Customer Service & the Last.fm forums

From Random Writings

A Techmosis presentation.

This presentation covers three things:

• Why the forums are important
• How to use them
• Some favourite bits.

Contents 1 Before we get started 2 Marketing then and now 3 Back to Last.fm 4 Dealing with the forum 5 Dealing with people [on the forums] 6 Favourite bits

[edit] Before we get started

• This is all going to be a little bit narcissistic; it's not an official Last.fm thing, it's just my view. But I think it's a good view, and if all goes to plan you shouldn't notice me navel-gazing.
• I'm going to presume, as well, that you've got a soul. I warn you now: I'm shameless. I'm going to use words like 'marketing' and phrases like 'sell your product' and not be the least bit embarrassed. I'm brazen, I know. The assumption here is that you've got something worth using – something people like. But you've got to sell it to them – if you give it away you'll soon be hungry. And if they don't know about it, they can't buy it. Thus, selling and marketing. Selling is short for 'thing that lets you eat and have a house,' and 'marketing' is short for 'letting people know they can buy this cool dingus.'

[edit] Marketing then and now

• Before we get to the forums we're going to take a step back and look at how the world is different now to how it was then. Bear with me.
• A lot of what I'm about to say comes from these two sources: Seth Godin & "How to win friends and influence people." Seth Godin is a marketer who writes a blog you really should read. Posts are short and insightful. Marketing's not a dirty word, if you do it right.
• So. 'Then' – I'm going to say 'then', and you can think '20 years ago', but there's no clear line – you had a product, and you wanted people to buy it. What did you do? You threw money at the problem, and bought as much marketing as you could. TV ads and newspaper spreads and sponsorships.
• It was a scattergun approach, and the person with the biggest budget won. Occasionally the best idea won, but you couldn't pick the winners in advance. "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half," said Lord Leverhulme.
• Chimps drinking tea? Really? You'd predict that?
• But this doesn't work any more. People aren't watching TV, and if they are it's through torrents and TiVo, so they skip the ads. Nobody buys papers. And if you're launching a product then you're going up against people who still have giant advertising budgets. They will crush you.
• So today, you can't sell your product like you used to. Fortunately, the internet has made two key differences for you.
  • The first one isn't relevant at all to this talk, but it's interesting. You've got much more focused communities and subgroups. People centre around their own interests. 20 years ago if you had a product devoted to vegan feminist knitters, you were out of luck. Couldn't find them. Today... So you can run ads, or sponsor blogs, and be sure that your adverts are reaching the right eyeballs.
  • But that's really smaller, because people have adblockers and ignore adverts. What's important is not that you can reach the right people, it's that people share stuff. People love to trade links, to share neat stuff, to talk to their friends about cool stuff they've found. And this can be on a grand scale, or a personal scale.
• So – and this is a key thing, here – how do you get people to talk about you? Be remarkable. That's it. If you're remarkable it means you're worth talking about. If you look out the window on a train journey you'll see normal cows, and they're alright, but you'll get bored of them quickly. I was on a train recently and I saw a shaggy cow, like some kind of yak, and that held my interest for a bit. But if you looked out the window and saw a purple cow – you'd be talking about it for days, right?
• Being remarkable shouldn't be a gimmick. It means making or doing something worthwhile. So here's some examples. There's a whole spectrum of remarkable, and it's not necessarily about the product.
  • Dealextreme. Dealextreme is an online store that offers free delivery on everything, and sells a lot of entertaining junk. It's a gadget shop. Jonty, Laurie, and I spent an hour in #sys last Saturday at midnight exchanging product links, and laughing our asses off. A combination of 'WTF' and 'How much? *Buy*'. So it's remarkable for its catalogue and the free shipping. If you want a cow torch with lights in the nostrils, for 78¢ it's yours.
  • Zappos. Zappos are a canonical example of remarkable. They're a US online shoe store who are relentlessly focused on customer service. They've got this no-quibble returns policy and pay for shipping both ways. And no-quibble means no-quibble. There are people who buy a pair of shoes, wear them for a week, and return them for another pair, and do this forever. Months or years at a time. So what do Zappos do? They let them, cheerfully and happily. Does this cost them money? Yes. But you bet the people who do this tell their friends about how awesome Zappos' service is, and their friends buy shoes and don't try to game the system. Lots of people say 'no ifs or buts,' but not many places actually work that way. So companies that do are remarkable.
  • Little Miss Match. Little Miss Match is a sock company. Boring, right? Online socks? Pff. But. When you buy socks from this place, you get three socks, and none of them match. That's the only way to buy it from them. Turns out some people really like mismatched socks.
• The perfect is the enemy of the good, they say, but the Good is the enemy of the remarkable. Good meets expectations. Noboy talks about good – except when things go bad.
  • Mobile phone carriers are good. T-Mobile is good. You dial, the other person's phone rings. You send a text, they get it. Nobody talks about this. Jonty talks about T-Mobile, but only because he his G-phone had a fault and it took them 3 weeks to fix it. And when he got his phone back all his data was wiped, even though it was just fixing a cable in the screen.
  • Banks are good. You pay your money in and they don't lose it down the back of the sofa, your debit card works in shops. Nobody talks about banks, unless they went over their overdraft limit by 20p and got charged £30 for it, or they insist on you bringing some print-out along with you when you've got your passport and cashcard with you already.
• In summary: good is not good enough.
• So what are you shooting for with remarkable? The boring answer is 'more sales,' but I prefer to think of it as 'love'. You want people to feel like you love them – that they're special. Meeting their needs is good. Making them feel awesome is remarkable.

