While we are not one to toot our own horn, we do support pretty well here. We’re humbled by the kind words our customers share with us on a surprisingly regular basis. It makes our day when we hear that “talking to you folks at Rustici about SCORM is like reaching an oasis in the desert” and “you guys definitely set a good example for what support should be.” With that, we felt like it was a good idea to share our core tenets on how we approach customer support since we may do things a little differently.
Be empathetic
Working with the eLearning standards is hard work. What we do is not something everyone worries about or even has to think about on a daily basis. Knowing that helps Ryan and I adjust our attitude where other folks may find the teaching and re-teaching of certain concepts mundane. We see it as a chance to teach a thing in a different way that maybe hits the mark. If not, that’s okay, if people stop calling or asking questions, we run out of things to do. The deeper thing that we keep in mind is that every person who contacts us for help is a person. That person has their own stuff going on in their lives (as do we), but we have no idea what they can be carrying on top of the issue or question they are coming to us with. When they come out the gate frustrated, it’s probably not based on something we did or said, it may just be something else that is amplifying the issue. Bottom line is, as someone in the office once said, in order to do this job, you have to be a bottomless pit of empathy.
Own your mistakes with transparency
As a company, we are transparent about the way we work and the way our company operates as a whole. Each support ticket we solve gets an automated survey asking if the client was satisfied with the service they received. The Delight-O-Meter keeps track of our customers’ reactions with the 100 most recently closed tickets. We find that it is a good way to hold ourselves accountable to what is going on in the support world. If we get less than 97%, we have to talk about it.
As we like to say about software, like people, it isn’t infallible. Things break. We hope it never happens, but there is always an opportunity to fix a line of code or even fix the way we do a certain thing. Long story short, if the root cause of an issue is with us, we’re quick to own up to that. But most importantly, we fix the issue in any way we can and we try to never point the finger.
Be yourself
We are who we are. One of the things that I love about working here is that I am allowed to be the same person on the phone with clients as I am at home. I do come off “folksy” to some, but that’s who I am. (Ryan loves to call me out on this.) When you call us and click ‘1’ to get a Donnelly, we are who you get. And yes, we take calls! We don’t limit the ways in which we support our customers. Often a call is the best method for resolving an issue. We want each and every conversation with us to be a memorable one. We want people talking about the experience even if some of the folks we talk to aren’t always paying customers, they will remember us and they’ll be back. All the time, we hear “I can’t believe you guys are real” as I think some companies tout having great customer support, but fail to really measure up. Ours is as real as it gets! When you open a support ticket, it comes directly to a Donnelly. It’s not going into a void where it may or may not be answered.
Let us know if you want to talk further, as always, you can ask us anything at support@rusticisoftware.com!
