If you're reading this blog, congratulations! You are a customer of SEOmoz. I've probably personally spoken to at least a few of you, and provided help and support to many more of you. Have you ever wondered how SEOmoz supports 15,000 PRO members and over 250,000 free members and blog readers? After all, Roger can't personally answer every email we receive here. He's not Santa Claus! Instead, the six mozzers that make up the Help Team answer all of the emails, phone calls, and chat requests we get every day. I want to tell you a little bit more about them and give you a look at the way we've built the SEOmoz support channels to meet our overall goal: to provide the best customer service on the planet. It's a hard goal to reach, but I can't think of any more worthwhile endeavor.
The Help Teamsters
Crissy Hall
Crissy is old school! She came to SEOmoz in the spring of 2010. Back then, the Help Team was just Sarah Bird (our COO) and Crissy, and I joined soon after. She loves the fact that she’s been able to watch our team and SEOmoz grow since she started. Things are always changing with our site and tools, and as she says, it keeps us on our toes! Her favorite part of working at SEOmoz is the balance between fun and productivity that makes our team and company such an amazing place to work. Crissy spends her time helping users with their tool and billing questions, planning kick-ass Help Team outings (we made terrariums together last month), and helping the Marketing & Ops teams keep track of our weekly membership reporting.
When she’s not in the office, Crissy likes to take her son Sam on adventures around Seattle. She likes to sew up a storm, particularly to make clothes for her toddler (instant gratification, according to her). In the "warmer" Seattle months she rides her bicycle, named "Tom Selleck," to work and back.
Megan Singley
Megan's been a help teamster for a little over a year now and loves connecting with our users. With several years of experience in customer service, she really strives to make every interaction with SEOmoz users a positive one. Besides responding to emails, calls, and chats, Megan plans and organizes our weekly software demos and investigates billing issues to keep any possible fraudsters at bay. She's also been known to do some writing, whether it be on the SEOmoz blog or in product messages throughout the site.
When not at the MozPlex, Megan likes to watch The Daily Show and Battlestar Galactica with her cat, Lily, and her awesomely-cool-fun-amazing neighbor across the hall, me! (Those are her words of course.) She also enjoys reading anything she can get her hands on (lately, it's been The Hunger Games series) and even started a library for the office. On weekends, she hangs out with friends (including lots of fellow Mozzers), goes dancing to anything from funk & soul to 90's hip hop, and cooks as much as possible.
Kenny Martin
Kenny joined up last year and is one of our few Washington natives! He grew up in a small, sleepy Northwestern town, thus is afraid of the sun. He compensates for a lack of natural energy sources by drinking copious amounts of black coffee. Kenny spends most of his time pursuing the TAGFEE dream by diagnosing tough technical issues, getting his hands dirty with a little web design, and filming each week's Whiteboard Friday.
He never wanders off too far away from his MacBook and for this reason alone his girlfriend mistakenly thinks he loves it more than her. It's probably because most of his spare time is spent designing websites or leaning about some fantastic new technology on the internet. He also loves the Daily Show, puppies, pizza, and tacos.
Nick Sayers
Nick joined our team in September last year and got up to speed lickety-split! Like the rest of our team mates, he answers customer emails, phone calls, and live chat questions. Nick has also spear-headed our new help documentation project that gives customers the resources learn anything about SEOmoz's tool set. This effort makes our company more scalable by answering customers' questions before they call, write, or chat with us, which gives them more instant gratification, as well. Needless to say, he spends a lot of his time creating screencasts and typing up FAQs. Nick has a passion for educating and helping others, so is constantly looking for new resources to show SEOmoz's customers.
Nick enjoys film, video games, reading, and cooking. He is an avid reader of anything from Eastern Philosophy to some of the nerdiest sci-fi/fantasy novels ever written. When not at work, Nick is usually spending time with his wife and partner in crime, Becky. On most nights, they cook new recipes together, play an unhealthy amount of Left 4 Dead 2 or Skyrim, and watch movies. On the weekends, Nick and Becky explore Washington and go to retro theaters. Nick is also involved in independent film-making and has produced, written, and directed a feature film and many shorts. On the sci-fi geek front, Nick has a huge collection of memorabilia from the Alien(s) films. He also has a cat named Ash after Bruce Campbell's character in the Evil Dead series. Of course, this means Nick calls her Evil Ash when she is bad.
