A short cautionary tale about the misuse of customer data
February 5, 2014Do You Need To Change Your Organisational Structure To Improve Your Customer Experience?
February 11, 2014It’s not about the channels in your support, it’s about the support in your channels – Interview with Girish Mathrubootham of Freshdesk
Today’s interview is with Girish Mathrubootham, who is founder and CEO of Freshdesk, an online customer support Saas software solution. Girish joins me today to talk about how to turn customer service into a marketing opportunity/asset.
This interview follows on from my recent interview: Most websites fail to facilitate the customer journey – Interview with Mark Lancaster of SDL – and is number ninety-two in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.
Here are the highlights of my interview with Girish:
- Girish has a background as a software developer but by his own admittance was pretty lousy at that so moved into product management and pre-sales.
- Previously worked for Zoho.com.
- Girish considers himself a product managers at heart and believes that a successful product is one that has a lot of happy customers.
- Girish quit Zoho in October 2010 with a colleague and Freshdesk was launched in June 2011 as an online customer support software delivered as a Saas solution.
- They launched the company as they were seeing the market change from a one-to-one ticketing approach in customer service to a one-to-many approach.
- Customer service can turn into a key marketing opportunity for firms.
- This is driven by the transparency that now exists when it comes to customer help, forums, recommendations, ratings, feedback etc etc.
- This has resulted in the lengthening of the ‘shopping’ cycle and the shortening of the ‘buying’ or ‘sales’ cycle.
- To facilitate this companies have to change their focus towards solving customers problems rather than forcing them to follow old processes and rules.
- Customer support on social media isn’t just a customer service issue it’s a brand issue.
- Consumer behaviour changes more rapidly than company behaviour.
- All of your customers today have social power, it’s just that some of them haven’t realised it yet.
- With respect to customer service, social channels used to be used primarily as conduits to move customer issues to traditional channels. Now, the technology has developed such that most customer queries can be ticketed, handled, tracked and closed directly in the social channel. This is having a positive effect on customer ease and advocacy.
- This also has a positive impact on customer service as a marketing opportunity as others are watching.
- One big challenge that gets in the way of companies picking up on this opportunity is their mindset and the fact that they still think that customer support means answering phone calls and emails.
- Another challenge is that customer support, in many firms, is still seen as a cost centre and so is still not getting the investment and support that it needs to exploit this opportunity.
- Customers today have a platform today to go and influence and impact future business.
- Girish cites Amazon and Zappos as leading proponents and advocates of this type of approach.
- Girish also cites Buffer as another example of a company that is doing great things in this space. Buffer goes as far as calling themselves ‘happiness experts’. They go out of their way to educate and help their customers.
- An easy way to find other companies that embrace and understand how customer support can impact marketing are those firms that are not charging, at various levels, for their support and are treating all of their customers with the same level of care and attention.
- One of the biggest challenges facing companies today is integrating all of their channels so that they have a unified view of the customer. In simple terms, companies need to know if a customer has already sent them an email or has tweeted them when they call customer support.
- The typical customer may be jumping around channels but in their mind they are only having one conversation with the business. If the business doesn’t not link all of these touch points together then they will miss out on the sentiment and context of the conversation and that could have a negative impact on customer service delivery and sentiment.
- It’s not about the channels in your support, it’s about the support in your channels.
- Question: if you have a mobile app, should your customers be able to call you directly from within the app?
- Freshdesk’s aims are to make customer support simple, flexible and fun to help clients achieve 360 degree engagement with their customers.
- They are making their support more fun by bringing in game mechanics and gamefication.
About Girish (taken from his Freshdesk bio)
Girish is the founder and CEO of Freshdesk, and is in a permanent state of Sahelu with customers. He is also the official Foosball Champ at Freshdesk (though he sometimes loses out on revenge games, just for the kicks). When he isn’t conjuring up interesting product ideas, talking to investors, or beating little children at Foosball, he loves walking around the floor and being the Guy with the Answers.
Girish comes with over 15 years of experience in making and marketing best-in-class enterprise IT management software, and a pedigree of having some of the happiest customers in the world. Before starting Freshdesk, Girish was the VP of Product Management at the ManageEngine division of Zoho Corp.
Check out Freshdesk at www.freshdesk.com and their free 30-day trial. Whilst you are at it you say Hi to them on Twitter @freshdesk.
Photo Credit: motti82 via Compfight cc
10 Comments
Interesting thought that companies should have one view of their customers.
Obvious, yet oh so hard for most organisations.
I can’t but help think it is just that most aren’t prepared to bite the bullet. But sooner or later somebody will. Then it will get interesting.
James
Indeed. Whilst many forms know this not many are achieving it and many struggle with making the appropriate changes. Strikes me that those that change and change faster than their peers may end up with a competitive edge.
Adrian
Love the title, Adrian: It’s not about the channels in your support, it’s about the support in your channels.
To answer your question: if you have a mobile app, should your customers be able to call you directly from within the app? Yes! And they should be able to chat, text, or contact you in any other way, shape, or form that relates to what they can do from a mobile phone. I’ve installed apps before that are completely pointless… more of a way to just look at products or get additional product details, but that’s it. No real point or purpose. If you’re going to have an app, have a reason for it.
To your point, this can turn customer service into a “marketing” opportunity. Great experience = great marketing.
Annette 🙂
Annette,
Agreed. I’ve often wondered why a company would build and launch an app if it doesn’t help a customer do something easier or quicker.
Adrian
I agree. I think some do it just to say they have an app.
Hello Adrian,
It occurs to me that ALL that needs to be said is said through: “It’s not about the channels in your support, it’s about the support in your channels.” And when you examine this deeply you find that for almost every company there is little genuine support in any channel: whether traditional or social.
My favourite expression/saying is: The best way to show that you care is to care!
All the best
maz
Nicely put! And, thank you for sharing that expression, Maz. That is going to become one of my favourites too now.
Adrian
Absolutely love the title of this post, Adrian! Couldn’t have used better words.
One question that really hit home for me was whether customers should be able to call you from within your mobile application or not. In my opinion, your customer should be able to reach out to you no matter which platform they decide to use. So yes, mobile apps are no different. With a huge surge in mobile devices and platforms, in-app support has become a must have. If you don’t respond to customer queries, you earn yourself a bad name. My team developed devContact (www.devcontact.com), which is a support desk built specifically for mobile applications and includes features such as live chat, FAQs etc. keeping this very concern in mind.
Glad to see this question being raised. Great post! 🙂
Hi Faryal,
Thanks for your comment and I am really pleased that you liked the title 🙂
As you point, the imperative has to be that the contact process has to be as seamless as possible whatever the channel.
Thanks,
Adrian