 All right, we're good. Mark is the Operations Manager of Server Press LLC, a software company focused on workflow products and services pertaining to the WordPress community. He has spoken, organized, and worked as a sponsor for several word camps over the past several years, and he believes strongly that the community is what makes WordPress so powerful. He spoke on topics ranging from business marketing, customer service development, and fitness, as well as talking about word camps, AT word camps. Mark lives in Milwaukee with his wife, his nine children, ladies and gentlemen, nine children. Three dogs, excuse me, three cats, two dogs, his son's snake, and a bunch of fish, speaking of zoos. In between times with his family at work, he enjoys his photography and working out, okay, the working out part really is not true at all. Mark actually hates working out, but he does it anyway. Mark's here from Wisconsin to talk to us about how to win at customer service. Ladies and gentlemen, Mark Benzikine. They say that right? Benzikine? Benzikine, all right, good deal. Hi. Do you guys mind if I sit down to do this? I have a lot of reading to do and a lot of talking, and I'm gonna be talking at about 50 miles a second, so. I was in a Toys R Us with my parents who were visiting from California in the middle of January one year on a Sunday, and I broke the cardinal rule of reading your email on a Sunday while in a Toys R Us with your parents. And I was here with a barrage of emails from this one customer who apparently was in a different country and had a few hours on me. OMG, you deployed it all wrong, you erased my own website. We do a service, one of our services is we deploy websites for customers who have built their sites locally and might have an issue with deploying it on a live site. It was specifically said to deploy on such and such.com. This is so unprofessional, kindly contact me immediately. I am absolutely flabbergasted. This is outrageous. Do you ever bother to read the info on the forum? I never gave username password to the root where my main site is installed just to the subdomain. He goes on and on. I am in total meltdown here, what the hell did you do? Greg Franklin is one of our support people. He's also one of my business partners. You'll also notice it says this thread was merged from a different conversation. This is because each one of these was a separate trouble ticket that was submitted. Even the deployment sucks, it doesn't work. This is absolutely shameful. Shame on you, my Skype is such and such. I expect someone to contact me ASAP. Keep in mind, I'm in Toys R Us, rest in peace, running up and down the aisles. Getting more and more worked up over this. You ruined my website, you misinstalled the other website, I can't access my WP admin, ridiculous, what's wrong with you? I am taking a huge dent in my reputation. A client website, confidential, is not splashed over my main URL without any possibility of access to WP admin. What were you thinking? He also added, as you can see, a nice little screenshot named desktopsoverscuredup.png. I can't access the WP admin of my main website, I guess you messed up the DB real good. The tweets. So it's not bad enough that he's emailing us privately. Yeah, no one will answer. I can see you are seeing this, this is beyond nightmare. Please reply ASAP, this is a disaster. No love for you team, totally feeling awful, you just killed my main website, way to go. Just totally ruined my day, your assistant deployment just killed my site. What a botched work. Desktop server, I can see you are seeing this, this is beyond nightmare, he sent it again. Yeah, no one will answer. Oh, by the way. Wow, just poking around my console, what a mess. Artist server, you obviously didn't read your own form. You have to be a total noob to have completely disrespect to your clients to leave such a mess and wreck so much havoc on someone else's website. Both websites are not working, some parts are installed here, some there, username and password are lost are non-responsive, databases having fatal errors. I can't even begin to imagine how this unfolded. Really, this is beyond bad. So I was sitting on a panel a few years ago with Tony Perez and he said this and it's stuck with me. When somebody says you screwed me, which is essentially what this person said, it's like somebody is calling your baby ugly. So when you get something like that, they say that with customer service, one of the first things you have to do is have empathy for the customer. I can tell you at this point I had absolutely no empathy for this customer. That's the honest and goodness truth. But I needed to in order to address his concerns because he was a paying customer and we might have screwed something up, right? So before I even addressed him in Toys R Us from my phone and I have fat fingers and I type slowly on my phone, which you will see later, I had to step back and I always ask myself these four questions before I even address a customer. Is there any truth to what they said? Did we screw up? Am I reading emotionally or reacting emotionally or am I responding logically? What are they really saying between the lines? And this is what I want to talk about because this has to do with the empathy part of things. And are they really calling my baby ugly? Nine kids, right? So anyway, so in my opinion, based on having gone through a lot of trouble tickets and having done customer support for a long time, these are the five top reasons that people tend to be motivated