Customer Service is the New Marketing

• June 22nd, 2007 /
•  Chris Schultz

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been making some major decisions about siteMighty. We’re learning what our strengths are, and what we have to work on. It’s been an exciting and busy time around here, and were making some tweaks to our business model based on feedback they were getting from our users.

During the course of the last month our Director of Marketing, Blake, has become our Customer Support Guru. His phone rings all day long, he answers support tickets at 9pm at night and on weekends, and his instant messenger window pops up every 30 seconds. If this conjures up images of customer service hell, bear with me, just like Blake’s been doing.

We recognized that this was becoming unsustainable for him a few weeks ago, and we decided to do something about it. So, do we take our phone number off the website, let our support tickets linger, and leave our customers to fend for themselves? No way!

As much time as support is taking up, we love it. Our customers are reaching out to us, they’re using the siteMighty, they’re trying to learn affiliate marketing, they’re working hard to build their businesses. All of these touches with our customers are opportunities for us to show how much we love them. It’s a lot better than the alternative, no customers, no calls.

In March at the SXSW interactive conference, we went to a presentation that included Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com. The presentation was titled Customer Service is the New Marketing. It was about how to WOW customers with support that exceeds their wildest expectations. This is how you get customers to stay with you, this is how you get customers talking about you. This is our opportunity.

So here’s what we’re going to do:

We notified our users this week that as of July 15th, personal support will be available for free customers for 30 days, and then limited only to paid accounts. Self-serve support like the FAQ and Knowledge Base will always be free for all users. After all, it costs us a lot of money for Blake to be on the phone for hours. We can give the software away for free, but getting personal support with learning affiliate marketing and how to market your site will cost you $19 a month. This seems like a fair bargain, and and it will enable us to provide an even higher level of support to our paying customers.

On top of that we are embarking on a month-long company-wide project to enhance our support at all levels.

• We have a great team of interns who are learning siteMighty from scratch. they will be live blogging about their experience in setting up siteMighty sites throughout the summer. This will create great content for us that will serve as a step-by-step guide to setting up a siteMighty site and that we’ll include in training guides and FAQs.
• We are overhauling our siteMighty support system. We’re building a huge database of FAQs as well as a searchable Knowledge Base.
• We are writing a training e-book that will serve as a guide to getting started with marketing your SiteMighty site.
• We’ve already launched 24/7/365 live chat support powered by Clixconnect. This has already substantially increased our rate of sign up and customer satisfaction because people can get a hold of a real person at the very moment they have a question.
• We’re creating screen cast videos that will be embedded in siteMighty at various points users might have questions.

We’re really excited about all these upgrades. We are in the business of putting people in business, so if we can help our users succeed they’ll stick around.

We really believe that customer service is the new marketing And we’re excited to get ourselves in the position to provide better support than ever to our users. If you are user now, thank you, if you’re not why not sign up and give us a try.

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