What does Mindvalley do? It is the leading publishing company that merges software, mixed media, video, mobile apps and social networks to put authors in the personal development movement at the forefront of the Internet generation. The company behind amazing home study programs like The Silva Life system series. Mindvalley got the World Blue Most Democratic Workplace award five years in a row, and was voted one of the world’s coolest offices by Facebook fans of Inc Magazine. Hanah Zambrano, director of customer happiness shared some exciting insights in this interview.
1.) How big is your “customer happiness team” and how many tickets does your team solve every day?
We have a total of 13 awesome troopers dealing directly with our customers – seven of them do this via phones and only spend about 30-50% of their time answering emails, four work mostly via emails and one deals specifically with inquiries and communications that come in through our social media channels. In total, we try to solve between 600 and 700 emails a day on average 🙂
2.) What’s the main reason, you care about your customer service?
Asking me about the main reason I care about my customers would be like asking me why I care about breathing. Without customers, a company has no life, and the support services are just one of the many points of contacts between a company and its customers. Through the support services we have a direct conversation with our customers – we get to know them, help them help themselves and we learn from them. We do not see the support services as a reaction center that is waiting for customers to complain, we see them as a proactive center that is ready to create relationships, engage customers and create raving fans.
3.) What kind of metrics are you using to measure customer happiness and performance of your agents
For customer happiness we measure two things. The first measures whether our customers are satisfied with the interaction, and for that, we use Nicereply, where the customer could rate us out of 10. Secondly, we measure a customer’s satisfaction with our products using the Net Promoter score. When it comes to performance metrics, you can check out this article that Grayson Smith, our operations manager, published recently on one of our blogs, Mindvalley Insights. We also assess individual performances through “agent interactions” and not by “cases resolved”, which means that only sent messages are count.
4.) Do you have any special motivation programs for your customer service agents?
We don’t have an established “motivation program” here in Mindvalley. We believe in creating and stimulating organizational culture where everybody is motivated to work, and the customer happiness team is a key part in that. We are the safeguards of the culture and that is a pretty cool motivation. We do make sure that the team is rewarded whenever big accomplishments are achieved. This way, foment cooperation and team work.
5.) Do you have any tips to improve customer service you want to share with?
Hiring is the key. Make sure you hire enthusiastic people, people that are engaged to your mission, your company and your products. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have experience in the field or the type of support as you can train them for that. But it will be almost impossible to train someone to care and be nice.
If you are not using a customer service system, what are you waiting for? Do not manage your customers on gmail – it is unproductive. A help desk will allow you to view and understand your customer interactions so it will save you time and money. Plus, it will also allow you to provide a much better service.
6.) What is, in your opinion, the future of customer service systems?
Mobility and integration. Customer service systems will continue to allow its users to access the platforms from any device and at the same time they will integrate the multiple channels through which support can be provided, be it via email, phone, Facebook, Twitter, etc. There are some systems out there that already do this, but in the upcoming months/years we will see how these help desks will allow us to do even more in all kinds of channels.
7.) Do you have a funny story from your customer happiness department that you would like to share with us? (We know that there’s a lot of them)
Perhaps not funny stories, but we do have some good ones! Our customer segment is focused on people who are interested in lifestyle and personal development, so we have super happy and sweet customers that send us pictures of their families and travels. Some have even wrote poems for us, and one customer actually went as far as mixing a song!
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