Support Smarter What Can Go Wrong Doesn’t Always Go Wrong The journey back from the HelpDocs retreat in Panama was always going to be long. In fact, despite being around 4 hours shorter, it felt infinitely longer than the outgoing journey—a result
Support Smarter My Ever Changing Expectations of Service Levels It’s 30 celsius outside. In fact, it might be more but I’m too comfortable working from the air-conned executive lounge to step out into the bustling boulevard of Panama City and
Support Smarter The Truth Is You Might Not Need a Knowledge Base Over the past few weeks, I’d been preparing myself for my first ever webinar, in partnership with our friends at Gorgias. Sid from Gorgias came up with the idea of a webinar
Support Smarter Filtering my Negativity as a Crappy Customer It turns out, I’m a crappy customer. Not to open with a blog post cliché, but honestly, this really is a tough one to admit. 'Cause nobody wants to accept they are,
Starting Up Customer-Centric Service isn't a Growth Hack It was a rainy Sunday. My wife and I had spent the morning lazing in bed reading as the rain bucketed down outside. After a few hours of pleading puppy dog eyes, we
Starting Up Taking Responsibility for Other's Faults Yesterday, I experienced my first moment of pure dread since joining the HelpDocs team. The stupid thing is, in hindsight, it wasn’t even that big a deal. It was 4:02pm—I
Customer Stories Star Wars Robots and Educating the Future Innovators—In Discussion with Sphero's Sara Sampson Like most nerdy movie buffs and tech lovers, I’m a big fan of Sphero, the masterminds behind that BB-8 Star Wars robot. They are—in my humble and totally unqualified opinion—one
Product Insights HelpDocs 💖 Front Before I joined HelpDocs, I was a freelancer. I worked within a few teams, but was rarely on the inner circle or anywhere near support, so had very little use for a collaborative
SaaS Insights The Painful Experience of Breaking up with Customers Breaking up with customers sucks. It’s like any relationship. You’ve both poured everything you can into making it work, but despite all your best efforts something just doesn’t fit together
Support Smarter Remembering My Golden Ticket Support Experience A few days ago, the creative geniuses at Geckoboard shared a glorious poster with a bunch of comical characters, affectionately referred to as "The Tickets". There are nine tickets in total,
Support Smarter What Hotels Have Taught Me About Customer Support When we started building HelpDocs, I had a lot of assumptions about customer support. I believed the loudest, angriest customers got all the rewards. I thought doing small favours for customers was a
Support Smarter Strategies to Navigate Confused Customers Towards Your Knowledge Base Releasing a knowledge base to your customers is like a cruise ship on its maiden voyage. Building a ship takes a lot of effort and resources. But if nobody ever gets onboard, it’
Support Smarter Simple Steps to Make Sure First Time Users Have a Great Experience Landing in a new destination is always a little daunting. How should I get to my hotel? Do I need cash? How should I greet someone? Luckily signs and interactive maps point you
Support Smarter Introducing Our First Guide: Building a Knowledge Base from Scratch It’s easy to leave setting up a knowledge base at the bottom of your to-do list. Or y’know, assign that one to another teammate. No biggie. 🤨 Like an author getting started
Support Smarter Rebuilding a Knowledge Base for a High Growth Startup When I started my job at Drift, I was there for many different reasons: To learn everything I could about our product, to disperse that knowledge internally and externally, and to set the
Knowledge Bases How Self-Service Knowledge Bases Empower Support Staff to Get More Done “The customer is always right”. Yeah, and they’re super demanding too. According to Harvard Business Review, 65% of customers want their problem resolved in the first try. And, over 60% of customers
Support Smarter Live Chat & Bots: Where Do They Fit In When Interacting With Customers? Customer support has always been a bit of a necessary evil for companies. Nobody wants to spend money on support, but without support would you have any customers? I doubt it. With the
Support Smarter 6 Customer Support Experts Weigh In on How to Stop Your Help Center from Going Stale If you're a startup, keeping up with product updates is exhausting. You're likely pushing new code each week, which means your product is changing every week. Keeping a knowledge base updated is pretty
Support Smarter How Surprisingly Good Support Wins Us Customers At HelpDocs we’re kinda great at customer support. If you’ve ever sent us a support request (or just a hello) you’ll have seen this yourself. Almost all our chats are
Support Smarter Creating a Culture Where Everyone Does Support At Front, we’re passionate about helping companies communicate better. Thousands of teams use Front’s shared inbox platform for customer support that feels friendly and personal, with the powerful features of a
Support Smarter Moving Past the Ticket Number: Having Conversations with Customers "Hello Jarratt", a faceless agent from Acme Corp Customer Support replied in an email thread. "Thank you for providing that information and for working with us through the troubleshooting process&
Knowledge Bases Create Better Knowledge Base Articles by Using the Magic of GIFs Customer support has evolved in recent times. People want to serve themselves, rather than fill out a form to get in touch. When was the last time you phoned a company to get
Support Smarter How to Balance Customer Feedback and Your Own Vision When Shaping Your Product Roadmap We all know it's not easy to be a product manager — juggling between your customers' requests, keeping your team's morale high and creating an amazing product along the way. But the hardest of
Product Insights Why Technical Founders Need to Conquer Customer Support When we launched HelpDocs earlier this year there were just the two of us. We ran everything. Product, sales, marketing, support, legal. You name it, we ran it. That’s pretty much the