action? Head to Help Scout and drop your digits in the form — you’re going to love it. Alternatively you’re building out UI Libraries and have tips and tricks of your own, I’d love to hear from you!

(More) Tips for Building Your Sketch UI Library was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When you own a brick-and-mortar store and the street it’s on is under construction, closing up shop is not an option. It’s up to you to keep customers shopping with you, even when it’s less convenient for them to do so.

Same goes for your online business. Forces outside your control — email clients not playing nicely, your customer’s IT department delaying a company-wide browser upgrade — are going to conspire and make doing business with you harder than it should be.

Too often, we sweep those issues under the rug. It’s tempting to consider the problem solved if we get the customer to switch to a different browser or turn off an extension. You might just want to say, “Sorry, we can’t help you if you insist on using that crummy third-party tool that’s getting in the way.”

But if you don’t want to lose business, you can’t throw your hands up and blame those external forces — you won’t win any positive word-of-mouth about your support by treating the symptom rather than the cause.

Sometimes, you’ve gotta fix problems you didn’t create.

Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Support Rep

Clear out your cached responses

It’s time to stop telling people to clear their cache or try a different browser as a first line of defense. Yes, sometimes a problem is a browser or caching issue, but it’s not the customer’s job to reproduce and create a bug report to prove themselves. Dig in and get your hands dirty, ask clarifying questions if you need to, and see if you can identify the issue the customer is talking about first.

When you tell a customer to clear their cookies and cache or try an alternate browser before properly investigating their issue, they may not expend the energy to follow up if the problem persists. Not only have you provided a subpar customer experience, you’ve missed the opportunity to find and squash a problem that likely affects other people. You also just brushed off a troubleshooting dialogue with a customer invested in helping you find a fix.

This doesn’t just go for SaaS companies. If you have an ecommerce or eservice site and a customer has trouble placing an order due to a bug during checkout, that’s a lost sale. It’s one thing when you know for certain clearing the cache will solve an issue, but suggesting customers clear their cache as the catch-all can prevent serious problems from getting fixed. If clearing the cache does not fix the issue, the customer may not follow up or complete the purchase.

Outfoxing the fox

Last summer, Help Scout started receiving a few reports about a cursor disappearing in the text editor, making it difficult for some of our customers to reply to their customers. Since we pull customers’ browser information into conversations using a custom app for third-party sources (and automatically with questions sent through Beacon), we noticed a trend: these reports were coming from customers using Firefox. A certain keyboard combination was causing Firefox to lose recognition of the cursor’s focus in the editor, stopping replies in their tracks. The bug wasn’t specific to our editor, but it was still affecting (and annoying) our customers.

We tagged the conversations, let our customers know the issue was specific to Firefox, and explained that as a temporary bandage, they could use another browser.

We added some key event handlers to detect when a user maneuvered the keys in a particular way, and we manually instructed the browser to do what it should be doing on its own through our editor. We ran the workflow on all the tagged conversations notifying that the issue was fixed, and all our happy customers could return to Firefox. Maximum happiness for everyone involved.

Working with third party poopers

The plethora of third-party tools and browser extensions can make any customer support rep silently scream at seemingly irreproducible, near-impossible-to-pinpoint bugs. That struggle is real. But it isn’t enough to tell your customer to disable their extensions to “see if that works.”

GoNoodle, whose product prompts short periods of physical activity throughout the school day, regularly screen-shares with customers (primarily teachers) to get to the bottom of problems. Those problems are often out-of-bounds — unrelated to GoNoodle’s product and stemming from a third-party tool, such as the external display teachers use in their classrooms.

Smart Boards (a widely used line of interactive whiteboards), for example, run on their own internal software that doesn’t always play nicely with GoNoodle. To crack this nut, GoNoodle’s special ops developer tested all Smart Board software at different release levels to find which ones work for their customers. Even though GoNoodle doesn’t bill itself as “software compatible with Smart Boards,” they keep a Smart Board in their office to run tests when they suspect that’s what’s causing customer-reported issues.

It’s a losing battle trying to allocate resources to adapt your site or software to accommodate every third-party tool out there, but that doesn’t mean your support needs to shrug these situations off as “too bad, so sad.”

Sometimes you just can’t win

There is a line between when you can and when you can’t help someone, and it’s often drawn when another contact would lead to faster and more comprehensive help for your customer.

Customers will sometimes write to Basecamp support, for example, complaining they can’t access their website, when what’s really happening is the customer’s web admin set up a Basecamp account and invited them to it, and they’re confused about where to go for help.

Once the support rep figures out what’s going on, they point the customer in the right direction, explaining that Basecamp is the program their web admin is using to collaborate with them on their website. They offer the email address for the account owner and instructions for how to post the same question in Basecamp.

It’s not your job to know and research every tool your customer touches, nor is it scalable, but in those cases it’s best to help in good faith every way you can and lead customers to better help at a deeper level.

It doesn’t matter whose fault it is

Regardless of what’s going on outside your company’s door, you have a responsibility to help your customer, even when the issue is with a tool you don’t support.

