Hello! My name is Lena Zhuravleva, I am the founder of “ Dadata ”. "Dadata" corrects errors in the addresses - it is used by online stores, delivery services and car dealerships. In total, Dadata has more than 15 thousand users, both free and paid.

Most of our work is support, which, besides its usual function, is also for us:

• competitive advantage
• channel to attract customers through search,
• channel to attract customers through the recommendations.

I'll tell you how it works for us - it will be useful for the founders of small services.

Support bites competitors

Have you encountered a situation where every marketing material of yours is copied word for word literally in a week? Unfortunately, this is a reality in which market leaders are forced to live. What can be done in this situation?
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To create competitive advantages that cannot be faked - to make a good quality product that you can quickly try. And provide excellent support.
Going to our forum and comparing it with the forums of competitors, the user immediately sees how and in what style we respond to requests. And it helps him make a decision in our favor.


Support focuses on the nature of the problem, not on the wording

We denote the reaction rate, show the status of the problem and explain our actions. If what the user has written is not an error, we will definitely tell you why.

Support leads new users

Three years ago, when we launched Dadat, we thought about how we would collect feedback from users. Often such a place becomes a forum or some kind of board like Trello.

The forum has drawbacks: it is out of control. It has no task status or knowledge base. This is a tool for communication, not for feedback.

Trello-type boards also have drawbacks: it’s not clear how to manage 2000 cards (this is how many requests we have now). The cards are small, the stack of them is huge, it is inconvenient to read the correspondence, you don’t look at the picture or code normally. Trello is good for planning within a short iteration, and not for product support for many years.

Therefore, the support of "Dadata" lives in User-echo ( UserEcho ), the most adequate and cheap system of all that we watched. This is an open ticket system. It has public tickets with general questions and wishes of users and private tickets that are needed so that customers can tell about the problem with intimate details.


Yuzerahe has everything that is required attentive technical support service

There is even a type of ticket "Gratitude" - an analogue of "thank you". Thank you tell us once for 175 hits. This statistic made me reconsider the attitude towards gratitude - I began to thank the services I use more often. It's easy, and developers are pleased. I still remember how we rejoiced at the first “thank you” and how we still rejoice at every letter in which users thank us. I try to throw such letters into the general chat of the product - it raises the moral expo of the team.


Users rarely give thanks

User-echo has features that we love.

• The knowledge base about solved problems is not accumulated inside the company in the heads of employees, but on the network. If users ask the same type of questions, we can always give a link to the article with the answer in User-echo.
• The system allows anonymous questions. Customers often do not have the desire and time to register on the forums and confirm mail (product manager "Dadaty" Anton Zhiyanov writes about this ). Damn, they have a problem, burning, you need to leave a message soon! In User echo, you can immediately write without SMS and registration.

There is a problem or a question - the person writes to the support. No captcha and “confirm email address. mail "

But the most important thing is that the user echo is indexed by search engines. For a couple of years, we and our users wrote so much relevant text that new customers from search came to us constantly. They search for something about errors in addresses, get into User-echo and become clients. In total, we convert about 10% of such search queries into clients.

Support pleasantly surprised

Solving a technical problem and processing a request for a new feature is the minimum level of support. But we always try to make the client even happier - if he is satisfied, he will recommend us on occasion, and this is a very important channel for attracting customers.

When a client of “Dadaty” has a serious bug because of our fault, we give the client money to the account as compensation. And we are inexpensive, and the client is pleased - he will save a little on the next payment.

If someone cannot use us in a third-party application (CMS, CRM) because of a plugin from a third-party developer, we try to contact the developer and remind him of the client's problem.


Do a little more than the person expects - and he will remember you

We also help with integration. If the client sends an idle code or links to the error page in javascript, Anton will roll up his sleeves and try to get to the bottom of the cause. We will help you write a working sample code, even if the problem is not directly related to Dadata.

I have a personal trigger list for customers who have registered and did not use the service. I read all the answers to the letters, talk to customers. If they are satisfied - I ask them to recommend us to friends or in social networks, and often they do it. All these extra things are small things. But they greatly influence whether the client recommends us or not.

Support eats up time (surprise, surprise)

When we launched “Dadatu”, product manager Anton was first engaged in support. But there were too many tasks, and it was a pity for Anton to spend on them all the time. So we realized that support should be divided, and gave him a tester Nikita to help. After Nikita was replaced by Nastya. And so far only two people support all customers. Sometimes I help them.

We did not specifically hire in support of outsiders. It is important for us that the users are engaged in product development. On the one hand, they understand customer problems better. On the other hand, they can solve them faster.


The basic requirement for a support company: to clearly express their thoughts in writing. I have to write a lot :)

In total, one person-day is spent on support every day. This load is balanced between Anton, Nastya and, very rarely, me. Everything focuses on what they like: Nastya solves the basic problems of users, Anton takes on complex queries and new features, and I answer transactional letters - I love this thing.

Support - in the company's DNA

We believe in good support and try to help all users. These are our basic values. But gradually we discovered that they create a competitive advantage of the service, which is impossible to fake. Competitors can copy articles or even some product features, but not the service style or user loyalty.

And it's just nice to help customers :)

The author of the article is @lyalius . I will be glad to your comments!