Ep. #710 - User Support and Your Software Platform

Matt DeCoursey 0:01
And we’re back. Back for another episode of Startup Hustle, Matt DeCoursey. Here with Matt Watson. Hi, Matt.

Matt Watson 0:06
I’m so glad you’re here. Can you help me with some problems? I need some support.

Matt DeCoursey 0:12
Do you have 99 of them are less?

Matt Watson 0:15
can I lay on your couch and have one of those therapy sessions again? I miss those days.

Matt DeCoursey 0:22
For those of you listening, that probably sounded a little weird. So I’m gonna clarify that one. Now, I used to have an office couch, and Matt would often just come in and plop down on it. I could hear him land. And I’d be like, Wow, okay, so what do you want to talk about? You know, what I want to talk about? Now, I want to talk about user support and your software platform. We’re

Matt Watson 0:46
That’s what I was talking about. I need support.

Matt DeCoursey 0:49
Oh, yeah. I was thinking more of like a bra. It’s a different kind of support. I mean, I don’t know. So we’re back for part 37 of 52 episodes of our How to Start a Tech Company. Now. Look, this is what today’s today’s topic is one of those things that, quite honestly, you might consider skipping. But don’t. This is this is this is important stuff. And you know, things that are, you know, Matt, you’d like the boring things in business, right?

Matt Watson 1:25
If they’re profitable and make money, I do.

Matt DeCoursey 1:28
But they need to be profitable and make money. And in order to do that, you have to be able to support what you do. If otherwise, you’re going to wreck your brand, you’re going to wreck your customer, your client list, you’re going to wreck a lot of stuff.

Matt Watson 1:40
Well, some of these kinds of things are what people would call the dial tone or table stakes of stuff, right? It’s like, they’re just things that you have to do. They’re not fun, they’re not exciting. But your software has to have documentation, you have to have help. You have to have guides on how to use it you. It’s just things you have to do to be in business, but they’re not fun and exciting.

I have a question. What’s the dial tone?

That’s a good point.

Matt DeCoursey 2:10
All right, we’re gonna move on, and you know what, something that is relevant, unlike Matt’s answer to my question of what is a dial tone is knowing that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is sponsored by Chatdesk. Does your business receive a high volume of phone calls? Well, you can deflect over 10% of your phone calls to Facebook Messenger and save up to 80% of your support costs. And just for Startup Hustle listeners, Chatdesk is offering their call deflection service for free throughout the holiday season. Learn more at chatdesk.com forward slash shift. And Matt will say that three times fast at some point during the episode, or you can click the link in the show notes, which is so much easier. You know, now that by the time this comes out, the episode of me with the Chatdesk CEO will not have been published. But I just continue to be impressed with what they do. Because they offer scalable solutions for what we’re talking about, which is supporting your digital platform, amongst other things that they’re not limited to that. But that’s they’re really made for that amount. When you think when you think about user support and supporting your software platform. You have a lot of experience with that. I mean, where do we start?

Matt Watson 3:18
Well, I mean, to develop what you just said real fast. By the way, I made a phone call the other day, and it came up on my phone and asked me if I wanted to chat with somebody instead. And me and my wife would be the happiest person in the world. If that worked for every single person she called and she could chat with them. I’m a huge fan of that. And if chat desk is making them happen, making that happen. I love that desk. So that is a the world’s like, that’s like the best thing since sliced bread, I think but there’s a lot of kinds of support. You’re right. And a lot of it depends on the type of product you have to sell. Right? Like that’s the answer to everything with with starting a tech company as the answer is always depends.

Matt DeCoursey 4:03
Okay, that’s a definite maybe. And, you know, so I think we we start with like, what is user support, and we’re gonna, we’ll just say, tech support. Tech support could be for hardware, it could be for software, it could be for like a gazillion different things. One thing that I think that you’re certainly, you need to set yourself up to notice or watch out for is the effervescent echo that you love hearing about for me. And that echo is going to immediately begin telling you what’s wrong with your product. So in the regards of like for tech support, that might be hard. You could be a hardware manufacturer or a software publisher, maybe a help desk, you could even be like a school or institution trying to help people get into an E learning platform. The thing to remember is is if people can’t get in to whatever you built or whatever you sell or anything, the level of frustration is going to rise very quickly, and your value proposition goes into the shutter.

