“I still remember the day I got my 10th customer. I felt I was on the moon. I still know each of my first customers in person.”
– Tim Brooks*
(A UK based web host)

In the year 2000, Tim was one among the many start-up web hosts affected by the dot-com bubble burst. Years later, after his company became one of the leading web hosting providers in the UK, he recounted the elation he felt when he got his 10th and then the 100th customer. The going was tough, getting each customer was a struggle, and each customer was precious.

It is stories like this that reminds us how much effort our clients have put in to build their business. That is why, when our clients outsource their customer support to us, we understand how great a responsibility and privilege it is to become a part of their business.

At Bobcares, we constantly push ourselves to keep our outsourced customer support service the best in the world. We believe that it is not enough to just make those contacting support happy, but to make them truly delighted with the support experience, so that they’ll spread the word around and help our clients grow.

Today I’ll touch up on what we do differently to help our clients build a happy, loyal customer base and accelerate growth.

Cavalry is on the way

Every customer waiting for a response from tech support is anxious, and anxiety is a killer. As Maya Angelou once said:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel“.

It is quite true for support. It doesn’t matter if an issue is resolved “eventually”. It doesn’t matter if the resolution is technically perfect. If customers spend a lot of time waiting for a response from support desk, the solution is never going to make them happy. They need to know that the cavalry is on the way, and that no effort is being spared to help them. 

On a routine basis, we resolve 97% of support requests in help desk within the first 60 mins – with an average response time of 23 mins. The knowledge that an expert is actively working on their issue quickly calms down customers, and make them feel valued. If the resolution to an issue is likely to take long, we make it a point to give frequent updates on the progress so that the customer knows that we are doing everything in our power to help them.

One size doesn’t fit all

It is a common pitfall in customer care to use “scripts” or “templates” to respond to support requests. What it essentially tells a customer is that they are just one among many – that they are just a number in a big system.

Do customers understand that they are one among hundreds of others? Yes, they do. But does that make them happy and loyal? No, it does not.

This basic human desire to be treated special is at the heart of a great support experience. This is why we never use templates in a support interaction. We customize each response so that the customers feel we’ve put in effort to understand their unique situation, and have done all that is possible to resolve their issue.

Nothing but the BEST solution – delivered instantly

We are passionate followers of the open source movement. We believe that through collaboration we can achieve better solutions in a short time. Over time, this philosophy has seeped into our support culture, and it has served us well.

If one among our 300+ engineers come to know about the solution to a technical issue, it is as if everyone is aware of it. So no matter how arcane or difficult a customer support issue is, our support team is able to quickly identify a solution. In that way, no one spends time re-inventing the wheel, and the time saved is spent giving quicker responses to customers or improving the server infrastructure.

Experts who know the system – on call, all day

Complex machines that they are, servers do sometimes crash, and it could happen at the most inconvenient time. As a rule of thumb, the best chance to bring a server back online without business loss is the first 10 minutes. Only an expert intimately aware of the system configuration can manage to do it within that time. That is why, regardless of the time of the day, we make sure that an expert who knows the system forwards and backwards is always at hand to quickly resolve a server downtime.

Not just servers, even customers need assistance all through the day. This is especially true in this age where people travel to other time zones or customers sign-up for services from all over the world. It is not enough to give a simple response during off-peak hours. To make customers to feel valued, we ensure that instant, empathetic, expert care is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Leveling the playing field

Huge corporates like Amazon and Apple have the resources to create a responsive, well managed support team from scratch. But for small businesses, building a well-oiled support team organically is a costly proposition. It requires heavy investment in money and time to buy the necessary infrastructure, hire a support team, and continually streamline the quality of support.

By spreading the infrastructure and other costs among our many clients, Bobcares is able deliver a world class support operation at a much lower price. We help level the playing field where small and medium sized businesses can compete with the biggies in the market without costing an arm and a leg.

Most of our clients re-invest their savings in support cost right back into the business, and accelerate their growth. We’ve had the good fortune to be associated with such companies that started with us as single-man shops, and went on to become multi-location corporates.

At Bobcares, customer support is not just a job. It is a labor of love. We believe customers fall in love with a service that truly cares for them. We want customers to feel that they would never get a better service anywhere else in the world. With each small improvement that we make to our support process, we take one more step towards this goal, and we are lucky to have a group of great companies who walk with us towards this dream.

* Names in this post are changed to protect identity as per our NDA.