[edit] Back to Last.fm

• So how does this apply to us? Is Last.fm good? Definitely. Is Last.fm remarkable? Probably. We do a lot of things right. A lot of people love us. We're 80% of the way there, just by being us.
• But we fall down when it comes to talking to people. Call it 'customer service' if you like, but I'll stick with 'talking to people'. It's not just about help – it's as much about listening to people who want to tell us things. It should be the highlight of our day when someone gets in touch. By phone, by email, by post, by forum.
• Take a phone call. Someone's taken the trouble to hunt down our number, figure out our office hours, and call in. They're focused, interested, paying attention, and willing to trust us. And we bounce them straight to voicemail. When someone emails office@, does anyone read it? Does anyone reply? Why not? These people are reaching out to us, and we're ignoring them. This is a pretty shitty thing to do.
• And it doesn't have to be this way. Office@ gets 100 messages a day, but 90 of them are spam. 3 of them are recruiters. 3 of them are journalists looking for something. So that's only 6 people who are asking for help, and most of them just need to be pointed to the FAQ anyway. This is not some kind of giant workload.
• And this really is the astonishing thing: nobody does this. It's not some giant deluge that's threatening to overwhelm us unless we throttle it back, but there's no website near our size or repute that lets users talk to developers directly, or has a staffed phone line, or will talk to people who walk in the door. It's not a huge workload, so why not do it? Wouldn't that be remarkable?
• Anyway. What makes Last.fm remarkable? Well, one thing is this: [robot at the helm]. But what makes this remarkable? [Norman]. How about this? [Visual radio]. But what makes this remarkable? [James, Robin, Davids]. How about this? [Tags tube on Playground]. [Olivier].
• It's the people, right? That's one of the best things about working here – the people you work with. Having those people talk to the users directly makes us a little more remarkable, and doesn't take much time.
• Customer service isn't just the job of the customer service people. You can't leave it up to Laura, Matt K, and Annett. Annett's part-time, for a start, and we've got millions of users. Three people can't be an expert on absolutely everything we make. Why won't the client scrobble? Why does my 'Now Listening' say one thing and the 'Recently Listened Tracks' say another? Is this advert breaking the rules? Why won't this app work on my blackberry? Often these questions have easy answers – if you know who to ask.
• Good answers let the users help themselves. The forums are searchable, and people have memories. There's 20 or 30 ordinary users who post in the forums just because.
• It's a great way to find out what's broken. Our users are quick off the mark. If you start your day by checking the front page of Web Site Support every day, you'll soon have an idea of what features people want and what our biggest bugs are.
• It's surprisingly rewarding. People are delighted when you write back to them, even if you're saying "Sorry, we can't fix that at the moment." They'd rather have an authoritative response than no response at all. It will give you a warm fuzzy feeling – trust me.