Matt Watson 5:05
Well, and in depending on the type of product that you’re that you sell, almost every customer is going to need help, right? And so there’s got to be an effective way for them to get the help. And for a lot of companies, there are SLAs, their their service level, you know, objectives for responding to customer service is one way that they, they stand apart from their competition. I mentioned this before about stockpiling the past, you know, a large percentage of our customers would go to install our software, and they they’d end up having a question was no big deal, we can, we can help them. But if, but odds are while they email us, and then they’re stuck, they might be installing one of our competitors software, because they’re just trying to figure out how to solve their problem, right? And so if we don’t answer them very quickly, they’re either going to stop waiting for us, or they’re just gonna go find a competitor. And the speed of support and ease of support is a really huge thing. And it’s kind of one of those hidden, hidden things there that can be really a differentiator and help you with conversion, helping people get installed, getting to that aha moment where they figure out that your product is something that they should spend money on.

Matt DeCoursey 6:16
And overall support is the intent is to help people use something more effectively. And that’s the key is effective use of whatever it is, and with people get to the it’s maybe a whole nother discussion of why are people even at your tech support, anything, you know, like, why is where they have an issue where they’re having a problem. But that’s where an effective leader and a CEO and a founder, like I said, it’s gonna listen for the echoes and really hear, okay, this is where people were having problems, but maybe even backtracking a little bit. So you know, we’ve talked about Giga book a lot in the past and how when we build a smart onboarding program, our user support, inquiries went down 90%, the day we launched it, and that was because we listened for the echo we knew people were, it was a complex, it was highly customizable, which meant there was a bunch of bells, switches and levers. So we made it easier for people to do that, which then reduced our need to need so much user support. But that meant that the support that made it through the breakthrough instances, were even that more important to pay attention to, you know, another thing that and kind of a shift of a change of lane here is, you know, when I talked to the chat desk CEO, and not trying to give a spoiler alert here, he wrote us something that I don’t think I’ve ever really, I’ve never really highlighted or thought about effective support should also create a sales channel of sorts. I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re asking, you know, and think about that. And I was like, wow, you know, you that is a very, very legit point. So first off the, maybe they need to buy an add on, maybe you don’t have something that they need, and you will later so being able to effectively notify them. Case in point, the the instance or the opportunity shouldn’t die at your user support.

Matt Watson 8:11
Well, and you’re absolutely right, a lot of times customers have a problem. And the solution to their problem may be selling them another product that you have, or professional services or consulting or a lot of different things, right? You just You just never know. Like, I know back in the VinSolutions days, my previous company we sold on site training, right? So if people are calling in saying their salespeople, you know, they’re not using the product, no problem will come out for $3,000 a day. We’ll be right there. Right. And it was a perfect opportunity to sell training.

Matt DeCoursey 8:46
And people and that’s using it that’s using it as a sales channel. Yeah. created. That’s like a win. That’s a win win. Yeah, and that’s a good thing. So, you know, another thing, I don’t want to get too far into this, before I bring this up, I think the key with user support is, is timeliness. If someone’s reaching out and wants support, they have a problem with whatever it is you sold them or you’re trying to sell them. The longer you wait, like you alluded to this earlier, like just assume that they’re downloading or ordering your competitors anything and you know, one of the things that that is just fact is that companies that reply quickly, have a higher retention and close rate, just meaning like so. And this doesn’t mean you have to tender the solution. It’s about saying, Hey, I’m here, I hear you and repeat after me listeners. I’m not the right person to answer that. I know who else I’m gonna go ask and I’ll get right back with you. It’s all about how you that’s how you feel the question that you don’t have the answer to and rather than just waiting eight hours or four hours till that person you need to talk to gives you the answer. Let be communicative there’s touch points. You know, it’s kind of like playing volleyball you don’t want the ball to hit the ground.

Matt Watson 9:58
People are just trying to solve problems, right? They have a problem, they’re trying to solve a problem. And they they quickly want to figure out if you can help them or not. And if they get stuck, then they’re very quickly you’re not going to solve the problem. So you got to figure out.

