Umesh Gopinath
November 6, 2017
2 min read
The other day a friend (an entrepreneur and Newton user), messaged me saying he wanted to talk about our customer support process. He wanted to know how we managed to give quality responses, sometimes as quick as within 3 minutes, like how we did to an earlier query of his. He wanted to know what our team did different from his and wanted to adopt some of our best practices. He wanted to know our secret.
It felt good, for sure, but I was not surprised. Almost every app store review Newton receives, mentions the exceptional customer support we provide. I have always wished if all the organisations, I ever dealt with, did customer support like Newton. Even I’m a fan.
I spoke to my friend about our small but smart, round-the-clock support team; the tool we use — Help Scout; about saved replies and also how everyone in Newton does support, as and when required. Why we never send an automated acknowledgement mail and instead insist on a speedy reply written by one of us, answering the query or asking for more details. About how most of our mailers are plain text and are encouraging people to hit reply and talk to us — None of ours mails are ‘no-reply’. About how we take Twitter equally important and try our best to solve problems there itself rather than saying ‘write to help-desk’. How we have given confidence to our users that we are here to truly help. About how we fine-tune the work flow at every instance of we failing to give a closure to someone’s problem; to make sure that nothing falls through the crack.
What I forgot telling him was that the conscientiousness to respond and close mails or anything we are responsible for, is in our culture. It’s not just something we do specially for customer support. Every mail, internal or external, at Newton HQ is replied to within an acceptable time frame, with a resolution or an acknowledgement with ETA. It’s been then updated with regular status updates and is finally closed. We just do the same with our customers.
