Go Hug your Customer Support People

Recently Jigsaw experienced an engineering hiccup (felt more like a gastric bypass) that caused interruptions in service for our most important members- the ones that use Jigsaw every day. To make matters worse, we had to bring down the system that we use to support our customers in order to keep the main database working, so all of our customer facing people were flying blind while attempting to fix account mistakes, help customers register, search for data, etc. All this happened during the last week of the quarter, when inside sales people in particular are trying to make their appt and calling goals- definitely not time to play “Where’s Waldo?” with our website.

It was during this time that I renewed my amazement with our customer support team and everyone that jumped in to help triage- including many of our loyal members.

I think the internal abilities necessary to do customer support and hunter type sales are completely opposite, like the autonomous nervous system (or whatever it is) that doesn’t allow you to sneeze with your eyes open. Sales people that are trying to get a deal that are forced to answer product problems react with symptoms that include “pupil dilation, increased sweating, rapid heart rate, occasional vomiting” and become apt to shed their clothes run out the building like Benny Hill.  I personally am the escalation point for many of the issues- and was forced to write out a scathing response to one of our members that had I sent it would most likely have sparked (another) lawsuit. (Look for a copy of that email in next week’s blog.)

Anyway, now that the quarter is done and you have submitted that great work of fiction known as your personal taxes, go hug your customer support people. They will be cleaning up on all the promises you made to get that deal to drop in March, and if they are like the Jigsaw support team, they’ll be doing it with a smile.

*quote taken from Wikipedia’s article on fight or flight response.

Comments

[Darren Cunningham]

Great stuff as usual Garth. I wrote a quick post about your blog yesterday: http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/17/a-hug-and-a-laugh/

Our sales team is getting some good laughs (and advice) from your blog. Keep up the great work!

Darren

[Garth]

Darren-
Thanks for the props on the LucidEra blog (blush). I take what you say so much more seriously now that you don't work for Salesforce.com...

:-)

Seriously, you guys are doing some very cool stuff and I look forward to working with you again.