It may mean working with third-party tools; it may mean stopping to teach less savvy users about how saving to a PDF works. You can at least answer their immediate questions, then direct them to resources to help them learn.

Your customer doesn’t care whose fault the problem is. They just want it fixed.

Find out why 8,000+ companies use Help Scout to grow their company grow by putting customer service first.

An earlier version of this post was published on the Help Scout blog. If you enjoyed it, hit that 👏 button to share it with others, and enter your email right down here ⬇️ to have thoughtful and well-researched articles like this delivered to your inbox each week!

Solving Problems Outside Your Domain was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Storytelling has become such a buzzword in recent years that even saying it’s a buzzword seems out of style.

But the truth is, stories are still the best way to create stronger connections.

The question many companies continue to struggle with is: how do we use stories to create and nurture customer relationships?

To help answer that question, we spoke with the folks at Muse Storytelling, a story-building course and platform, about how companies and customer service professionals can use stories to connect with customers.

1. What elements differentiate storytelling from copywriting or video content?

Storytelling is really a structured pattern of communication, a pattern that can be found within video, copywriting, and other media and formats.

The two defining characteristics of a story are character and plot. You can be the character in a story you’re telling about your childhood, for example, and the plot is simply a series of things that happen.

Customer success is an important part of retaining customers. Here’s how it can impact your business ➝

There’s a huge difference between telling a story and telling a great story. A great story needs to have these four main ingredients, what we call the pillars:

The Four Pillars of a Great Story

• People: A character the audience connects with and cares about.
• Places: Where the story happens. More unexpected and unusual places help increase the intrigue of your story.
• Purpose: Some message or truth behind the story, the reason it’s being told.
• Plot: The structure and arrangement of the elements. A strong plot ensures you’re engaged from the beginning to the end.

2. When does storytelling fail with customers and when shouldn’t you use storytelling with customers?

Stories are the most powerful way to connect, but they aren’t always the right way to communicate.

Be sure to avoid answering a simple and direct question with something far more complicated than it needs to be.

When a customer is asking about a feature, for example, they are looking for a fact or statistic — you fail them if you dive into a story. For example, if a customer asks about the battery life of a product and you launch into a story about someone else’s use case, that’s only going to frustrate them. Now if you give them the fact or statistic and they’re still looking for more information, or seem unsure, that’s when it’s a good time to dive into a story to help bring that feature to life and ensure it’s felt.

3. How can companies use storytelling internally?

When you think of internal storytelling, make sure you have clarity on your own story. Today, more than ever, people are looking for a mission and something to believe in far more than a job. Internal storytelling works best when you have passionate people who believe in the stories they’re telling.

4. What are some highly effective stories that were produced by a company (i.e., not by an external agency), and what was their process?

Kathryn Giroux, Story Strategist, Muse Storytelling

Gnarly Bay does agency work and creates their own stories. Not surprisingly, the stories they tell for themselves are their most popular and most viewed work, as well as the work that attracts most of their clients. The most effective stories, whether told by a company or agency, are the ones that truly have something to say.

When we try to create a piece of content to get views, awards, or likes, it rarely works. That particular motivation doesn’t lead us to create something that resonates with our audience. However, when we truly have something to say, and we let that lead us in creating a strong story, it can resonate much more deeply.

5. When should I use visuals over written storytelling? Is one better than the other?

Siouxsie Alarcon has been telling stories professionally for the last 20 years, and is from a long line of storytellers, jokesters and pranksters.

Storytelling, regardless of medium, is all about helping the audience experience and feel your story.

Video is a strong storytelling medium because it stimulates the senses. When you’re telling your stories in written form, visuals certainly help pull readers more into the story. Including visuals throughout a blog post, for example, helps the audience quickly get a sense of the story and encourages them to spend more time with it.

Ultimately, it comes down to helping your viewer feel and experience your story as much as possible.

Find out why 8,000+ companies use Help Scout to grow their company grow by putting customer service first.

An earlier version of this post was published on the Help Scout blog. If you enjoyed it, hit that 👏 button to share it with others, and enter your email right down here ⬇️ to have thoughtful and well-researched articles like this delivered to your inbox each week!

How to Use Storytelling to Connect with Your Customers was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Talking about negativity with support professionals is a bit weird. We’re a pretty positive group — after all, we got into this profession because we wanted to help people.

Still, one constant with building things is that your customers are going to tell you what they think, good or bad.

I vividly remember one piece of negative feedback I received. We had just launched a new post editor across WordPress.com when a customer sent in the following note:

“This is a primitive, poorly planned, dysfunctional piece of software. . . . It is so poorly designed — if ‘designed’ is a word that even applies — no amount of fixing will make it right.”

That stung. After all, my job is to ensure customers have the best possible experience across WordPress.com. Clearly, I was failing in this instance. Yet while this interaction was hard to swallow, the feedback was still about a thing — not about me, or specific to my actions.

Another example that sticks in my mind came from feedback I received after a customer interaction. When customers contact us through customer support, we send off a feedback form so they can rate their experience as a green, blue, or red robot and provide additional comments. In this particular case, I got a red robot and a stinging comment:

“My dog would have provided the same level of support.”

This one was about me and my actions. It hurt.