Chiaryn Miranda
Chiaryn is the newest addition to the team, having been here for about two months. Don't let that fool you though: she's caught up real quick-like! She's been doing customer service for a long time and is working on learning new things about SEO every day. What better place to learn, eh?
When she's not in the office, she likes to make art and take photographs. She's been working on a sketchbook that will be going on a national tour. She also likes to take trips around the beautiful Seattle waterfront with her camera. When she can, she tries to take candid portraits. Check out some of her artwork on her Art House Co-Op page. She's also an avid movie fan, with a particular love of horror movies, and reads as much as possible. In her words, she'll gobble up pretty much any nonfiction book you put in front of her. That's why we call her Turkey Miranda! Just kidding - that's not why we call her that.
Aaron Wheeler
If you've made it this far, you've probably figured out that this is me! I started at SEOmoz in the summer of 2010 and am loving every minute of being here. A couple months ago I became the manager of the Help Team, which means I do what I can to support the lovely members of our team, and provide our customers with the best service on the planet. It's a tough goal - we have very discerning customers - but a goal I think we can eventually fulfill. Some background: I studied sociology and cognitive science at UC San Diego, but starting doing SEO after graduating. Turns out that ranking for attorneys in San Diego is tough work! I left San Diego early 2010 for Seattle, and eventually found my way at SEOmoz.
Besides working at a place I love, I enjoy reading (currently Steve Jobs), watching great shows (currently my third run of Deadwood), and seeing my favorite bands in Seattle's historical music venues (this month: Junip, Nada Surf, and The Asteroids Galaxy Tour). I also enjoy trying out vegan recipes with my girlfriend, Holly Haymaker, who has the coolest name in the world and a whimsical interactive e-cards site, to boot!
What Do We Do?
You know how, sometimes, you have a question about our site and tools? Or about your account or payment? We're the people you call, email, live chat, and post to our help forums for. Unlike huge companies with call centers and many tiers of support and different people doing phones and chats, though, everyone on our team does everything. It's a great way to keep everyone fully informed about site issues and keep our support fresh and agile. That's not all we do, though! Let me show you all of the ways we keep our customers happy:
Email: Using a Robust Ticketing System
When you send an email to [email protected], it gets forwarded to our ticketing system. We use ZenDesk, the same help desk software used by companies like Groupon and Box.com. ZenDesk allows us to manage customer emails, assign them to specific people, and easily share them with engineering and product so we can get answers to questions quickly! This is important because we receive over 2,000 emails a month: way too many to respond to from a single email address effectively.
How Does It Work?
When we receive an email, the sender gets an email back with a ticket number. As you see, it gets added to our queue of tickets to reply to. We try to answer 80% of tickets within 8 hours, but if it's a situation where someone has a billing problem or can't access their account (lost password, etc.), we try to answer even faster than that. Our goal is for each member of the Help Team to answer 20 tickets per day. If we don't have the knowledge to answer a question, we'll send the ticket to our engineers and product managers to get an answer. If it's a bug, we let the customer know and open a bug fix with our Triage team. They assign the bug to an engineer, who fixes it and lets them know. Triage sends it back to us when it's fixed, and we email the customer and close the ticket.
When we close a ticket, we send a one-question survey through SurveyMonkey asking how happy we made a customer with our customer service. We try to make 90% of our customers happy, and 30% of our customers delighted. Sometimes, though, we fail to satisfy a customer. When this happens, we ask for the customer's email address and ticket number so we can get in touch and make it right. I've found that when a customer has had a bad experience, reaching out to them to make it right almost always turns the situation around.
Phones: Not a Phone Bank
We get a relatively small amount of calls at SEOmoz: about 100 to 150 a week. Makes sense, as most SEOs do their research online. =) We don't have a sales team and don't do phone marketing, so the only employees that really have phones here are in Operations or the Help Team. We get a lot of calls from potential customers asking about what we do, though we do get a few from PRO members, too. Here's a chart with our phone stats for last week:
How Does it Work?
