Stop Insulting Your Team by Making Everyone Do Customer Service

Here at Edgar, every new hire designs and rolls out a new feature for our app in their first month, whether or not they’ve ever seen or written a line of code in their life.

JUST KIDDING.

That sounds like a total disaster.

And yet, there’s this kind of trendy idea out there that this is the approach businesses should take with customer service. Like you should have people from all different departments take a swing at answering emails and providing support.

The principle behind that makes sense, right? Because making customers happy really IS everyone’s job. No matter what role you have in the business, the bottom line is you’re doing something to help the customer.

But this method for putting it into practice — taking people with no customer service experience and putting them on the front lines just so they can get a firsthand taste for it — makes about as much sense as me asking our head of operations to build a new feature for our app. (Nothing personal, Sarah.)

So why do so many startups think that this is a great idea for customer service? After all, being excellent at customer service is a finely-honed skill, just like being a Ruby on Rails developer. Our CS reps have spent years in the field practicing the craft of making frustrated customers happy and happy customers thrilled, and being the liaison between our customers and the rest of our team.

And that’s only the tip of the CS iceberg — customer service is the only department that needs top of mind knowledge of absolutely everything happening at a company. They need to know every promotion, every piece of content, every coupon code, every whatever, so that they can field questions and point people to our best resources.

They also work intimately with our product team by translating customer feedback into the language of developers for bugs and feature requests. And at our company, our customer service team is also our QA team.

Personally, I’ve never worked in customer service, so everything I just listed would be a totally new skill for me to learn. And I admit — I imagine I wouldn’t exactly kill it on all fronts on day one.

So why would we insult customer service by throwing every new employee, no matter the role, into CS duty? Why would we act like it’s something anyone can just pick up and do at the drop of a hat?

Not only that, but why would we devalue our customers by having totally inexperienced people handle their requests? We hire people who are already great at customer service, and we still put them through extensive training in order to deliver the absolute best responses a customer has ever seen. One of our internal goals is for every CS interaction to be the highlight of our customer’s day — we don’t want to treat users who need assistance like guinea pigs just so our non-CS employees can broaden their horizons.

I understand how this whole idea got started — customers are the lifeblood of any business. And keeping communication lines open between customers and the entire team is definitely important.

That’s why we have our own ways of keeping the customer experience front of mind for everyone on the team — without having to force people with no CS experience to do a temporary stint on the front lines.

Here are our main tactics:

Cancellation Roundup

Anytime a user cancels their subscription to our service, we give them the opportunity to explain why — and once a week, a member of our CS team collects those reasons in an email that everyone on staff receives.

Granted, it’s not the most uplifting email in the world.

But it’s important! It’s important for every person on the team to know what people don’t love about us, so that we can plan improvements for the future. It doesn’t mean that all those people are receiving or responding to the information firsthand — but they need to hear it.

Feedback Friday

That last email can be a real drag, so we make up for it by sending its non-evil twin a few days later. Our email inbox and social media accounts receive tons of positive feedback every week, and nine times out of ten, nobody would notice except the people whose job it is to notice. (Spoiler alert: it’s customer service!)

We kick off every Friday with an email sent around from CS featuring some of that week’s biggest and best compliments, and it’s not just for an ego boost. Understanding what we’re doing right is just as important as understanding what could be improved! Everyone on the team deserves to hear the praise we get, but more importantly, everyone NEEDS to hear it, so they’re equipped to make good choices moving forward.

Slack Channel Updates

As a 100% remote team, staying in communication via Slack is a huge part of our day-to-day routine — especially because it keeps us all up to date on what our customers are saying, as they’re saying it.

When a member of our CS team comes across some particularly noteworthy customer feedback, they’ll share it then and there in Slack — and oftentimes, they’ll ping a relevant member of the dev team to make sure they see it. (This may actually be MORE effective than having our developers “do” customer service themselves — this way, they’re seeing the messages most relevant to them, instead of just reading and fielding a bunch of questions that aren’t.) And since every member of our team belongs to every room in Slack, nothing falls through the cracks.

Making customer service everyone’s responsibility by insisting that everyone works hands-on in a department other than their own, doing a job they aren’t trained for, and that other people have spent their entire careers training for? There are a lot of ways that method can backfire — and when it does, it’ll hurt your team AND your customers.