Matt DeCoursey 10:15
I agree. So Matt, let’s speak from experience here. Because you know, one of the things that sacrifi and so Matt, Matt’s company stack up, I was acquired earlier this year, congratulations. But you know, I had the honor and privilege. And on Sundays misery of working in the same office with you, Matt, but I got to watch so much of what you you guys did at sacrifi and learn from it. And you guys, as the platform grew, I really saw you utilize and build a very effective support unit that encompasses people all around the world. And part of part of what I thought was great was the mountain I own Full Scale, go to full scale.io, to learn more about how we help help teams help companies build effective software teams. But one of the things you said to me that has just, as always stuck out is you built an opposing schedule tech team. So your US team didn’t have to come in and immediately deal with 30 support tickets every morning. And and you felt that that immediately changed the vibe.

Matt Watson 11:24
Well, and you bring up a great point. So anybody who has a product that they’re selling to internationally, right, I mean, that’s a big part of it is you’re getting people that have customer issues, product issues, whatever it is, during off hours. First and foremost, you hate to interrupt your US based staff that, you know, 10pm or three in the morning to deal with those kinds of issues. But you know, if you’ve got customers in, in Asia, that are that are having problems. And maybe there are simple questions like how do I do this and the product, if you if you have somebody that works there timezone that can deal with those issues. That’s a huge benefit, right? Otherwise, they’ve got several hours before they get a response, you respond to them, and then they’re probably sleeping while you respond. So it’s like they’re waiting a day or two before they get their questions answered. So yeah, at some point in time, if you got an international business, going, going working 24 hours a day becomes important. And that was important for us that stock fight, because we had over 1000 customers, and half of them were international lead customers all over the world. So

Matt DeCoursey 12:26
I remember your epiphany moment when you know when you you said man, you know, we have users, it was like 70 different countries. Yeah, we’re like, and we have users in 70 different countries, which means all different time zones, all different kinds of clients, all different needs. And then in the case where you built, you just added a couple. So SR e site reliability engineers, people that are working in Matt’s case. Now I really thought that was a brilliant move for a lot of a lot of reasons. Because, you know, we’ve talked in the past, no one likes to start their day by eating a shit sandwich. Like if the user supports pile up overnight. First off, people aren’t getting replied to in a timely manner. Also, it’s possible with just a little change of focus. In some cases, those site reliability engineers had already tendered solutions that were ready to go live by the time that team arrived. And think about that from your scalability, your team building and just your morale in general, like, everyone likes to feel like the cavalry is around the corner, or that we’re working as a fluid unit like, and you’re trying to build things and go forward. If it’s just a negative vibe to start the day. Like I said, with a shit sandwich, man, if you eat a shit sandwich in the morning, nothing else tastes great for the rest of the day, maybe even the next day. Let’s try. Let’s try it. In our next episode, Matt? Well, Matt Watson will be eating a shit sandwich and reporting to all of us on how long it takes to get the taste out. But I think that’s some good points, right?

Matt Watson 13:51
That’s fine. Yeah, Matt can do that.

Matt DeCoursey 13:54
Wait, no, I meant I had a good point. It’s not about the shit sandwich. But it was like, talk about that for a second though, Matt, because I thought that that was a very sophisticated and strategic move that played really well.

Matt Watson 14:07
Well, and we did two things. So we had SR ease, or DevOps kind of people, developers that would help support the system at night, which was helpful to the local development team in the US, right? Because if the system went down at three in the morning, there was somebody in the Philippines, that Full Scale, actually, that was monitoring the system and could reset the servers or do whatever they needed to do. But we also had support people to mean we actually had a, you know, support people as well, not just engineers, but we had, you know, customer service support people as well. So we had both sides to handle, you know, server related problems, but also customer issues both So, and it was really

Matt DeCoursey 14:48
important, you know, and here’s the thing, too, is don’t tell yourself that you aren’t ready for that or it’s not scalable, you can’t afford it because that’s I mean, look when we Add sponsors to the show. We want them to be things that we think are cool that are useful or that we’ve used or we support. And I mean, that’s what I like about chat best. So let’s take a moment to recognize the episode sponsor chat desk and many businesses receive a high volume of calls over the holidays. Chat desks helps companies reduce the calls by every 10th 10% by deflecting calls to messaging and self service. Their client list is like Vera Bradley Barkbox. Thanks, and a whole lot more. You can use it for free chat desk.com forward slash shift. Matt, can you do that three times quickly? You did it before. Ready?