[edit] Dealing with the forum

• Don't worry about the negativity; it's an aspect of the medium. If someone likes something we do, they'll say "Huh. Cool." If they really like it, they'll post on Twitter or Facebook or their blog. If they dislike it, or it doesn't work, they'll come to the forum. Sometimes users don't realise this either – several posts about the radio not working will turn into "WHY DOESN'T LAST.FM FIX THIS PROBLEM NOBODY CAN LISTEN," and you have to gently explain that while yes, there are 10 people having radio problems right now, there are 20,000 people listening without problems.
• Remember that every post is because a user cares. Even our forum regulars who love to complain about everything. They're there because they care about what we do. They want it to work, and it doesn't. Or it doesn't work the way they like. It takes time and effort to write a message, and they've gone to that effort because they care. So see past the histrionics and the screaming.
• Be direct. Use clear language. The joy of the forum is that it's very much person-to-person, rather than official announcement. Refer to people by name, rather than as "customers" or "stakeholders". I like to say 'problem' rather than 'issue'. You should say 'sorry' rather than 'apologies for any inconvenience'.
• Don't be afraid to say no. There's some stuff we're not planning to do, or doesn't make sense, or isn't feasible. For instance, artist connections to groups are limited to 200, because they don't perform well if you go over that limit. Every so often people complain about this, and think we've just picked an arbitrary number. It's OK to tell people that the limit's there for technical reasons, and we've looked at making it higher but can't at the moment.
• Don't be afraid to say things. You're not posting on the blog, nothing you say will end up on TV as 'A Last.fm spokesperson said...' Be sensible – don't give out the XBox launch date, don't publish our recommendation algorithms, don't give them Norman's day rate – but it's OK to say that we're working on improving the track selection algorithm, or we'd like to do more with loved tracks too, or we're looking at a problem and trying to fix it. And remember – be direct. Include as much wiggle room as you need, but no more.
• Be polite in public, blow off steam in private. Mock privately, help publicly.
• Users aren't experts, and that's OK. Programming is hard and music licensing is arcane. People don't understand that what they ask for is a lot of work, and can't be turned around on a dime. You can explain this stuff to people – they don't need the nitty-gritty, just the overview. And if they're persistently douchey about it being easy, link them to the jobs page.
• Adding forum links to JIRA is really helpful. Whenever I write up a site release announcement I can link back to problem threads, which shows that problems are getting fixed. With other bugs it makes it easy for the person who fixes it to tell the people affected that it's fixed now.
• Remember we're proactive, not reactive. There's a lot of stuff that the users on the forums really, really want. We'd like some of those too, but we've got our own roadmaps. Don't get focused on the forums above all else.

[edit] Dealing with people [on the forums]

• So hopefully I've convinced you that talking to users is something you want to do. Here's some handy tips.
• Fundamentally, all of this is common sense. You know this stuff already. But it's handy to have it spelled out. Thus, read "How to win friends and influence people." It's got kind of a sucky title, but you could also call this book "How to be nice." You can get the gist of this from Wikipedia, and I recommend reviewing the bullet points often, but the book will give you a more expansive view.
• Some particular key points:
  • Give honest and sincere appreciation. If someone reports a bug, say thank you. If a user goes above and beyond – say, a particularly helpful post or makes an awesome app with our API – throw them a free month's subscription.
  • Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely. This ties in with people writing in because they care. If someone's profile is a tea page, this is a big problem for them. Take it seriously, don't think "Oh, it's just one user."
  • Avoid arguments. You don't have to have the last word.
  • If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. Nobody's going to sue us if we say we fucked up. A sincere apology is better than trying to disguise it. This doesn't mean you have to be a walkover, though, and you can explain how we're trying to do better.
  • Sympathise with the other person. How would you feel if your profile page was unavailable for 2 weeks and all you saw was a tea page?
• This isn't about glad-handing people, it's about a perspective, and remembering that there's a real person on the other end of the screen.
• Some other tips:
  • Maintain a sense of humour. There's some funny stuff out there.
  • Don't take sides.
  • Credit where credit is due. If a user's given a good reply before you got to the thread but you want to give more details, say something like "StudleyUK's totally right about this, but you may also like to know that..."
  • A light touch works better than heavy-handedness. Don't take yourself too seriously. Ask people nicely to behave if they get angry or abusive. You don't have to meet fire with fire. This goes for trolls too; being nice to people is surprisingly effective.

[edit] Favourite bits

Some of these are ridiculous, others are funny, others are plain surprising.

• The ever-present clock bug. Don't forget that even adamant users can be wrong.
• The angry user apologising for being a dick.
• The illustrated help post from some random user. I gave him a subscription for this.
• Good morning Nazis.