to do what this particular customer did. They have a lack of trust, they've developed a lack of trust. Something didn't go as expected. They're under a lot of pressure. They have a lack of education or information and they're in panic mode. So I'm gonna just address a couple of these and I'll probably skip through a few slides because this is a lightning talk and this really could go on for an hour. But OMG, you deployed it all wrong. So we have panic here. You deployed it all wrong. Something didn't go as expected. You erased my own website. This person has a lack of education. This is so unprofessional. Once again, lack of trust. I am absolutely flabbergasted that you managed to do such a stupid mistake. Lack of trust, something didn't go as expected and lack of education again. And then he goes on and we have lack of trust, lack of trust, lack of trust, panic, lack of trust, lack of education, lack of education, lack of trust. You can see that these are the themes that no matter what he says, you can always bring it down to one of those five things. And then you can start to say, okay, I can understand why this person is angry because he's speaking from these points of view. These are the emotions he's feeling and this is what's driving him to do what he's doing. So before you address the customer, these are the things that I always try to remember. One is a team effort and the team is not just you and the people you work with. It's you and your customer. You have to form an alliance in order to work through a problem. That makes him a team maker, him or her. Your ego doesn't count, but your company reputation does. So forget about how it makes you feel and whether you feel this big by the time you're done. Your company reputation is what matters here. There's no place for emotion when you're dealing with a customer. If you don't feel like you can remove emotion from your response, wait to respond or turn it over to someone else and don't take it personally and don't get personal even though it is just business. So my response and you can see all my slides which has all of this. If you want to read all of it, I'm not gonna read all these verbatim but I started out with apology. Then the next thing I do is I address the panic. I say, let's step back for a moment. In other words, take a breath, relax. And then paragraph one, I start to educate him. And then near the end of the paragraph, if you look, you'll see, I explained through education and I explained that we know what we're doing. So I'm working on starting to build this trust back. Once again, paragraph two is about educating the customer very gently, very carefully. And then paragraph three is we've done this a million times. We know what we're doing. We are experts at this. Once again, once someone sees you as an expert, they trust you. More education. And then, hey, I need from you your backup. Let's become teammates and let's work through this. But and then I say, you know, let's give me your backup. We'll take a look at it, but you're in charge. What would you like us to do next? So he's a teammate but he's kind of in charge of the situation. Now you think at this point, you get, okay, he explained it all really well. I'm really happy. I'm gonna be really nice to this guy. Of course, that's not the case. Let me inform you, Mr. Benzikane, anything that starts out like that, you know is not gonna end well. I triple check the info before submitting it. The only conclusion is that you messed up. Let me show you why. And then he goes into why he thinks we messed up. I expect a personal communication until this is solved. So he's having trust issues, press issues, educations, didn't go as expected, panic. In short, he's having a total meltdown at this point. So in cases like this, I don't personally believe that you always soft shoe a customer. Sometimes you have to give them a little bit of tough love. Now you still don't do it with emotion, but you have to be a little bit firm. So my response was very simply, sir, he addressed me kind of firmly. I addressed him not by his name, I called him sir. I am interested in helping you, but you seem to be only interested in throwing out accusations despite, and these are my fat finger typos on my phone, being presented with the preceding information. I'm sorry you upset, but once again, this was not a malfunction of our process. If you're interested in working with us to resolve this, please provide us with the copy of your latest backup. So once again, I'm kind of putting the ball back in his court by doing this. I'm reminding him that we know what we're doing. I'm reminding him I want him to be a teammate so we can solve this. I want him to review the information that I already presented him with to educate him. In other words, sir, you got bad luck. And let's fix this thing. That's my daughter, by the way. That's a family motto. So this is the turning point. At this point, you can see he softens a little bit. Which backup? The site I developed locally. Also, I am not into accusation. I'm trying to understand what happened. See a little bit of turning around here, right? I want to know what's going on here. So he's starting to rebuild some trust. Starting to rebuild. He's starting to want to get educated. Even though I educated him earlier, he's starting to actually be interested in being educated. Then I'm much nicer in return as a result. I was referring to the backup yet and I'm clear with what I want. And I explain I'm not in front of a computer and it's a Sunday. He