Our Secrets to Outstanding Customer Support

What’s the first thing you think about when you hear the words “customer support”? Too often, thinking about customer support brings up negative memories of long wait times, call centers, robotic responses, and never getting the answer you need. At Litmus, we’re on a mission to prove this customer support stereotype wrong.

We all know the power great customer support can have on a brand-customer relationship. No matter how great a product is, bad service can ruin how your customers view your brand. On the other hand, outstanding customer service helps build trust, increases customer satisfaction, and sets the stage for long-term relationships with your clients.

That’s why here at Litmus, we not only focus on building great products, we also work hard to make sure that the experience you have with our customer support team is nothing but exceptional.

94% of Litmus customers rate our customer support as great.

But how do we do it?

There are metrics we focus on, yes, but we also have guiding values that contribute to the success of our customer support team. Here are a few things we do to ensure the customer experience always comes first.

Speed matters. But quality matters more. 

Some questions can be answered quickly. But if you’re reaching out with a complex problem—a rendering issue that we’ve never heard of or a specific question on how to make Litmus fit your unique team setup—writing a personalized response might take time. Sometimes, lots of time. We never want to leave you hanging without a response, though. So this is what we do: 

1. We respond to you quickly—even if it’s just to let you know that we’re investigating.

If you email Litmus’ customer support team, you’ll hear back from us quickly. As a team, we try to keep our average first response time under 3-4 hours. In fact in 2019, 83% of customers received a response in 4 hours or less. (We respond to everyone within 24 hours, excluding weekends and holidays.) If your question needs a closer investigation on our end, we’ll send you a quick note anyway to let you know that we’re on it.

2. Resolution is a priority, so we do the research to get there quickly.

Let’s say you have a question that needs a closer investigation from our end. We sent you a note letting you know that we’re on it. Now, it’s our goal to make sure the next email we send you fully answers your question.

That might mean we pick a coworker’s brain, look up the latest bug report, get opinions from our product managers and engineers, research your account history, etc. Plus, we’re also trying to think two steps ahead. What information can we share that will also be helpful to you later on as you explore the platform?

While this takes time, it typically means there’s less back-and-forth. Because we’re spending more time and research on cultivating responses to customers, we see a decrease in the amount of emails it takes to resolve customer issues. 85% of customer inquiries are resolved in 2 replies or less.

Be transparent. Be human.

We have a customer support handbook with team values that we all sat down and worked on together during a company retreat. One of those core values is centered around transparency.

We are human and authentic when talking to customers. We encourage everyone to use their own voice, and we do not rely on scripts or canned responses. When a customer asks us a question, we practice empathy but also honesty. We don’t make promises we can’t keep and do our best to always share reasoning and context behind the business, product, and release decisions.

Invest in team health and happiness.

It’s simple: Happy customers start with a happy customer support team.

Too often, customer support is seen as a stepping stone. Folks might take on a customer support role to get “a foot in the door” rather than seeing themselves grow their careers in support. And you can hardly blame them. In too many support organizations, there just isn’t a career path. As a result, turnover is high—and that impacts the quality of customer support.

We are passionate about customer support as a lifelong career, not merely a stepping stone. For this reason, we provide two career paths, one focused on leadership and management and another one to let support experts dive into more product-focused, specialized roles. This ensures that you can grow in your role and career within Support, whether you move into management of a team or become a project leader in Support Ops. We are a growing team at a growing company, where customer support specialists have the opportunity to advance in their careers. The result: Churn on the team is low and many of our team members have years of experience with our product—and that has a significant impact on the quality of our customer support.

But don’t take our word for it. Read what some of our customers have to say about their experiences with our support team:

“Comprehensive answer, even more than what was requested. Just a great job.”

“Allie is amazing. Litmus support is great overall, but Allie goes above and beyond. Support, and experiences with people like Allie are why I have used Litmus for so long and will continue to do so.”

“Honestly, Litmus gets so much right. I got such a great response, and all I did was provide some general customer feedback on the service!”

“Super helpful, exactly what I needed, very timely. Overall great!”

Have a question for our support team? We’d love to hear from you!

If you have any questions about Litmus, our products, or just want to say hi, we’d love to hear from you! Just email us at hello@litmus.com. We’re here to help.

Taylor Davis

Taylor Davis is the VP, Customer Experience at Litmus