Matt Watson 15:35
Got this.com/hipchat desk.com/shift Chat?

Matt DeCoursey 15:41
Lost? Dude, you got work to do, man. Okay. I’m going to ask you some questions now. And here we go. So in terms of user support, true or false, you should ask yourself, how will this increase my efficiency?

Matt Watson 15:59
Well, I can spend less time dealing with customer fires all day, and pissed off customers, because we provided support for them initially, and they got their questions answered quickly.

Matt DeCoursey 16:10
I will accept that as the right answer. And I’m upset that I Wait, hang on, hang on, I don’t have a bell. This is the best we can do, Matt. Okay, note to self get new sound effects for our new platform. By the way, hopefully, you’re enjoying our beautiful sound quality. We are we have changed to something so you can hear all of the default rich tone of Matt and Matt’s voices, because I know that’s really what all you were worried about. Okay. Next question, Matt. In terms of user support, if you ask yourself, what comes to mind, when you ask yourself, will this make your software team more productive?

Matt Watson 16:54
Absolutely, because it will fend off questions from them too. Right? You know, at the end of the day, if a customer has an issue, and the support team doesn’t know the answer, it’s got to get escalated to the, to the developers to the engineering team, for them to figure out how does this thing work? Right. So even if you have good documentation, good, you know, well trained customer support team, all that kind of stuff. It they become the filter, right? Where those issues don’t get bubbled up to the engineering team. So it helps it helps them as well.

Matt DeCoursey 17:25
I would like to add something as an answer here. And I’m gonna say yes, so a giga book, our QA testers are also our support. A, they already know how everything works, because they have to test it. And then also, we just looked at numbers, and we found that, honestly, 80 90% of the time is user error. So we ended up Q support requests come in, and then we ended up kicking it over to QA, and then they would test it or maybe, or whatever. But in some cases, you might not have that big of a team. So if you end up with software developers acting as user support, and that is the way to reduce the effective pneus of your team. Now, are you ready for the next question? See, I was going to try to read it in Spanish. And then I realized I don’t speak Spanish. So yeah, a little bit of a problem there may need to get some user support on that. In terms of user support, man, when you ask yourself the following question, what do you think? How does this impact quality?

Matt Watson 18:27
Well, I’ll tell you a story about my dad the other day. So he still works at VinSolutions auto trader, and they built the number one, right, yeah. And so they built some kind of system, that would take all the dealers inventory and put it on the Facebook marketplace. And my dad has to help support that. And he was going through the documentation and did it himself, and quickly realized that all the documentation was bullshit, and none of it worked. And it was a complete disaster. And the reason I bring that up is when you actually create documentation, and force yourself to go through it, it forces you to find out if the documentation is correct, and therefore improves the quality, right? Like when you stop and document how things work, and test them because you have to test them while you’re testing the documentation. It will help you find quality issues and help you improve the product. And my dad found out it was a flaming pile of crap.

Matt DeCoursey 19:22
Yeah, and here’s another thing too, as is and I’m gonna kind of pile on to that flaming pile of crap. If you Okay, first off, if you’re gonna make documentation, you have to update it. All right, you do. Like you have to be committed to changing it or just don’t even start doing it. And second off, if you give your support people crap documentation, they’re gonna give crap advice to the US, which means makes everything crap. I’m just really into crap and shit sandwiches today. But I mean, that’s another thing. But it’s so easy. I mean, that’s so as user support. I mean, people typically aren’t pinging user support to be like, This typically does not happen to you Is your support team? Hey, I just really wanted to reach out because everything’s working perfectly. I got into platform great has made my life better. I love it. I’m going to tell 100 friends about it, and I’m going to pay for 10 straight years. Nope. You know, usually not the thing. Okay, now, are you ready for the fourth part of my four part? Four part questions.

Matt Watson 20:21
I’m ready.

Matt DeCoursey 20:23
In terms of user support, ask yourself, What are common challenges?

Matt Watson 20:29
Creating the content that you just mentioned? Right? It’s, if it’s video content, it’s getting people to make the training videos. If it’s docs, it’s hard to get people to update the docs, create the docs, if it’s blogging, it’s hard to get people to do the blogging, it’s hard to get people to do all of it. That’s the biggest struggle I have.