says I'm aware this is Sunday but I can't wait. I would appreciate it if you'd transfer me to another support assistant. So you can see here it's pressure. I need to solve this ASAP. So I say I'll see if Steve is available. Steve is our main developer. He's our lead developer. He's the lead developer and knows every trick in the book. Last question though, are we talking about a subdomain or a sub directory? This was one last piece of information that I asked earlier that he did not respond to. So once again, I'm building trust by showing him he's our priority by bringing in the expert on a Sunday. Thank you. I appreciate it. We were talking about a subdomain. He answered the question that I had asked twice before. Anyway, I have put my world on hold. I really need to solve. So we can see once again pressure is really pushing him. And this is what is the underlying current of everything that's gone on here. This is really what it boils down to. And I give him an update. I'm still trying to get in touch with someone. Some Sundays are typically slow as support. We're working together but I'm giving you information. We're not going anywhere. We're still here for you. Thank you. I'm looking forward to hearing from him. Enjoy your day off. See, so now we're best friends. I give him, hey, Steve responded to me. So I'm giving him constant, we don't have anything for you but he's on it. An update. So we now have a resolution, right? But what about Facebook and Twitter? So here we have this Facebook post. I'm not gonna read this all to you but I publicly because this is written, you have to keep in mind when you're dealing with Facebook and Twitter, you're not necessarily addressing the customer. You're addressing the audience and you have to pay attention to that. And so in this particular case, while I don't ever, ever recommend airing the dirty laundry, I had to explain everything, single thing that went on. What actually happened was he had hired a web development firm in China who had gone in the night before and totally messed up the website. It really had nothing to do with us. But he didn't tell us that until later. We actually did some, some diagnostics and some digging and figured out that this was the case. So I had to post something because if nothing was said, the audience that comes to our Facebook page is gonna think, oh Facebook, I mean a server press does not care about their customers, which of course we do. We care deeply about each and every one of our customers. And then he posts in response to my Facebook post, this ends here, I was wrong to publish this on your wall and it's a big mistake on my part which I regret. Your support team was wonderful and I can't and I can take you to being offended and I wish I could take it back. You showed amazing attitude, et cetera et cetera you can read and admits that he was in full meltdown mode. Once you solve their problem, attitude changes. So winning. And that is how you take a customer, read between the lines, learn how to have empathy for them and turn them into a customer for life. By the way, this happened four years ago and he is still a customer of ours. I have time for one question. What's that? Oh the slides are on speaker deck. I will tweet them out. So I expect every single person in this room to follow me on Twitter so that I can tweet them out. How's that for marketing? And I will tweet them out but it's on speaker deck. I believe Java Boy 42 is my handle on speaker deck and I just put them out but I will tweet them out very shortly. Any other questions? At Mark Benzak, right? There, all right. I still can't jump. Any other questions? Yes sir. Yes. Yes, it is true that in this day and age, the question is in this day and age, don't people expect you to operate 24-7? That is true. I am a big fan of setting customer expectations. In our auto responder, we actually say we answer email support between these hours and these hours. We actually do also do voice support from time to time but we try to keep it to email support. And since we are a software company, we deal with people all over the world. It can get a little bit tough but our auto responder does state this is when you can expect an email response from us within X number of hours. And we don't generally, we have about, I don't know, 60,000 customers and we generally don't have too many problems with people saying I need an answer right this second. They get that auto response and it's good enough because setting customer expectation upfront is always the key to that. Okay, any others? Yes. The question is how many people do we have in our support team and how do we make sure that the quality is consistent from the top down essentially, right? The answer to that is, and this is gonna kind of amaze some people here, we are a company of four people. We have one person that handles almost all of our support and that is Greg and he does an amazing, amazing job. I will get called into support, I mostly do operations now so I don't do as much support as I used to. One, we have at times brought people in to handle support and we shadow them for about three weeks. We have a ton of documentation that we've written. We actually, because most of our customers are developers and designers, they like to solve their own problems. So for us, we found that the more documentation that we can have out there, the easier it is for us from a support standpoint because they like to find their own answers most of the time. Oh, that's it, all right. Thank you. Thanks so much.