When a person calls in to SEOmoz, they usually start out talking to Hillari, our fantastic office manager. She makes sure they're not a spambot and, when they're a lovely customer, transfers them to the Help Team pool. The first available person picks it up and starts helping! Pretty straightforward process, as you telephone users know. After the call is over, we try to create a ticket and follow up with the customer to make sure they had all their questions answered. If it's an SEO question, we refer them to the Q&A or to our list of recommended SEO consultants.
Live Chat: What You Need, When You Need It
When potential customers are browsing our software sales pages, they often have questions they want answered now. Same thing goes for existing customers with questions about a payment or their account status: these are the kinds of questions people want to know the answers to quickly. Live Chat comes to the rescue! Instead of requiring a customer to call or send in an email, we usually keep someone logged into Live Chat throughout the day so customers can get help immediately. This leads to happier customers and cuts down on our ticket and phone levels. We use the awesome chat widget SnapEngage, and installed it to a few choice pages.
How Does it Work?
Kenny coordinated with SnapEngage to create a custom view of the widget. When you click "Chat Now," it pops up a dialog box that displays three FAQs, and has a field for the email address of the customer and the question they have. When they've typed those in, all they have to do is click "Message" to open a ticket, or "Live Chat" to start talking! Interesting point: we didn't always have those three FAQs. Adding them reduced chats about these topics about 90%. Yay for preemptive answers!
After we finish chatting with a customer, the chat transcript is automatically added to ZenDesk as a ticket, where we can save it for future review and for long-term tracking. We can also follow up with a customer there. If we're offline, or if a customer chooses the "Message" option instead of the "Live Chat" option, it creates a ticket from the get-go instead.
We can also track the types of computers and browsers people are using when they chat with us, which helps us diagnose the issue faster and get an idea of what our average customer needing immediate support looks like. The chart to the left is a look at last month's chatters.
Forums & Documentation: Help More People More Quickly
We maintain both our customer service and API forums through the SEOmoz help desk. We've also started adding all of our tool documentation, videos, and walkthroughs here to make them all available in the same place. This makes our Help Desk a one-stop shop for looking at frequently asked questions, checking out known issues with the site or tools, and just generally getting more knowledgeable about how to use a PRO subscription to its fullest. It's also where we ask customers to submit feature requests.
How Does it Work?
When a customer has a question, they can go to our Help Desk and do a search for the answer, or browse existing questions and documentation. Many of the forums are straight-up questions and answers, but a lot of them are longer-form pages that are part of our documentation project. We want to document the bejewels out of our tools! Yes, there will always be questions from customers, but the more information you can put in their hands early on, the more happy they'll be, and the more scalable our service becomes.
One cool feature: the Feature Request Forum has a voting system so customers can vote on the features they want to see most. Our product team reviews this feedback to get an idea of what to prioritize and what to put further down the roadmap. It's a great way to get customers more involved in SEOmoz's future!
This, That & The Other: Events, Office Tours, Webinars, Demos, Cookies...
We do a bunch of other stuff to help our customers, and it's hard to get it all down in words! We give weekly software demos to help new customers get the most out of PRO,
represent at MozCations,
give tours of the MozPlex and help out at MozCon,
and bake plenty of cookies (you gotta help your fellow mozzers out, too!):
All in all, it's a wonderful life. SEOmoz has the best customers around, and there's no other place I'd rather be. I'd love to share more with you and hear your stories about great customer service, as well as get feedback on what you'd love to see more of in the customer service biznez. Please feel free to write me in the comments, shoot me an email, or tweet me at @aaron_wheeler. See you around the site!
I feel so lucky to have all of you backing us up and supporting the Moz community. It's been fantastic working with so many of you one on one, traveling for Mozcations, working on videos, content, webinars or even just enjoying baked goods. Thank you for helping to make Moz such a great place for our team and our customers.