Matt DeCoursey 20:46
I have a different one. I think it’s responsiveness. I think the biggest challenge that really all companies have is responsiveness like, you know, either you get stuck in queue. All right, so things that people say right before they go crazy, I’ve been on hold for three hours. That’s not responsive. You know, like, also, like sitting there. And you know, there’s the you know, the, we’ll get back to you in 24 to 48 hours. Cool. That gives me time to go buy something else. Thank you for clarifying that window of of how long I had to buy your competitors shit. And then I’m going to fully support your answer on just quality data. You know, like, is this current?

Matt Watson 21:33
You know, my favorite thing is that people say right before they go crazy. Tommy, hold my beer.

Matt DeCoursey 21:39
I’m out. I’m out of new episodes of Startup Hustle.

Matt Watson 21:42
Hold my beer.

Matt DeCoursey 21:47
Is that really what people say before they go crazy?

Matt Watson 21:49
Yeah. Yeah, they say hold my beer, and then they do something crazy.

Matt DeCoursey 21:55
You know, something else that isn’t crazy. Now that I’ve been doing, I’ve been recording reaction videos after the podcast. So I’ve only done a few of them so far. But I’m going to do one after this episode, and I’m going to talk about the episode itself. And some of the things we learned. It’s kind of like the video version of the founders freestyle. And you can find that on our startup on the Startup Hustle YouTube channel. By the way, speaking of not doing things correctly, we had to hurry up and record this episode because we recorded next week’s episode instead of this one.

Matt Watson 22:27
We were overachievers. We were ahead.

Matt DeCoursey 22:30
Now, we weren’t ahead. We had skipped to step C without completing B, which is a good time for you to do that. Or until or to let you know that next week. Next week’s edition part 38 will be about what are sales channels, and I love selling stuff. Alright, so now, did you know that 61% of companies track their customer happiness?

Matt Watson 22:59
Yes. And I’m a big fan of net promoter scores. By the way.

Matt DeCoursey 23:03
Did you know that because you read the setlist and you saw the same info I did? Or did you actually just know that?

Matt Watson 23:09
No, I saw it.

Matt DeCoursey 23:11
What’s the Net Promoter Score, Matt?

Matt Watson 23:14
It’s those one to 10 scores, they ask you like how do you rate this product one to 10. You get those. And then there’s little math formula behind it. And they use that to create what’s called the Net Promoter Score.

Matt DeCoursey 23:27
Rankings and reviews now, yeah, that’s important to mention, because you know, so 77% of customers are more likely to share a positive experience with a brand. Now, for those of you that don’t know me, I’ve worked in I’ve managed a chain of retail stores. I’ve been a ticket broker, I’ve worked in the music industry. I’ve been a startup founder and software builder for for a long ass time at this point. And the rule of thumb across all those industries that you can count on is pretty much that you’re hoping a happy customer will tell one person, but an unhappy one is likely to tell 100 Yeah, and there’s just a lot of ways to prevent that. It goes back to that communication. Just the ease of use, man like like, what did you say recently? You’re like, don’t make me read your manual?

Matt Watson 24:16
Yeah. RTFM

Matt DeCoursey 24:18
Don’t Don’t make me read your manual. Yeah, let’s see. FM. I’ll read the fucking manual. Got it.

Matt Watson 24:25
Okay, well, to what you’re what you’re saying, right? You got to assume for every one person who has a problem, there’s really like 10 more, but they didn’t take their time to contact support. They just left. They’re just gone now. Or they still have the problem. They’re still pissed off about it. Because people don’t, don’t speak up.

Matt DeCoursey 24:46
So with that, for all of you listening we you catch help me catch up on something we’ve been terrible at. We go down and click that fifth star or that subscribe button. We’re like over For 700 episodes and on this podcast and now finally reminding ourselves to ask for your feedback and your reviews, that’s important stuff. And something that we don’t ask a lot. And that kind of goes into my next point of it should be easy to find your user support, like, what however it is, whether it’s chat desk, or a library or videos or whatever, don’t hide it, it needs to be easy, because once again, you’re just loading up the like tension, the ball of anger, that unhappy people build up right before they pop when you’re just frustrating to find things, you know, and in some cases, so one of the another thing we did a giga book that I found to be really helpful was, so we have like, you know, there’s like seven pages or environments that are key, and we just made a simple video that this is what you find on this page. We went fast and tore right through it. It didn’t have like a 48 second intro that’s like in Dubai. Oh, yeah, here we are. I was like, like, immediate when you started, this page does this, this is how you do it. This is why it’s important. And if you need help, click here. And that contributed to the reduction of user support needed.

