The Planet Blog

Hi everyone! I started working at The Planet a few months ago in the technical support department, and I’ve really enjoyed my experience here. I’ve been on the customer side of technical support calls for most of my life, so I’ve never understood what it was like to be on the supporting side of the call. Now that my perspective has changed a little, I’ve noticed that the best customer support occurs when the support provider and the support requester work together to create the best experience possible.

Shelves of books have been written about providing great customer support, but I haven’t seen many written about how to get great customer support. When you work with a service-based company, you’re likely going to interact with customer support representatives regularly. During these interactions, your experience will not be defined by your question or the issue you have. Instead, it will be defined by how you present your issue to technical support.

It can be extremely frustrating when a server goes down or a script isn’t working the way it should. When this happens, my gut reaction is to get upset and throw my keyboard. I’ve also noticed that when I am angry, I have a difficult time trying to explain my problem to technical support. I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone in that regard, and with my newfound perspective, I came up with a few tips that might help you get the most bang for your buck when you work with customer support:

1. Remember there’s a human on the other end. It doesn’t matter where the customer support representative is; they’re human, and their responsibility is to help you. I don’t have any empirical data, but human nature tells me it’s easier to be nice to someone who is nice to you. Once you realize there’s a person on the other end of the phone trying to do his/her job, it’s a little easier to thank them in advance for their help. It may seem insignificant, but if you thank me in advance for my help, I’ll subconsciously work harder in an effort to deserve that gratitude.
2. Don’t assume your request will be ignored. I’m surprised by the number of people who start or end their e-mail with, “No one will probably see this, but …” or “Not that anyone cares, but …” Don’t assume that you’ll be ignored. That assumption is more of an overarching negative sentiment than it is a “reverse psychology” play. The support process can be defined by the expectations you set for it, so get started on the right foot and expect that your questions will be answered and issues will be resolved.
3. Don’t start with a threat. “If you don’t do this, I’m going to report this to my bank and other authorities,” or “If you don’t respond within 25 seconds, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer” … It’s not uncommon to hear things like this in the first message in a ticket. Starting with a threat never helps your cause. It’s much easier to help someone who seems easy to help. Invoking lawyers does not make your ticket seem easy to address.
4. Provide useful, descriptive and relevant information. This tip can be tough since it’s hard to understand what information is relevant, but think about it before you send a support request. If you are having trouble logging in, then “I can’t log in. Any ideas?” is not quite as clear as “Whenever I try to log in, the login screen just reloads without an error message. I know my username and password is correct. Any ideas? Thanks.” That extra information will help considerably and will reduce the number of back-and-forth e-mails between you and the support representative.
5. Don’t write overly detailed, wordy support requests. The longer your e-mail, the more difficult it is to read, diagnose and to respond. A representative has to read the entire ticket to find what’s meaningful and figure out exactly what’s wrong. Since they’re trying to help you, you want to reduce their burden. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. So, be clear, concise and brief. If you’ve got a couple different issues for support to look at, break them out into individual tickets … different issues may need to be addressed by different departments, so multiple issues in a single ticket can lead to delays in responding to specific issues in the ticket.
6. More Tickets ≠ More Support. Don’t create multiple support tickets for a single issue … While it seems like you are drawing more attention to the issue and creating a sense of urgency, you’re really slowing down the support process. Support representatives might be addressing the same issue in parallel or information might be lost between tickets, elongating the time to resolution.
7. Escalate your tickets smartly. If you think a ticket should be handled differently or if you would like a supervisor to look into a specific issue, you should always feel free to request escalation to a manager or a supervisor. The best way to make that request is to update your open ticket, initiate a live chat or place a call into the technical support phone line. If you aren’t satisfied with your support experience, then we aren’t either, so we want to hear from you.

As you can see, the prescription is not too complicated: Prepare yourself to receive the best support, and you’re much more likely to receive it.

- Sean

Continuing The Planet’s feature coverage on WHIRtv, Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR sat down with our vice president of Customer Care Jim Picone.

Jim explains the major improvements we’ve executed in our customer care organization within the past two years and focuses on the benefits of our new phone, chat and ticketing systems. With these new systems, we can now track critical metrics to create best practices and monitor operational efficiencies.

Watch the video below to get additional insight into our call center and our vision for the continuous improvements we’re making in our customer care organization.

At The Planet, we talk a lot about our commitment to customers. It’s one we take seriously since we know its businesses and livelihoods on the line. Talking to customers one-on-one is a great way to learn about how we can become an even better service provider. Before we announced our “new” company in January, we talked to quite a few customers. We wanted to hear first hand about their experiences using our services, what they liked – what we could do better – and also gauge what’s on their minds. We learned a lot in the process.

We also asked some customers if they’d be willing to participate in success stories about their companies. We’ve been blown away by the outstanding responses. So many people have been willing to spend time telling us about their companies and also providing quotes for our press releases. It goes a long way in helping us tell our story.

And sometimes the results pay off in a big way.

Doug Turpin, the IT director at Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group, has been a terrific supporter of The Planet. He stepped up to the plate on a success story and a press release quote. In turn, an eWeek reporter wanted to talk with Doug about how he uses our services and how he relies on The Planet to run his IT infrastructure.

A reporter at the Wall Street Journal saw the eWeek story and called Doug and The Planet’s PR team. Last week, the Journal ran a feature on Doug and Atlantic Bay. We’re very proud to be included in the story and even happier for Doug and his company.

Here’s what Doug told us:

“When The Planet approached me about a success story, it was an easy yes. The uptime and reliability, along with the technical support and general professionalism, have been awesome. And I know what it’s like to work with other companies that don’t have the same standards. I was happy to speak with eWeek but never dreamed it could lead to a feature story in the Wall Street Journal. That never would have happened without The Planet.”

While not all results are like this, Doug’s help paid off in a big way for him and his company. So congratulations to Doug Turpin and his team at Atlantic Bay Mortgage. We can’t promise these results every time, but it’s pretty cool when newspapers like the Wall Street Journal want to know about our customers.

If you’re interested in working with us on a success story, contact Yvonne Donaldson or Erin Tsang in our PR Department.

- Steve