I am ready to get a bundel of thumbs down and dislikes again for this comment, but look Rand, SEOMoz can be do better if they stop self praise all the time. (You are doing well, and we accept it, what else do u need?)Look we look at the SEOMoz as our source of learning,sharing and discussing technical issues. SEOMoz should get mature now, with over 250,000 free users you still think you need this kind of self praise sort of things here? Surely Not! What if Matt Cutts start talking about his staff and company in Google webmaster blog every second week, instead of addressing real issues. I am saying all this, because I 've seen such kind of SEOMoz specific posts quite a few times, recently there was a post by some one named 'how we manage the SEOMoz community'.
One more thing, if someone in your staff really want to have this type of post, there are better ways to present it. Tell us about how you do things at SEOMoz, and then tell us about the best practices, and then make some recommending statement and tell us what should be done! In short you can turn such 'personal' kind of blog post into something useful.I 've heard about promoting from YOUMoz blog to SEOMoz blog, but if there is some option to demote a blog post into YOUMoz, I would like you to demote it. Not because its bad, or I will give it a thumbs down, but because it does not belong here, its like someone's personal diary shared on a techincal blog.
Such claims of "how we do customer service" should be made when you reach peak of something, the situation at the moment is that it takes a YouMoz post "SEVERAL WEEKS" to recommend, reject of even READ by SEOMoz staff, now tell me Rand, what sort of customer service is it? Look one of your staff member used so much time writing this post, another one would have read it for proof reading, another one setting it up, and then posting it and then the writer would be replying to comments here! Dont you think this time could be used to read, reject or accept the youmoz post? This is just one issue of YouMoz which I have in my mind. My point is that, SEOMoz is growing rapidly, it should not waste time on such things, you are a bigger company now, I dont know when will you realize this fact. Stop wasting time on such self concerned topics, instead try to focus on the target. Am not a native English, so my English isn't that perfect, but I just hope you understand what I am trying to deliver here, it may seems criticism, but this is what will take you one step ahead if you listen to these things.Thanks!
Thanks for the different point of view Asad.
I would say that SEOmoz always wants to feel like a small, personable and personal company. We have a lot of priorities internally and folks here work crazy hours and incredibly hard to serve the community, improve our software, produce content and do all the thousands of things required for a scaling startup.
However, we have something unique in our culture (TAGFEE) that demands a different level of commitment to transparency, to sharing our team members, to illustrating how we handle things like tickets, phone calls and help requests. That sharing may provide value to some readers and not to others like yourself, but that's true of any blog post. It's in our culture and it's asked of our team (since many years ago) to do this on a regular basis, and we're going to continue that tradition and make sure that for those who want, there's an opportunity to see inside the company's operations every few months.
In terms of YOUmoz specifically, which it sounds like triggered your complaint - that queue gets long due to a lot of submissions, many of varying quality. However, we've gotten on a very solid schedule of publishing and we're probably not going to accelerate that for the time being (at least until we have data suggesting that our readers want a higher volume of posts/day vs. feeling inundated with content - our goal isn't to become a content-production warehouse, but rather to curate and publish the good stuff).
Hope that helps!
Great to see that Rand still kept his mind in balance after getting criticism from Asad. I personally feel such kind of activities like sharing company related stuffs enriches and strengthens the relationship. I don't find anything wrong in it infct it gave us a real taste of seomoz.
Initially i as not aware of all the members of seomoz team now i can recognize each one of them!
Aidenmoor! If SEOMoz is here as a paltform for us, and we are discussing a completely different opinions here, its just because of Rand! I always expect a gentle reply from him. He knows that you cannot gather 250000 people on one platform without getting some criticism over few things.
Rand, Thats a gentleman's reply and I liked it! :)I love SEOMoz, and I love to get to know more and more about SEOMoz backend activities, believe me I am following SEOMoz as a 'Social Media', at almost every possible site you are there in! And most probably, I am the only person who has linked to his SEOMoz profile from his blog under the "Social media" section, its just because I love to socialize and being here. (some people may have doubt over it :P)There will always be the 'second view' in everything! And there is I think nothing so wrong in that!
Btw, I loved the tagfee things, where can I get more info on this tagfee thing! the idea seems nice!
