“Yes, I am human:” learnings from fast customer service via live chat

Post by cookiecaper » Fri, Jan 21, 2011, 10:25 AM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #14

manoloe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our development team at IndexTank handles our customer questions. The training they've received comes from working alongside client development teams for years (our team has been together for 4+ years handling search problems for many companies). So we trust each other to type freely. The misspellings is an interesting suggestion. Since our team originates from Argentina, English is our second language, and we do mak…

Most people will take thoughtful typing with mis-spellings over a 'canned response' any day - especially younger users. A bit more advice since you're abroad. If people ask, I wouldn't lie about your location. We had some customers who would ask Indian reps to pick an American name (lots of Bobs) - but sometimes people make chit-chat about weather and the like while waiting - and getting caught in a lie can destroy t…

Post by lylejohnson » Fri, Jan 21, 2011, 1:42 PM UTC

CountHackulus wrote: post #21

nachopg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was the Mechanical Turk (not in the "amazon" sense of the words) behind the Olark in that conversation. I was never instructed in what to say when we get a question from a customer. We only have to follow three simple laws, in a specific order: never injure a human being, obey orders by human beings and protect our own existence. That's all. But, hey, saying "how can I help you?" sounded right to me, so I use it of…

Those rules are surprisingly similar to Isaac Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.

Post by manoloe » Fri, Jan 21, 2011, 2:44 PM UTC

swombat wrote: post #30

How do you deal with the constant distraction to the dev team? Must be quite bad if you have a lot of customers and a small dev team. Having random people pop up on your IM client seems like the opposite of an environment that encourages a state of "flow"...