December’s MoDevEast conference was filled with some of the coolest tech talent and savviest marketers along the Atlantic.
Among them was indie app developer Josh Michaels, who presented about doing better customer service with mobile customers.
Whether in-store, online or mobile, providing excellent customer service is essential.
Although Josh’s mobile business is a one-man show, his tips on handling customer service can benefit businesses off all sizes.
Check out the top three mobile customer service tips from the session.
1) Be easily available
When Josh decided to start Jetson Creative LLC, he had dreams of coding at night and tearing up the slopes on his snowboard all day. His first love was coding, but he had no desire to deal with customers.
After submitting his first app to the app store, Josh quickly hit the slopes and didn’t worry about the customers he left behind. By leaving his customers with no way to contact support or report problems, they quickly found another way to vent, through negative reviews.
Granted, your support team may not be snowboarding during the day, but how easy is it for your customers to reach you?
- Is your website a labyrinth?
- Is it clearly stated who customers should contact if they have problems?
If critical information is buried on your site or not in existence, you might as well be snowboarding. Customers want to be heard and have their problems fixed. If you make it hard for them, they will vocalize publicly, making a preventable or quick fix problem, escalate into a larger one.
Keep in mind, people don’t just want to talk about problems, sometimes they want to give suggestions or give you a pat on the back. Make it easy for people to give you kudos.
Josh suggested brands should have separate places for support and feedback so you can be sure to know about the positive experiences people have as well.
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2) Value Your Customers
Your relationship with your customers doesn’t end with a transaction.
Josh values his customers so much, he’s willing to help them hack into a country’s firewall system. His app, Magic Window’s beautiful scenery and serene music made for a great relaxation tool that one of his customers, a soldier stationed in Afghanistan, came to love.
Unfortunately, the app did not fully work overseas missing many scenes and music, so the soldier simply asked Josh to send the files via CD to Afghanistan.
Instead of calculating the cost of the man hours to create the files and overseas shipping, Josh brainstormed a way to get the soldier what he needed; enter the hacking lesson.
Granted, hacking may not be the best solution for every business but Josh’s sentiments are spot on in the realm of customer service.
3) Take complaints seriously
What happens when a family’s 2-year-old figures how to play Ow My Balls on his parent’s iPhone? At first nothing, his parents found it hilarious that their kid was learning to talk by repeating phrases in the game. (I’ll leave it to your imagination as to what the kid was saying.)
However the tides turned when the game spouted a quote that offended them. After a series of emails with the family, Josh wasn’t entirely sure the situation was real or if he was being punk’d by his friends.
After doing a little research on Facebook, he found out this complaint was from a real-live person. Fortunately, it turned out the family’s own friend was responsible for the offending quote by using the game’s recording feature as a prank and the crisis was averted.
No matter how outlandish a story, take it seriously until someone screams, “Gotcha!” It’s better to be the butt of your friends’ jokes than to alienate a customer. Few things will upset a customer more if you ask them if they’re Ashton Kutcher or your college buddy.
What other mobile customer service tips do you have?
Image: CA Technologies