The Google blog has no sense of community, just users. SEOMoz has users who are evangelists of the brand and therefore care about the people that run them. I see your point that may be true for a 5% niche of users, but for the majority of SEOMoz readers, they are Moz envangelists who like seeing content like this as the occasional breath of fresh air on the blog.
Also, how much the community likes these posts is reflected in the thumbs up. If they got 20 thumbs down, I'm sure SEOMoz would adjust.
Believe me, even I thumbed this post up, just because I know these guys put all the efforts to create this platform for us, and reaching this level where we feel comfortable sharing ideas.but the point was about the approach of being sort of you can say self centered, which if I were in command would have avoided to keep things straight and technical only!(just another business model you can say)
Another thing is that, just thumbs up is not the parameters to conlude about the success! because usually on internet, if people dont like something they have too many options and they stop visiting that site or portal whatever it may be. hardly someone care/dare to write a crticizing post on something. So if someone write a criticizing thing for you on internet specially, you should take that into consideration, its because the critic cares for you, and he has taken some time out and wrote about the issue.
Hi Asad... I think you are missing something important which is at the base of this post by Aaron: TAGFEE, where the T is "Transparent". And personally I believe that this post is an example of transparence... or are you used to get to know those people in the backstage, who daily take care that the show goes on daily?
Personally I was happy to read the stories behind the people I am used to dialogue several times during the week because of an issue or another.
And for the same reason I was happy to read the post Jennita (the "someone" you cite) about how SEOmoz deal with the very hard duty of maintaining a Community like the Moz one.
Personally, then, I believe that Aaron here, as Jennita in her post, has quite clearly explained how they have organized their job and give some hints about how with just 6 persons SEOmoz is able to deal with 15,000 paying customers and more than 250K registered users.
About the "it a takes a YouMoz SEVERAL WEEKS to [...] even read by SEOmoz staff", I suggest you to read again the Jennita post and you will see that they were very aware of that problem and that they reduced the hold on in two weeks... still a long time, but, hey... imagine that just the 1% of the Mozzers present a YouMoz in a month, they are 2,500 posts that needs to be read, edited, re-read, adjusted, corrected: as you can see, it is not an easy task.
By the way, Aaron and the other guys have nothing to do with YouMoz :).
Oh, for your information, Google is flooding of post, landing pages et al about "How Cool is Working in Google" ;)
Ciao
Completely agree with you sir.. On the other hand this actually a message to other companies how they should work in order to be transparent and grow as a company that is loved by customers itself...
I will never call it a self praising.. Hell no but if somebody is confident enough that he is right and he feels like he should come forward to become an example for other people then he should come at the front to get the job done!
First of all, I asked Rand as well, and I would like to ask you as well about 'Tagfee', and the details of it, the idea seems kinda fascinating.
YouMoz was just an example, even Rand took it as if that's what triggered my criticism, but since I am not a paid member, I dont have too much involvment in here so that was one of the things that came into mind, which I mentioned where I think SEOMoz needs to improve. I know its hard to do that, but my main point talking about YouMoz was, that instead of spending time on such posts, the time should be used in balancing the other portions of the SEOMoz which needs improvment.
Hello Asad,
I think this post will help you to understand TAGFEE: What We Believe and Why: SEOmoz's TAGFEE Tenets.
Hope that helps,
Sha
I <3 the help team, even Kenny..... =)
Thanks for the great post Aaron! My favorite post all month. As a former help teamster myself, I can attest to the high standards of customer service that the department holds itself too.
What Aaron was too modest to mention is how the Help Team acts as inspirational TAGFEE leaders for the entire Mozplex! They are the ones who set the tone of fun, professionalism and of course outstanding customer service for the whole office. Keep up the great work!
Great post, Aaron and H-teamsters! I just want to add that the Help team is an important part of our product planning and prioritization, providing our product team with invaluable input into how customers like you use our products and tools, what you couldn't live without, how well our product is working (or not), and more. They are test and dog-food our products like no one else, all on top of their work with you. And, oh, yes, the product team has serious terrarium envy!
