You're so close to finishing up your shiny new app. You can't wait to get those last little pieces polished up so you can start on boarding users. Then at the last minute, you think to yourself, "Wait, I want to make sure my precious customers have someone they can talk to when they have questions and when they need a feature and especially when something goes wrong!".
You do a quick google search for the top customer service tools and realize that you absolutely have to launch with one of those live chat bubbles with the little bot that answers all you customer's questions and makes jokes and all that other stuff. "Yes!", you think, "That will be perfect. What better way to get in touch with my customers and find out exactly what they need!"
So you copy a few lines of code, and within minutes your customers have a direct line of communication right to you and your team.
Amazing...right?
Fast forward 6 months down the road and that short list of polish points has become a never ending list ranging from people's hopes and dreams to their worst pet peeves. And that chat bubble seems like it never stops pinging you.
Ok maybe it's not quite that extreme, but throughout this article we're going to get into some of the considerations you should take before dropping that cute little bubble in the corner of your app.
1. This is the way
You ever hear the saying "The best offense is a good defense"? Of course you have. What a cliché, right? Well, turns out it's pretty applicable here. One of the best ways to support and empower your customers is to provide them with a wealth of knowledge and tutorials that they can explore on their own. This includes product onboarding guides, how-to examples, and any special help articles or workarounds for unique functionality. Often times it's good to include both a written and video version of these as well.
One of the immediate down sides of having instant customer support is that your customers don't have to truly learn how your application works. I know this seems a bit pedantic but hear me out.
Every application is opinionated in some way. It starts with a problem that exists in the world and based on the opinion of the builder, it solves that problem in the way that the builder feels best.
It doesn't mean the opinion is always right. Sometimes it's not and we have to pivot how our app works but regardless, every app has an opinion.
Take a blog platform like Medium for example. Do you think Medium invented blog platforms? Of course not. People have been building ways to host blog articles since about 5min after the internet was popularized. What Medium did was push its users to think within their opinionated framework.
What was that you ask? That for bloggers, owning your own blog space via a WordPress or Wix site isn't actually as important as having readers. Turns out a blog isn't all that valuable unless you have people reading it.
Now bear with me as we bring this example full circle. Let's say that Medium had not enforced this paradigm and instead simply handled ad-hoc customer questions via a chat bubble without pushing them to learn the "Medium way". There's a good chance that customers would have applied their established paradigms about how blog platforms should work and either demanded Medium become another blog builder tool or left thinking it didn't suit their needs.
In my customer support experience, I regular see customers come in with their own preconceived ideas of how our app should work and try to project that onto us before they understand how ours actually works.
If you want your customers to truly value your application, you need to push them to understand your opinionated solution through solid documentation and good UX. Otherwise, you'll forever be competing with their preconceived notions about how your app should work.
If after they understand it they still don't want to use your app, then you've gained valuable insight into your market's needs and should probably change something.
I cannot overstate this. Having instant customer support CANNOT be a replacement for teaching your customers how to properly use your application through good documentation and solid UX patterns.
2. Is it done yet?
Do you remember in the early days of the internet when you had an issue or a question or just wanted someone to talk to and the only option you had was to send off a contact form to god knows who and hope someone saw it? Or even worse, pick up the phone and hope you entered the right sequence of numbers to get connected to a real person? Ahh, those were the days.
Fast forward to today and customers expect a bug fix, new feature, or just a response 5 minutes ago. Today people expect immediate responses from a real life person to all their questions all the time.
And I get it. As a consumer of these apps myself, I expect there to be some form of live chat when I have a question or issue. And if there's not I huff and puff about how behind the times that company is. Live chat is awesome!
This brings up my next point. Managing customer expectations when they have a direct line to you is hard. Like really hard.
Now don't get me wrong, as app developers and business owners, listening to your customer is a vital process of delivering a valuable product to your customers. But what's even more important is that you make sure you're setting their expectations to reality so that they actually feel listened to. And having a live chat bubble on your site is one of the easiest ways to unintentionally (or intentionally) mislead your customers.
Think about it, the world of instant chat support has conditioned customers to think that there's just someone sitting on the other end of that bubble waiting to answer their every request. It's like some kind of virtual fairy god mother. And often times they're not wrong. A company like Amazon or Shopify certainly has the resources to offer 24/7 live customer support. There literally are people sitting there waiting for you to chat with them. But as a startup you often don't have the resources to offer that type of support and trying to pretend you're an enterprise company when you're not is going to end poorly.