Matt Watson 26:09
So, I have another request, okay. If you’re gonna put live chat on your website, actually have somebody to answer it for you there.

Matt DeCoursey 26:18
Dude, that’s what Chatdesk does. That’s why I like it as you actually go in. It’s like a self-service platform and you can, you can literally vet the people. It’s not just random. It’s not just a bot, like you can actually go in and you can. It’s like gig economy. It’s I now,

Matt Watson 26:34
Live chat is the best thing in the world when people actually answer it. And those people know what they’re doing. It’s a god.

Matt DeCoursey 26:41
Dude. I filled one out the other day, and it was like, there was like, usual reply time. One day, I was like, slight filling.

Matt Watson 26:50
My favorite ever is I went into Sirius XM radio to cancel it. And I go to the live chat and I chat with him and tell him I want to cancel it and the responses that I have to call. I’m like, What the fuck are you farther away? They are. Chat with me. What was the point?

Matt DeCoursey 27:05
I am surprised there hasn’t been a class action on them. Because I tried to cancel mine once I went through the same thing I’m like, and actually in some states, it is illegal. California made it illegal for you to not have like a one-click Cancel kind of thing for pretty much any subscription.

Matt Watson 27:20
So, I want to I kind of went off on the jet, and he did cancel it for me.

Matt DeCoursey 27:25
Okay, so now once again, today’s episode, Startup Hustle is brought to you by Chatdesk, they help you to reduce the number of phone calls coming into your business by over 10% By shifting calls over to Facebook Messenger and other channels, you can get started in a few minutes, and the service is free for a limited time. Be sure to check it out at chatdesk.com forward slash shift. That’s chatdesk.com link in the show notes now and I’ll give you one more chance to do it three times quickly. Ready to go?

Matt Watson 27:49
Chat desk.com/chit chat desk.com

Matt DeCoursey 27:52
You know, you literally said chat. desk.com shet desk. You go out lot of work to do. We’re gonna bet wraps, right? Yes. And look, that’s how that’s actually how I want to, so we’ve talked so much about creating and building a tech company. Look, you can simulate support reps, this is something you can practice. This is something that if you get the same questions, you got to get better at answering them control the narrative at your business and about your product. And you’re gonna find that people I like so Matt four years later, and we don’t really need like, quote, support at Full Scale. But our sales prospects, they asked the exact same questions. You’ve heard me talk about this in meetings. I’m like, I’m actually shocked at this point. When I get a new question. They are like, like six things. I can’t I can’t wait. I can’t wait. You know. So what would a bot sound like? That was the DeCoursey bot? It would swear a lot. It would not? The Matt do the Matt DeCoursey bot for support would swear a lot and get angry, and probably not be very effective. So let me launch. Yeah, so true. It’s been a while. I’m so fat right now. I’m fat Matt. I wasn’t gonna say no, no, together. I’m the fatter of the mats. We’re both pretty fat right now. Maybe we could do something about that. All right. So, you know, overall, like, Matt, what are your What are your closing arguments here?

Matt Watson 29:27
Support essential to what you do. You got to provide a way for people to get support. And I know a lot of us, you know, we use Amazon and I have you ever reached out to Amazon support before? I have. Yeah. And they were actually very responsive, actually.

Matt DeCoursey 29:43
Yeah. Yeah, they did a fair a fair job and it funneled me to where I needed to be effectively.