I couldn't agree with you more Shelly! I was going to leave a comment but you phrased it perfectly and captured everything I wanted to say. Simply breathtaking! At first glance I read "H-teamsters" as "hamsters" but that didn't make sense! Then I started thinking of my pet hamster from when I was a little girl named Scooter - oh wait, she was a gerbil HAHA!
I experienced your help service couple of time and I must say your service is amazing not just for pro customers but it is awesome for free users as well. You know how to deal and give satisfaction to every customer.
Thumbs up for you.
Great customer service every time I push something in as well!
Finally Aaron! Finally we have a post from you.
You and the Help Team are simply amazing and, IMO, if any kind of Conference exists out there about Customer Care, therefore you, Chrissy, Chiaryn, Kenny, Megan and Nick you should start speaking there and teach how to run it, because - and I'm not cheesy but honest - your support to all of us Mozzers is simply amazing.
I am glad you linked to the zendesk Forums pages, which are a great resource for when you have a doubt about a functionality of the tools. And I really suggest all of you experienced Pro to attend one of the "Intro" webinars Aaron & Co. do, because they are very useful refreshers also for us long time Pro users.
Keep the great work!
Hey Aaron,
I just love this post ... I thought you guys were outstanding already, but seeing the numbers of enquiries you handle and all of the different tools you utilize to get the job done has raised the team to an even more mind blowing level of awesomeness!
Most of my email interactions with the Help team finish up with me giggling to myself in the dark: response emails that come with friendly, fun comments; cheeky survey questions that have me scheming up a witty response; and silly monkey video sign offs are just a few of the reasons. ;)
My very first call to SEOmoz was answered by you :) and had me finishing the call with a big beaming smile! Really, that is the thing I most love about SEOmoz ... I've dealt with hundreds of help desks over the years, but no other company has ever offered me REAL people who are as concerned about making sure my day is amazing as they are about fixing my software problem!
Actually, I have to confess that I've called a couple of times just to say G'day because I've felt like spreading a little TAGFEE back to the source :) I know, I know... I couldn't help it - that stuff is contagious!!
All that's left to say is THANK YOU to you and the Team for ALL that you do.
<3
Sha
WooHoo!!! I made it into the comments before Gianluca!! 8D
This post is great. Thanks Aaron & Help team for putting in the time to pull back the curtain on all the awesomeness you guys do and work on. SEOmoz wouldn't be the same company without you!
Some brands provide a half baked 'about us' sentiment; the Moz crew whips up a Thanksgiving cornucopia of company culture and in-house information through a series of blog posts. I'm not surprised.
I like the series of in-house company culture posts; as a consumer and community member, it's awesome to see the 'people' who comprise the brand. From a marketer's point of view, this is an excellent display of branding and building connections to consumers. Well done, Moz team; keep doing good work.
You left out one channel - the Help Team gets all the Q&A problems we Associates don't want to deal with. It's probably why Aaron blocks all my emails now ;)
Hi Aaron,
More companies should take the time to invite their users/customers in behind the scenes like this. Unfortunately most can't because most places are miserable place to work, you are lucky when you find a good one. It is worth more than just money, I am fortunate to have found that too.
From this article I now get a better understanding of who I am patronizing and supporting. This was really fun and interesting article that allowed me to get away from the normally day-to-day grind for a few minutes. It is obvious that SEOMoz is a well run company based on this article, how much the employees enjoy their job, the phone support (which is excellent), the Blog itself, conventions, and the outstanding tools. Keep up the great work and thanks to all of you at SEOMoz.
I emailed you just last week and your feedback form had me in stitches "1. Wild monkeys could give better service, 2. I'm satisfied but I'm not getting an SEOmoz tattoo yet, 3. You knocked my socks off. I want to have SEOmoz's babies" :)
I find the replies from the team are always punctual, useful and informative, the contributors to the forum too are fab for those techy questions.
great post. I love that you get in touch with people if they weren't completely satisfied. Great customer service policy. I also love the survey.
That was great post.. helpful team you have...
Always thumbs UP SEO MOZ TEAM
I love this post. Getting to know each of you is really a great idea and makes the SEOmoz help team a lot more personal and "human" (although you have a nice team page ....)
And furthermore I found a new link - https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums - havn't been aware of that before.
