We want to provide remarkable customer service.  Our boss Joel has some tips on how we do that, including treating your customer service persona as a puppet, taking the blame for problems, and cheerfully refunding customers at the drop of a hat.  They're great.  Today I'll discuss a few other nuances of our customer service practices, and how FogBugz helps.

Ralph Wilson mentioned in his great textbook Help! The Art of Computer Technical Support (Peachpit Press, 1991) that customer service, via email, phone, or face-to-face, is emotional labor.  We're mechanics, yes, but we're also counselors.  If you have zero training and countdown timers on your support calls, then you're set up for frustration, failure, and burnout. You need breaks, you need tools, and you need techniques and training.

• Breaks: Our official office hours for phone support are 9am-5pm, Eastern Time, Monday through Friday (although in practice we often stay here an hour or two later).  During that time, we have 2-6 people available to answer sales and customer support calls.  This means we can take snack, lunch, bathroom, and discussion breaks without always diving back to our desks at the first ring.

• Tools:  The best tool in our toolbox is the customer service functions in FogBugz.  Our Asterisk phone system stores voicemails in there, we can search for similar problems from other customers, and all previous emails from a particular correspondent are a click away.  BugzScout means we get error messages with the file and line number, so we can track down exactly where in the code an error occurred.  (One caller has been amazed that I can browse the source -- hey, customers can too!)   Fog Creek Copilot shaves hours off some calls, because a picture is worth a thousand words.  My colleague Jason just wrote about our use of VMWare for approximating a customer's setup (especially when Copilot is not an option) and testing.  And our Asterisk switchboard, wireless headsets, and programmable phones reduce phone support hassles.

• Training: At Fog Creek, front-line customer support folks use FogBugz to enter bugs and manage customer help requests, Fog Creek Copilot to fix FogBugz problems for customers, and CityDesk to write documentation (including this blog!).  We're using the same software our customers use, so we know its quirks, and we can follow assumptions and jargon in help requests.  And we read the knowledge base, install FogBugz on our own computers, and answer easy questions before the harder emails and phone calls get thrown our way.

• Techniques: Wilson describes many useful techniques in Help!.  One of them: most callers welcome a bit of guidance on the call, so it's fine to structure it to get the problem solved efficiently.  As early as possible in the call (without interrupting the customer), I try to introduce myself, figure out what product's being discussed, and get the caller's name and phone number or email address.  "In case we get cut off, could I get your contact information?" always works for me.  And FogBugz makes a perfect place to store my notes as I create them during a call; you could even create a template snippet to remind yourself to gather certain information.  (This entry is already getting long, so I hope we'll talk more about specific techniques in a future post.)

The first books we management trainees read here at Fog Creek include Mike Gunderloy's book on FogBugz and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.  We need both technical and personal skills to provide great experiences to our users.  And Fog Creek helps us learn and deploy those skills, and teach them to the next round of trainees.