Help Scout

The best way to ensure that empathy is part of your customer conversations is for it to be part of your overall team culture. Below are three things you can do to build a culture of empathy in your customer service team: 👩🏫 Offer training Offer agents training on how to express empathy while still being professional. This could be something you do during onboarding followed by periodic refreshers. 📋 Evaluate for empathy Have a quality assurance (QA) program that checks conversations for markers of empathy. You can also send out post-interaction surveys that ask questions to see if the customer felt understood. 🗣️ Keep the conversation going Make empathy a regular topic of conversation within your team. Set up regular cadences to highlight customer interactions you thought were highly empathetic. How do you encourage empathy on your team? Share your tips below ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/gS9ChsfT

While we love publishing helpful support content, we also enjoy sharing what other folks in our company are working on. Earlier this year, we published a piece written by Juan Pablo L., a senior JavaScript engineer here at Help Scout. It's all about color theory and HSL and it’s a great read, even for folks who don't know much (or anything) about CSS. If you missed it the first time around, give it a read! 🎨 https://lnkd.in/gFT4zrcp

ICYMI: This week Help Scout became Shopify Plus Certified! 🛍 There are only ~100 partners who meet Shopify’s high standards for performance, reliability, and security. We’re excited to be one of them as we continue to help growing ecommerce businesses serve their customers through a seamless Shopify integration, continuous improvements, and best in class support. https://lnkd.in/gyVypKv8

Does your support operations include a chatbot? If so, AI transparency should be top of mind. Keeping your customers in the loop when it comes to AI usage helps build trust, protects your business from litigation, and depending on your location, is often the law. If your business is using AI to provide direct support to customers, here are a few things you can do to provide transparency: - Provide data, privacy, and security disclosures and controls - Let customers know when they’re talking to a bot. - Let them know why a bot is being used. - Explain how it works and what it can do. - Disclose its limitations. - Make it easy to reach a human. - Give alternatives if the bot starts to misbehave. For more on the importance of AI transparency, check out this piece by Stephanie Lundberg: https://lnkd.in/edBp34mt

We’ve got news for our customers and friends on Shopify: Help Scout has officially joined the Shopify Plus Certified App Program! 🎉 This milestone only deepens our commitment to being the go-to customer support solution for businesses running and growing on Shopify. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gyVypKv8

What delineates an AI-first strategy from a customer-first strategy? Our philosophy: We will not ship an AI feature until it’s proven (by both data and our own support team) to be a better solution for the customer.

Too many businesses forget that their customers’ experience of dealing with the company doesn’t map neatly onto their internal departments. The customer journey touches many different points and requires cross-team efforts to improve. This month on The Supportive Podcast, we’re doing something different, sharing an episode of the excellent Epochal Growth podcast from Sarah Caminiti in which she chats with Ben McCormack about the why and how of customer journey mapping. Click the link below or search for The Supportive in your podcast player to get listening. https://lnkd.in/gYqeviav

From one customer-centric CEO to another 🤝 In our recent Conversation Corner webinar about whole company support, we played this clip from Zapier Co-founder & CEO Wade Foster about the power of getting more teams from across the company into the queue, talking to customers live. When we asked our CEO Nick Francis to react live, he was pretty straightforward: “Wade absolutely gets it.” Watch Wade’s cameo below [and check out the whole convo at the link in the comments!] https://lnkd.in/em5pcc-r

Even though Mathew Patterson is on sabbatical this month, there’s a new episode available of The Supportive Podcast. Mat shares one of his favorite episodes of Sarah Caminiti's Epochal Growth, featuring an interview with Ben McCormack on customer journey mapping. Search for The Supportive in your podcast player of choice to subscribe and listen to every episode.

How did Hawaii, rubbish hotel internet, and a bunch of pale, tipsy tech nerds turn Mathew Patterson into a “radicalized whole company support believer”? Watch to find out ⬇️