Aaron thanks so much for putting this together! It's really great to show our customers exactly how we work and hopefully helps them feel comfortable when they call/email us knowing who they're talking to. :) Thanks for taking on the awesomely difficult task of keeping customers happy and for taking the time to write about it. :) TAGFEE rules!
I love seeing the love for the Customer Service folks at SEOmoz. I once had a billing issue with Pro Tools that may or may not have been my fault. Crissy Hall rocked my world with her awesome customer service, which I believe actually made subsequent experiences with Pro Tools even better because they were filled with warm thoughts and affinity for SEOmoz. Thanks Crissy, and the rest of the team, for your service!
I found this article quite amusing. I have had a an error with my account for over 3 weeks, I reported it and got a "we are trying to fix it" reply, I then heard nothing for several weeks until I chased it up again, at which time I got a "sorry we are still trying to fix it" reply. I have just had to send another email chasing the issue again.
I dont call that good service, in fact I have no faith in your ability to fix this issue and I am going to have to resort to either cancelling my account or leaving bad feedback on social channels to get this issue resolved.
Really?....3+ weeks to fix an issue with data importing from a social channel.
When you have all stopped patting each other on the back and congratulating each other on how great your customer service is, perhaps you could actually help me out and fix the issue so I can send a report to my client who has been waiting for over 3 weeks.
Hey Lee,
Thanks for the feedback. I just looked over the ticket you have open with Chiaryn. That bug has been killing us too. We've been pestering our engineers and product team about it. Realistically, the bug is in the foundation of our social collector, which means they'll need to rewrite the entire product. I also dug through JIRA (how we prioritize our engineers' time) and it is being worked on. It just takes a lot of time. It looks like Chiaryn didn't give you an ETA because this issue is very complex. Being that Moz is extraordinarily transparent you can rely on that information. As soon as our engineering team lets us know they have an ETA we'll update everyone experiencing the issue.
I really really wish we could do more on the support team side. Believe us when I tell you we're also extremely frustrated with the bug too (both engineering and support)! If I could hire an engineer to work on this bug 100% until it's fixed I would. That's just not realistic with a product/company of our size and complexity.
I'm not sure what you are reporting from your social campaigns, but you should give True Social Metrics a try if your client has been waiting 3+ weeks for a report. They have a free trial.
Thanks again for the feedback. I wish there was more we could do.
thanks for the feedback nick
I'm just gonna go ahead and cancel my account, which is a shame because I had just come back to Moz after being a member a few years ago and though I would give your new system a try.
But my experience hasn't been a good one with a major part of your reporting metric not working it means I need to just multiple platforms to provide reports to my clients and that just isn't good enough.
If you are really transparent then why don't you have a big sign on the front of your site saying "our system is not currently working properly and we have no idea when the issues will or can be fixed"
good luck hope you get things fixed.
Seomoz support is very efficient and very helpful. I'm not sure if this is a Brit thing, or just me being a grumpy sod, but I do find all the "awesome talk" a bit tiring though.
"Did we use our powers for awesome?" Uhm, no. You did address a minor issue in an efficient way, but it hardly left me quaking with veneration and wonder.
</grump>
<thumbsdown>
Live chat always a plus. It has done wonders for our ecommerce sites.
Great work guys! From the other side of the world (Australia) we love your work too :-)
Help Team is awesome! Crissy and Megan actually helped me out yesterday a great deal, thanks guys!
Great post Aaron, its cool to meet all you guys that help make SEOmoz run smoothly. Anybody that works at SEOmoz has the coolest job in the world, besides being a world of warcraft administrator. Thanks for taking the time to introduce your team. Thumbs up!!!!
Big ups to the SEOMoz customer service crew! Stay awesome!
I love the post. This kind of insight stories make all of us feel like part of the family.
Thanks for the insight. It's great customer service that turns a great product into a fantastic experience and while it may not seem like it at the time, as we battle with the frustrations of our day jobs, it is appreciated.
Love the cookie table infographic.
Thanks for all your great work guys! You guys are amazing! Love all the free tools as well!
Thanks so much!
