How a Two-Person Customer Support Team Keeps 1 Million+ Users Happy
Teamwork makes the dream work.
It’s no secret that the Customer Support industry is focused on quite literally supporting customers.
That’s our job.
But the difference between good and great support are the details that go on behind the computer screen, behind the little chat bubbles, and in the different hats that must be worn to make our customers — as well as our colleagues — feel supported.
Let me explain what I mean and how exactly that works here at Heja.
Our small-but-mighty Customer Support team
Heja is a youth sports communication platform for coaches, managers, parents and players worldwide.
There are about 160,000 (and counting) sports teams signed up to use our app, meaning more than a million customers in total.
Yet, currently, our support team consists of just two members: my colleague Angelica and myself, Sara. So, no surprise, the two of us stay busy answering hundreds of customer questions each day.
How do we do it successfully? Well, we wear many hats.
We not only value our users, but we also value our knowledgable and experienced colleagues, and utilize them daily to help us out and unlock areas of improvement.
We’re a link between the internal Heja team who build and share the app, and the 160,000 teams who put it to use on the sports courts and playing fields of the outside world.
So whether it’s a friendly solution for a team parent, a Slack message to our product owner sharing feedback from an app user, or a quick call with an engineer mentioning a common customer issue, we believe cross-cultural education and communication is key to everyone’s success. And that requires a good deal of empathy and a lot of digging into different perspectives.
Like I said, we wear many hats!
Four things we value most in Customer Support
The non-negotiables for our department’s success.
- Clear communication with Heja’s developers. Although we may not always speak the same techy-language, we heavily rely on our developers. Our interactions need to happen often and be organized to ensure bugs are squashed as soon as possible so users can get on with their sporting lives.
- Creative collaboration with the product team. This is essential. The individuals who use Heja often give us great feedback for feature requests and design changes. We constantly listen and learn, and work with the product team to implement the best suggestions into the app. That process is an integral part of Heja evolving into one of the leading sports communication and management apps in the world today!
- A well-functioning inbox powered by Intercom. We use their platform to group all customer enquiries, which arrive through email or in-app chat. We customize Intercom to distribute the ‘tickets’ evenly between Angelica’s inbox and mine, organizing our workflow nicely. We can also tag colleagues to help us solve specific technical problems when required.
- Curiosity, kindness and professionalism towards customers. Above all, we’re here to solve each ticket that hits our inbox. For example, if a parent can’t log in, they could miss an update from the coach, meaning their child loses out on a chance to practice with their team. Not on our watch! We strive to allow all users to continue navigating and enjoying Heja with a peace of mind knowing our solution-oriented team truly cares for them, and can get them back on track as quickly as possible.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
The importance of #userlove
Customer Support is not just about bug-fixing and problem solving.
In a recent impact study, 82% of coaches said Heja makes their coaching life less stressful, and 91% of team parents felt closer and more engaged with their child’s sports team because of Heja.
On a weekly basis, our inbox is peppered with kind words from happy users.
And one of our favorite hats to wear includes sharing this #userlove once a week in our Monday Heja meetings.
This gives everyone at the company a dose of Monday motivation. It also offers our colleagues the opportunity to hear customer perspectives, and reminds us all why we do what we do — to connect the world of youth sports and help them prosper!
Here’s an example of last week’s #userlove:
“Hi there, I really like the app and we hope to set it up permanently to run our coaching sessions for our local rowing club!
It’s been really easy to set up and even one of our coaches at the age of 82 found it easy to use!”
A last word on Customer Support
Since there’s only two of us, we thought we’d finish by sharing a bit more about our experiences and motivations.
I (Sara) have worked in tech, specifically tech support, for the last five years and have learned a thing or two about standards and expectations. One thing I know for sure is that at Heja we like to keep both of those clear, achievable and pretty high.
And as a former soccer-playing student-athlete, I genuinely enjoy helping our community of awesome coaches and leaders. I’ve been around people like them my whole life and it feels like I’m giving back to a community who gave me so much. To swap a sports team for a tech team isn’t so bad, and I’ve found the systems work in surprisingly similar ways: in sports, life and business, success is underpinned by believing and achieving things together.
Here are my teammate Angelica’s reflections upon her role at Heja:
“I thrive on the one-on-one interactions within our growing community. Making a real difference in the lives of our users fuels me, and solving their problems has me feeling fulfilled in my role. To me, every conversation is an opportunity to connect and build an uplifting relational bond.”
“Our tight-knit, small-but-mighty Customer Support team of two enjoy working together to make our users smile and have the smoothest experience possible in Heja. I love how efficiently we work toward the same goals and how our optimized workflow makes it easy for us to offer a service that has us feeling proud.”
In many ways, Angelica, myself and our colleagues at Heja are much like the teams we work for. Each department is a position on a field or court and our users are part of that big Heja team. Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Because of them, we’re able to learn from the losses and celebrate the wins.
With that said, our hats go off to you — our customers. We plan to continue offering you great support and we look forward to chatting with more of you soon!
- Interested in a position on our team? Check out Heja’s openings here.
