Complain about health: as we understood that the main thing is support

One of the most reliable ways to lose faith in the victory of good over evil and hate humanity is to get a job in technical support. Support - certainly not a job for wimps. While your colleagues are generating ideas and developing different cool things, you are in technical support going through all the circles of hell. You will be called out as full jerks and Krivoruk idiots, accused of what you are not guilty of, and ask about what you are not able to do.



Technical support for financial services in this sense stands out even against the general background, because here we are talking about the most important thing - about money. And God forbid you to do something wrong with the money of your users (or them with their money, but with the help of your service - we wrote last time that more than half of the problems with translations occur due to the inattention of users). Mercy do not wait, get on the full.
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Reading these messages, it is easiest to come to the conclusion that these “angry citizens” are, let's say, a little crazy people. So, you should not pay much attention to them, because it’s not for them that you do your super-service (but for good, friendly, smart). But such a strategy does not lead to good.

At first, most startups think only about how to make a working thing and tell good people about it. But, if you do not immediately establish a good support, you will have a paradox: you will spend money on getting people to try the service, while ignoring those who already use it.

Why attract new users when it is better to keep old ones? We at UBANK at one time completely revised the organization of the work of technical support, making it one of the priorities for the company. And in this post we decided to share a few simple principles that helped us to establish the effective work of the support.

1. To complain is easy and pleasant

First of all, you need to set up user feedback channels. Gentleman's set: phone number, letter to the address of technical support, communication form on the site (which also generates a letter). UBANK is primarily a service for smartphones, so we, of course, added the ability to contact technical support directly from the application. In addition, we track reviews in Google Play and the App Store.

It is necessary to create channels for feedback - this is, in general, obvious. It is not so obvious that these channels should encourage people to give feedback. If something went wrong, the client should be comfortable complaining. And this is an interesting field for experimentation. Recently, we, for example, added a button that can be used in two accounts, without writing a word, to send technical support information about an unsuccessful transaction (already in iOS , in the Android version on the way).

2. The support is not a construction battalion, but special forces.

In many companies, support staff is at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. Stars develop a product, promote it to the market, think through strategies. Who solves the problem? To do this, there are girls boys in support.

But you won't get this far. Because for effective work, technical support first of all needs authority. At first we were afraid to give them to our support, worrying about security. Employees did not have access to either user profiles or detailed information on the status of payments.

To get even basic information about pending translations, we had to contact the developers, who were not very happy that they were distracted from their main responsibilities.

But technical support employees should not be in the position of poor relatives who beg for colleagues to solve customer problems like handouts.

At first, the answer to the user from technical support could take several days. Changing priorities, we agreed that the support staff should have full authority to solve customer problems as soon as possible.

3. Special Forces require special equipment.

A shoemaker without boots is a well-known postulate that never loses its relevance. You are developing a super-friendly service for users, while the backend on which your people work will bring nostalgic memories of the friendly interface of Windows 98. For starters, this is natural, you cannot put the cart before the horse. But at some point it is worth investing efforts in giving support to convenient tools for work.

We completely redid the admin area in which tech support works, making it as simple and effective as possible. As a result, you can now check the fate of any payment in five seconds. Previously, the same question could take a whole day. In addition, many users ask the same questions, and we not only created a database of answers, but also embedded a template system right in the admin area. Such little things are great time savers - and ultimately save your resources.

4. Just in time

Perhaps you do not have the resources to plant an army of cool specialists for technical support. Perhaps you have questions answered by one manager, who has to spin, solving a thousand tasks at once. But your user, frankly, doesn't care. They don't just want to be answered. They want to be answered immediately. And you must provide this answer to them.

During peak load or at night, when it is not always possible to respond instantly, we now turn on the robot. The simple phrase “I received your application and will be working on it soon,” strangely enough, it protects the nervous system of people very much. And three months ago we introduced push notifications. As soon as we send a response to the application, the user immediately receives a push on his smartphone. In the near future, we will do push notifications for the support employees themselves. It will turn out almost lively chat.

5. Prevention is better than surgery

In the near future, we will start warning users about errors using push notifications - even before they themselves complain to tech support. For example, if the transaction for some reason did not pass, the application will notify the user as soon as it becomes known, and at the same time will prompt what can be done. We hope it will save many nerves.

6. Cookies for heroes

People who complain bring great benefits to the company, because they give a chance to work on the bugs and improve. We formed a circle of several beloved testers-fans, from which we regularly receive feedback with a request to correct something in the interface or add something. In the ticket system, each of them has a special mark. We value also ordinary users who spend their time trying to explain exactly where and how they caught a rare bug. We reward such people with promotional codes. The amounts are small, but no one has yet refused them - everyone is pleased to receive the bonus.

7. And the hunchback horse speaks in a human voice ...

At first, we thought this: UBANK is a financial service, which means we have to create an appropriate “serious” image, so it’s worth answering dryly and to the point. We both answered and did not feel any enthusiasm from this (users, it seems, too). But then we decided that the attempt to inflate the cheeks - it's all from the evil one. Some nonsense. And they began to communicate with users in a normal human language. It turned out that the appropriate joke and friendly tone of communication cool down the heat of discussion.



Support employees themselves, by the way, after that felt the drive - the work of firing and tedious turned into a creative and fascinating. We began to communicate informally with people, and over the past year the amount of negativity addressed to us has decreased dramatically (although of course, we still have something to work on).



Once a user approached us who wanted to know if the transfer to the phone could be canceled. We asked about the data of his payment, and he admitted that he had not yet made it. Just a prostitute asked to throw her fee to the phone, and he wanted to know in advance whether it would be possible to return the money if something goes wrong.

Working in a support, which just does not have to face. But this does not mean that the aspirations of users should be ignored, even if they sometimes express their outrage in a not too elegant manner.

This, by the way, does not mean that they are assholes. It’s just that Russian people all the time are waiting for them to be deceived (and not without reason), and therefore they are always ready to go on the attack with a saga uncharted. But if they write the answer in a human way, it often turns out that they are quite normal people. And if you still call them, then all the anger evaporates and towards the end they thank you and wish all the best.

In general, do you want to restore faith in the victory of good over evil and love humanity? Welcome to tech support.