Hello, I am really sorry to comment here.. but i want to ask one question regarding billing info of Moz i was using trail plan of seomoz and i haven't planned to use it more i kept it left and i went on vacation now today i am seeing that my credit card has been billed with 99USD.. How can i get my refund i really don't want to use it anymore.. Kindly help.
You can contact us at https://moz.com/help/contact regarding your subscription. Also, please let us know if you didn't get the reminder email about the subscription. Thanks!
call
Hi Noa! David just reached out to you, so look out for his message. Thanks for getting our attention :-)
Kevin
Help Team
Thanks a lot Aaron for all the help that you and your team provide the users of SEOmoz.Keep up the good work.
I must admit that the SEOMoz customer service is the best I have come across online when dealing with issues in the SEOMoz system that I use with my agency.
Every company is far from perfect but the acknoledgement of mistakes, an explination of how it happened and a willingness to fix it goes a long way to making you feel good even in a bad situation.
This topic came up in the office today, so this post was really convinant timing. It was a really handy refrence of an example of how good customer service is done, just as I needed it.
Sometimes I wonder if there's some psychics around here with the way posts tend to pop up just before I need them.
Great post! What software do you guys use to track your customer support phone calls?
We use a pretty naive reporting system that's proprietary to our phone company to get the raw data, and use ZenDesk to create tickets for calls to track the qualitative reasons for calls. It's not a robust or data-heavy system, but it works for a small team like ours. We used to use a shared Google Doc spreadsheet to manually track each call! We eventually decided to move away from that for something more scalable. I'll dig up a bit more information for you and let you know more!
Keep up the great work... I love it when I have a question I get an answer, as well if someone in the Q&A has a question I can help with I love assisting.. The SEOMOZ TOOLS + TEAM = Sucess regardless the business you are in... Everyone is out to help.
This is a great post!! You all are awesome, Help Team!
I've only had to contact the team a couple of times, but both have been good experiences. Thanks to the help team for all you do!
Very nice to put a face to the helpdesk team and to see how things run!
When I worked on a help desk I recall 99% of enquiries being forgotten passwords or java runtime installation help - what are some of the common issues people experience here?
OK, I have to say it.
If you are fortunate enough to have had no more than a minor issue to be dealt with by the Help team, Lucky you.
If you never have to deal with the complexity of building and managing communities or help teams, Lucky you.
If you manage to spend your days living in a world that revolves so much around yourself that you can't let someone else talk about their experience without being irritated that their reality has encroached upon yours, poor you.
For myself, I very much appreciate the insight provided by posts like this one and the recent post from Jennita on Community management, since they are issues I am dealing with each day. I have also had one or two issues that I NEEDED to get fixed to satisfy client enquiries in the past.
Clearly my view of the value I get from my interactions with SEOmoz is different than yours. I also like to tell people when I think they have done an outstanding job. I make no apology for it.
Seriously, if we can't all just live in the world and accept that other people are entitled to have their needs met occasionally without us having to get something out of it personally, then things are pretty grim :(
If today's post really isn't to your liking, you can use that 5 minutes to do something else. Reading and commenting is NOT a requirement. There will be another post tomorrow and another opportunity for us all to learn something.
Sha
I'm not sure you actually read my comment before laying in to me did you? Based on that I won't waste my time responding in depth. However if you turn the stick around you might find the other end more to your liking.
Hi Mat,
I'm sorry you took my comment as "laying in to" you. If I had meant to address it specifically to you, I would have used the reply button so you could see that it was a direct response.
While your comment may have contributed to the part of the conversation that I take issue with, what I said was intended to point out to everyone that the absence of an experience in their own lives does not negate it from someone else's.
Unfortunately, there seems to have been an increase lately in people who presume to declare what is and isn't relevant to this entire community based on their own preferences. While I generally find that tiresome, but unworthy of acknowledgement, when it comes packaged in language intended to belittle and demean the company, the people involved and the services and resources provided here, I take issue.
You might notice that I did not choose to thumb down either of your comments, because I respect your right to make them.
There are plenty of ways to make a point politely and without resorting to personal insult or implied vulgarity. Unfortunately a concept that seems to be lost on some. :(
Sha