Unless you have a true support team that has round the clock support, you need to be very careful about what your chat service is communicating to your customers.
Do you have clear hours for when you're available? Have you made it clear to your customers what types of questions and requests you'll support? Is it easy to find the turnaround time for bug fixes and feature requests? Before your customers even reach out to you, they should know what to expect from you and your team.
"What about a chat bot?", you ask, "Surely, then I'll be able to manage more customers by having an AI respond to all their questions". Turns out customers are pretty good at knowing when they're talking to a fake person and they don't like. They've also figured out that if you pester that poor AI enough, eventually a real person has to get involved. So don't think that chat bot is going to make all your problems go away either.
Set customer expectations early and often, otherwise your customers will either take advantage of your limited resources or grow frustrated that you can't deliver on what that chat bubble is promising.
3. There's always one more thing
You know that point in a startup project where you're at a team meeting and you're all looking around at each other wondering what you should work on because you don't have any ideas for features and there's no bugs or improvements because the app is just perfect?
Oh wait, that's not a thing. I've never heard of any software project that is lacking in things to do. There's always one missing feature, one too many bugs, or one more improvement. There's always plenty of ideas for your app. The real challenge is finding the right ones to work on.
John Doerr said, "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything". The issue is that there's rarely enough time to execute all of our ideas and even if we had time, that doesn't mean we should execute. More importantly an app that tries to be everything to everyone ends up not being useful to anyone (see point1about an app having opinions). So, just because we have an idea, doesn't mean we should execute on it.
You know what one of the best ways to get an overwhelming amount of ideas that you should probably not execute on is? Add live chat support and connect it to your issue tracking software.
I don't know how many support conversations I've had that started out with "Oh my gosh, your app is exactly what we're looking for!" and ended with "Ok now we just need this10 point list of features and changes in order for it to be perfect."
Again, this is a fine line to walk because as I mentioned in my last point, listening to your customers is critical to providing them with a product that solves their problem and delivers value. I've often been the developer that wants to ignore customers and just stay focused in code land. That's bad. Customers our your most valuable insight because they are your market.
Writing code that doesn't deliver value to your customers is a waste of time and resources.
But listening to everything, every one of your customers says, is a sure fire way to die by a thousand cuts. It's very possible your customers don't know what's going to deliver them the most value. Sometimes we need to say no to what the customer thinks is valuable so that we can deliver true value in better ways. That doesn't mean we don't listen and re-orient ourselves around our customers. It just means we're strategic about how much we listen to.
If you don't want to overwhelm yourself and your team it's important to create healthy barriers between your project planning and your customers.
There are some rare occasions where an incoming request or issue should be moved to top priority but that should be the exception not the rule. Otherwise, you'll be ruled by whoever makes the most noise in your support system.
Regardless of your customer support tools, your customers need to felt heard without hearing that their issue is now your top priority.
Silver Lining
Ok before I start to sound like I want to go back to old school call centers and email contact forms, let's try to tie a nice little bow on this without being too grumpy. I'm not trying to say that chat support is bad and should never be used. I'm also not saying that you should ignore your customers or treat them like idiots.
Don't get me wrong there's some great benefits of having instant chat support. You can gain a fantastic connection with your customer base. You can build loyalty and relationship where there would otherwise be none.
You can get instant feedback and insight into the ways your market is using (or isn't using) your app. You can respond instantly when you notice trends in what your market wants and allow your customers to see that you really care about creating a solution that they actually need.
All these and many more are fantastic reasons to offer what I've been referring to as live chat support. But just dropping a pretty little chat bubble in your app without having a plan is probably going to cause more problems than it solves.
As you consider bringing in one of these awesome customer support tools I would encourage you to think about these 3 basic principles for the sake of you, your customers, and the future of your app.
Chat support doesn't replace good documentation and solid UX. You MUST build a top notch knowledge base to help your customers understand and adopt the way your application is meant to be used.
Chat support doesn't replace setting realistic expectations for your customers. Make sure your support tool isn't telling lies to your customers. When are you available? What are you willing to do? How long will things take? Be honest and follow through on what you say you'll do. Your customers will respect that transparency.
Chat support doesn't replace your project management tool. You need to create healthy barriers between your development process and your customers. Their requests and concerns should be heard without impacting your current momentum.