Have you ever been asked to do something in your job that you totally agreed to do, then as soon as you said ‘yes’ you realised the thought of doing the task was kinda a bit scary… or daunting in the very least?

I have!

For some context; I’m extremely fortunate to be in a job that I love. I get all kinds of warm fuzzy feelings being in a customer service role; knowing that I can have an amazing influence on a person’s day by helping them with a problem and hopefully putting a smile on their face. It rocks! On the other side of the coin, it certainly hurts when I’m not able to provide an awesome experience for one of our users. This can be from a variety of reasons; I might not simply have the right the answer to their question. I may have taken too long to respond. Or, I may not have entirely listened to (or to be more precise; heard) the customer’s request fully and as a result, didn’t resolve the issue too efficiently.

I definitely had this experience a few weeks ago. It was early in my morning and I was trying to make my way through our support inbox and resolve as many emails as I could. Unfortunately I totally dropped the ball on one of the emails. A user was experiencing some trouble and had asked me to call them. To this I responded with an email, trying to help resolve the issue where I could and asked them to email me back.

At Buffer, we are amazingly lucky to be set up as a fully remote and distributed team dotted all over the world. It’s so cool that I have co-workers in Berlin, New York, Cape Town – and the list goes on! One of the amazing benefits of this set up, is that we have timezone coverage across the majority of the day. However, the fact that we are all so spread out means we don’t have a central location, or an office; we also have to be very mindful of our schedules and that we try to maximum our online coverage at all times. At times, though, this means setting up demos of our product or hopping on a customer call can be a little hard to organise.

As you might imagine, my response of asking them to email me back after originally being asked for me to call them, didn’t feel helpful to our user at all. I felt awful. I had made an already stressful situation, for our customer, much worse by not fully hearing what they needed. Even though doing customer calls wasn’t something I had done too much of before in a support role I quickly agreed to pick up the phone and dial out. I was nervous. Thoughts kept going through my head asking ‘If I couldn’t figure out and fix what was going wrong through email, would I be able to do it over the phone?’. What happened next really blew my mind!

I spoke to our customer and explained what had happened from my point of view, how absolutely sorry I was for the poor experience I had given them, and how I would love to help where I could. The response I got was phenomenal. Our customer even apologised to me; explained how they were trying to prepare for a big presentation about Buffer and how worried they were that they couldn’t get Buffer to work in advance of it. They said they were sorry for anything they said in the heat of the moment and really valued the time to talk to a real person. This really resonated with me. After we ended the call I felt possibly the most elated I had experienced after trying to help someone else – and to be honest I hadn’t even fully fixed their problem, although we got a nice workaround in place.

Since that day, I have always tried to schedule in a call where a Buffer user, new or old, have expressed a keen desire to have a real time conversation; and after each call I find real value in the conversations. I learned a great lesson just by listening to what our customer wanted on that first call.

People want to feel special; be valued. It can feel amazing when your email is responded to faster than you were expecting, yet imagine the feeling when someone takes 20 minutes out of their day to listen to your words, really delve into every question you have, learn your background and even have a laugh with you. That feeling goes both ways, too. I take a real enjoyment after speaking to a customer. Maybe this is because it’s still a bit novel to me and something that doesn’t happen all too frequently. Regardless of that, I like to think that each person I have spoken to has helped me just as much as I tried to help them.

From each call I get better experience of dealing with people. I get to interact with different cultures in a way I wouldn’t normally in everyday life. I hear what people find tricky about our product or what they want to use Buffer for. All of this is wonderful, and adds another enjoyment factor to my job.

When I hop on calls now, I still might not always have the right answer, but I know I will be able to work through each situation with a little more clarity and make sure the person I’m talking to knows I’m doing everything to really listen to what they want.

If you, like I did, find the initial prospect of hopping on customer support calls a bit daunting, I would love to share a few little tips to help ease you into them;

• Jot down some notes beforehand of your previous interactions – what type of questions will the customer ask? What was their problem or query in the first place?
• Make it personal. Greet them by name – someone’s name is their favourite word 🙂 and ask them about their day.
• Ask throughout the call if what you said was useful or helpful to them.
• Empathise with what they are saying and picture you were in their position.
• Thank them for their time and working with you. Then let them know they can get in touch with you again if they ever need to.

This quote from the classic ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People’ sums up my frantic thoughts on customer calls when I was so used to email support;

“Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn’t you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn’t most of them turn out all right after all?”

There is a great deal of value in connecting with a stranger to work towards a common goal, and truly listening to them can help you get there 🙂