How We Do Customer Support at Buffer - Buffer's Founder Chat Friday

Key Takeaways

hey everyone at buffer we think about customer support uh quite differently to other companies so i thought it might be interesting to talk about some of those differences um i mean first start we call our customer support team members i buffer happiness heroes and the other thing is that we pay them pretty well compared to the market average based on our salary formula so maybe we just start with you know why do we call them happiness heroes and uh why not just customer support web or something like that yeah and i think that's a that's a really good one i think the key uh kind of a background where i think we've come up with the with the title is if you think about the buffer values in buffer culture the first value that we have is uh you know focus on positivity and happiness and if you think about you know who uh how we can achieve that the best or who in the company uh kind of has a chance to do that on a day-to-day basis and obviously everyone is able to do that but the engineer is able to do that by you know or a product person at the same time you know someone on the customer service team they interact and you know speak with customers on a day-to-day basis they have really the opportunity to make people happy you know every day by you know giving them a completely different experience than they would have had or they had would have been you know maybe angry or helped them to be you know have a better day because of the way they interacted with us so i think connecting that to our first you know value and really making those people the um professional happiness givers in in in a sense um i think that's been a it's been a key reason yeah yeah the other cool thing is that um right from the beginning we decided that uh customer service or great customer service would be half of the vision that we have for buffer so half has kind of always been focused around the product and the and the space and you know how we can help people with social media the other half has always been focused around customer support so we phrase it as you know the vision is to set the bar for great customer support and so i think from that regard that's also another reason why we wanted to have a different title for for people in the team doing that because we believe that we want to um you know we we we're already hitting very high levels but we want you know we aspire to do even more and kind of get to a point where customer service or you know that experience with buffer um doesn't really resemble um something at a different company right we want to really go beyond so i mean just in the last month uh some of the numbers we've had is that uh 93 of emails uh people that emailed buffer for customer support any questions uh got a reply within six hours and i think it was uh 70 percent also yeah oh 65 maybe in within one hour as well so really getting to the point where you know the majority of emails get a reply within six hours and a very high portion of them get an email uh pretty much right away and we're going further you know live chat and things like that as well so yeah i think i think it definitely comes with the vision i think another and that's actually another point that i think we've reflected on only recently is you know if you know externally they represent you know happiness right you know a customer comes in they talk to them get the re response fast right at the same time you know i'm recently chatting with you know other team members it's like you know they ask like you know how can you know i improve you know with buffalo values you know fit in better live you know live to live the live the values better and and i actually realized that you know our happiness here is often the ones that you know yeah really are in line with our values too and you know aligned so incredibly well that you know they're they're huge inspiration for me and like you know we think for both of us and like if i often say just look at you know how you know um this you know adam or mary or austin you know or we have other many many other heroes by now yeah um you know how they go about interacting you know not just with customers but also with you know you know other team members and you know how they send emails and i think you you have many especially interesting i think we have this one um concept that we try and uh think about a lot which is you know it's not just about the experience within email or within one of our customer support channels right like you say it goes really beyond that because we believe that happiness is key for a productive team and for the whole company right so i think that's been really interesting you know we have this idea that you know if we go and get dinner together yeah um the happiness heroes are the ones that are gonna you know it's kind of like the idea that any anyone become any person they come into contact with anything you know anyone that touched they're gonna um leave them happy about it so the waiter comes by and you know maybe they don't have the dish that they were initially going for or um you know something like that or maybe they get the wrong dish um that they brought to them and it's really interesting to see how well they know they'll handle situations like that and still be you know they're real professionals right in the sense that you know like you know any any interaction you can turn it into a happy interaction no matter what yeah yeah um yeah that's a little bit you know behind the story often people ask you know what do happiness heroes do a buffer and we just wanted to explain a little bit that goes far beyond just customer support and i hope that gives a few insights and would love to hear what everyone else is thinking about the topic