Matt Watson 29:51
But the good news is you don’t really need their support. You know? Yeah, and then that’s the goal right is you don’t really need their support there. Their website enables you to do do all the things you need to do. And it’s intuitive. And it’s got links to help where it needs links to help. And it’s got the context is in there and the app and all that stuff. But the biggest thing is speed. Like you mentioned earlier, and I mentioned earlier as well about Stackify was a strategic advantage for us as our how fast we were responding to customers was a was a big differentiator. Speed, speed is essential. And I’ve been working on a support issue with Microsoft now for three weeks about a billing issue. And basically, every email I got over the last three weeks was them telling me that some other person was now handling the case. And I literally like they, they at one point, they told me that they would get an answer to me in two to three days. And my response was, it’s been two freakin weeks. And you’re just now telling me that I’m like, Are you kidding me? I literally told them that nobody there knows what they’re doing. So it’s not timely. Now just ridiculous. Just getting a runaround. And my ex-mother-in-law used to work at AT and T, and they got in trouble if they were on phone calls for too long. So they would just transfer to somebody else. Which was not a good not good practice. But yeah, so support

Matt DeCoursey 31:12
AT and T doesn’t exist anymore. Do that. Is there not a thing? Are there are there?

Matt Watson 31:17
Yeah, they people still have landlines? My grandma probably got it.

Matt DeCoursey 31:21
I thought sprint or I don’t know, I thought some maybe it is a TNT? I don’t know. I know that. I what I do know is that of all of all things that people probably associate shitty customer service with. It’s probably airlines and your cell phone. All right now. So for my freestyle. First off, I’ve got three true or false questions. And if you get any of these right or wrong, then you have to come back and record another episode with me for next week. So you’ve got that going for you. First, true or false user support should be available and unobtrusive.

Matt Watson 31:57
True.

Matt DeCoursey 31:59
That is correct. You get to come back and record another episode. Congratulations. Now, we’re going to multiply that if you get this one right or wrong, that you have to come back and do two more episodes. User Support should be accurate and robust.

Matt Watson 32:11
True.

Matt DeCoursey 32:13
Also correct. Now, now we’re going to double would you like to double? Would you like to double down and go for future episodes that you Okay, taken? And then would you like to place an additional bat boosting that up to eight,

Matt Watson 32:26
I’ve already got 14 More anyway. So let’s just make it 14?

Matt DeCoursey 32:29
Well, whether you’re right or wrong, you’re gonna get to come back and do now 14 episodes with me. User Support should be consistent and flexible, true or false?

Matt Watson 32:40
True.

Matt DeCoursey 32:42
Also correct, Matt. Congratulations, you are the big winner, you get to come back and record a bunch more podcasts with me. All right. We’re feeling a little slower trying to find fun and interesting ways to make user support fun and interesting. Like my closing remarks are that don’t mess this up. You know, as a tech platform, founder, your presentation on your website and your ability to support and answer incoming request is essentially in many ways on par with much bigger gorillas that are in the room, many competitors that might have been around for a while. If you’ve ever seen that one of those commercials where someone calls in the business owner and they’re like, Hey, can he answer it’s like, hello, Hey, can I talk to accounting? He’s like, hang on puts on Hey, this is accounting? Can I talk to customer support, hang on customer support like that in a digital world, things like chat desk, and just you like presenting yourself well and making it accessible, put you on a very equal footing with other companies. And you know, people don’t know, they don’t know, they look at the way you react in the way you handle it and whether or not you have your shit together and make assumptions that you might be a much bigger, more established company. So that’s a really important part. Now if you are like, hey, we’ll get back to you in like six weeks. They think the opposite. They’re like, why is there no I thought that when I filled out the thing the other day, I was like, Why is nobody home? Like it’s Tuesday? Yeah, you know, 24 hours to reply like is just no one. Does anyone work there? I mean, wouldn’t you feel the same way, Matt?

Matt Watson 34:20
Well, I said earlier about the live chat drives me crazy.

Matt DeCoursey 34:22
Now, I tell people that a lot. I’m like, Dude, you got to get to put that on there. You got to be able to reply because nothing says we aren’t that great more than your live chat. urging me to ask a question and then be like, sure, and like responding to yours. We will get back to you sometime in the distant future. We’re gonna come back and do this again. And I’m just excited. You won 14 More episodes.

Matt Watson 34:52
Yeah, I’ll finish the series. 14 more to go.

Matt DeCoursey 34:55
I got a lot more work to do after that time.

Matt Watson 34:58
Yeah.

Matt DeCoursey 35:00
See you next week.

Matt Watson 35:01
See you.