I share these particular interactions to illustrate a larger concept. As we’re building products, we’re inevitably going to run into customers who aren’t happy with what we’re building.

No matter how much we test along the way, we can’t eliminate unhappy users.

As the front line of the company working directly with our customers, we need to learn how to deal with negativity if we’re going to be successful support professionals. Here are three strategies for three specific timeframes: preparing for negativity ahead of time, confronting it head on, and addressing it after the fact.

Strategy #1: Rehearse objections ahead of time

By rehearsing potential objections ahead of time, you can prepare before real-life negative interactions occur. At Automattic, we start an internal blog post (called p2s) to think up potential questions about a new product or feature we’re going to launch that might attract polarizing opinions. For example:

“I’m visually impaired; why is this interface so small and lacking contrast?”

That’s a valid question and something we need to be discussing. These threads have three purposes:

• Tackle negativity
• Discuss rationale
• Rehearse answers

First, tackling negativity forces everyone to confront the fact that some customers might not like the change we’re making. Addressing that ahead of time prevents anyone from looking at the situation with rose-colored glasses.

Second, we discuss the rationale for the change. In the example above, we might talk to our designers and developers and discuss the accessibility standards we adhered to in the development process.

Lastly, we rehearse our answers and get everyone on the same page. It’s not about creating support robots who copy and paste the same snippets to our customers. It’s about creating a consistent support experience so that if you contact us through email one day and then live chat the next, you’ll get similar answers around our products and future changes.

Strategy #2: Balance negativity

Our second strategy for handling negative customer interactions is maintaining an appropriate positivity ratio. In contrast to the negative interactions I mentioned, here’s a positive comment I received after helping a customer set up a theme by providing GIFs and screenshots:

“I have been showing my family his emails, and they too are in awe at how helpful he has been … ”

This kind of interaction is exactly what led me to pursue a career in customer support. It left me with a huge smile on my face.

In To Sell Is Human, Dan Pink discusses how door-to-door salespeople experience a heck of a lot of “no”s. How do you keep your head up amongst that level of negativity? Pink points to research on positivity ratios — the number of positive interactions to negative ones. If the ratio is high (say, 10:1), you’ll think nothing can go wrong (not necessarily realistic). A ratio of 1:1 is too pessimistic; the glass is half empty. A ratio of 3:1 is just about right.

While we don’t need to focus too specifically on the exact ratio, we do need to provide support professionals with tools to boost their positivity if they feel themselves slipping down the negativity slope. Here are four strategies we use at WordPress.com to do just that:

1. Happy file: Every Happiness Engineer is encouraged to create a happy file just for them. In that file, they keep amazing interactions like the one I showed above. When they feel down during the day, looking through the file is a quick way to pick themselves back up.

2. Peer reviews: We conduct peer reviews between Happiness Engineers a few times a year. The reviewer reads through ~15 of the reviewee’s interactions, looking for areas for improvement and also at things they’re doing well.

3. Spartan kudos: On a team-wide level, we do something called Spartan Kudos (the team I’m on is called Sparta). At the end of every month, one person reads through all the green robots with awesome comments and picks out the best one for each person. If you forget about how awesome your teammates are, this is an easy, quick reminder.

4. Happiness #hugs. On a Happiness-wide level, we aggregate awesome comments from our customers and post them to a company-wide feed with the hashtag #hugs. When you’re having a bad day, it’s easy to view the tag feed on the site and get a huge boost.

Strategy #3: Master explanatory style

We can explain negative interactions after the fact in a couple of ways. The feedback is either

permanent, pervasive, and personal,

or

temporary, specific, and external.

When you view a negative interaction as permanent (not going away), pervasive (everyone feels this way), and personal (there’s a part of me that plays into this), you feel like you have little control over your environment. Things are happening to you.

The alternative to “permanent, pervasive, and personal” is “temporary, specific, and external.” In this light, negative interactions become more manageable and actionable. First, negative interactions probably aren’t the norm (if they are, you’re doing something wrong). Second, negative feedback is usually specific to a certain product or “thing.” Finally, it’s external. It’s generally not about you or anything you are doing.

How do we put this into practice? I encourage Happiness Engineers to conduct personal reviews of negative feedback every so often to do the following:

1. Look for areas they could have improved in the interaction (details they missed, ways they could’ve improved the service, and so on).
2. Practice self-talk so these interactions don’t feel personal. This practice prepares support professionals to stomach any waves of negativity they might run into when navigating the queue.

Some people aren’t going to like what you build. That’s the cost of shipping things out into the world. If your product is great enough, there’s a good chance you’ll hear polarized opinions about it. But by preparing ahead of time, maintaining appropriate positivity ratios, and framing feedback as temporary, specific, and external, you can arm support professionals with ways to handle the negativity.

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This post first appeared on the Help Scout blog, where it was adapted from a talk delivered at SupConf. If you enjoyed reading it, hit that 👏 button to share it with others, and enter your email right down here ⬇️ to have thoughtful and well-researched articles like this delivered to your inbox each week!

How to Handle Negativity in Customer Support was originally published in The Customer Service Blog By Help Scout on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.