Help Yahoo Help You

Yahoo Help Is Asking For Your Help

Published at June 26, 2008 in If I Was Chief Yahoo. 0 Comments

This is my first post and I want to start this blog out right.

For me that means being completely upfront about where we’ve been — and where we need to go.

Our Customer Care Team at Yahoo has tried all the ‘traditional’ types of figuring out what our customers want from Yahoo Help. We’ve tried everything from surveys, labs and focus groups to the alphabet soup of CSAT studies and CRM analysis. And they all helped to a certain extent.

It’s just that we skipped (until now) perhaps the most important type of research: asking you.

Yeah, yeah, we know that YOU is all the rage and in fact, YOU may be getting pretty tired of being asked to jump in and come up with the ideas to make all these companies, products and advertising better. But if you zip back some ten years or so, you will remember that Yahoo was originally a grassroots effort, founded by two guys — Jerry and David — while they were in college. Their nugget of an idea grew by the proverbial leaps and bounds simply because people loved it and got involved with it.

We are hoping this will happen again. That you will step up to the plate and tell us how we could make Yahoo Help better. We want to hear your customer service stories — the good, the bad, and the seriously ugly. We want to hear your ideas on how you would design ‘the perfect Yahoo Help area’. Your insights on what’s working at Yahoo and what isn’t. Your two-cents on where you’d like us to be in the next ten years or so.

Thank you in advance. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sarah Browne

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Is Getting A Human Still The Gold Standard?

Published at September 2, 2007 in Telephone Support, customer service tales and Miscellaneous. 8 Comments

Every single participant — yup, that’s a solid 100% — in a recent usability study I conducted this summer said they would not purchase a product unless it was supported by a customer service telephone number.

Some 80% said they would actively search a company’s website for this hallowed customer service telephone number before buying. And if a telephone number is missing, or even appears hidden, poof! they’d move on to a company that supports their products with a phone number.

Yet, in other studies I’ve done, a significant percentage of participants said: ‘No way — I don’t want to talk to a person. Let me find the answer myself!’

Many companies, guided by this proclaimed preference for self-service, beefed up their FAQs and online help centers.

So tell us, folks, what is it? Is a getting a human still the Gold Standard? Are you still showing up at http://gethuman.com/ by the millions to search for secret corporate phone numbers? Or are you combing user bulletin boards, searchboxes and Yahoo Answers to solve your customer service problem yourself?

We really want to know. C’mon, speak up.

Thank you!

Sarah

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A Forum on Forums

Published at August 27, 2007 in Miscellaneous. 6 Comments

Online forums have been around for a long time. You know the drill—find a thread that matches what you are looking for, see if anyone has asked a similar question and if not, post one of your own and wait until others answer it. Many other websites use this mechanism in their Help areas to allow their customers to find quick answers and help customers answer each other’s questions. I personally was able to use Apple’s Help forums to find answers about why my old iPod Shuffle would not sync with my PC.

We at Yahoo! Help haven’t done much with forums yet and would love to know if you think they are a good idea. Have you used them on other sites and been able to get your answers? Or are they a place where people go to rant and rave? Do you think they would be a good way to help find answers to your issues?

Thanks for the help…

Ben

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“I Know You’re A Robot!”

Published at August 23, 2007 in customer service tales and Miscellaneous. 2 Comments

Once upon a time, Live Chat Help was . . . well, it was actually live. There was a real human being tapping away on a keyboard, diligently trying to help you with your password or upload or mail problem. While it wasn’t exactly the same as a welcoming voice on the phone, it was close. Live Chat Help was fast, easy and even friendly.

Then, we’re told, something happened: Live Chat Help has apparently been taken over by Robots. These Robots repeat the same phrases over and over again. They shoot out a slew of words BB-gun-like: “Thank-you-for-letting-me-assist-you. Thank-you-for-letting-me-assist-you.” They mysteriously vanish into the ether for minutes at a time. They eagerly ship you off to other Uzi-Scripting Robots in other departments, in other lands. Their every letter is perfect. Their every phrase precise. Typos are unknown.

And worse, these are time-guzzling Robots, who gorge on minutes and hours of your life, seldom resolving your problem.

They send you a Customer Support Feedback Survey afterwards, which (if you bothered) would slurp up more precious moments of your time.

At Yahoo, when one of our VPs heard a few of these tales during focus groups, she immediately directed all of Yahoo’s Live Chat Help agents to go ahead and let loose with a couple of misspellings, typos, brb’s, thanx and :). She wanted to make it very clear that Yahoo staffers are living, breathing, non-bionic customer care agents.

Still, we wonder. In your experience, is Live Chat Help still helpful? Is it something worth keeping? Once upon a time, we really did believe it was a way to resolve your issues in a speedy and personal way. But if you’ve met one too many robots, you might not even want to click on our Live Chat Help buttons.

So please, help us, help you. Thanx!

Sarah

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Dig Dug

Published at August 21, 2007 in Miscellaneous. 3 Comments

Anyone else remember Dig Dug? It was a video game from the 80s where the player had to build tunnels by digging underground and connecting certain tunnels while also avoiding a various assortment of monsters and falling rocks. This is the way I feel sometimes when I am using a Help system. I’ll do a search for what I’m looking for, something that’s as plain as day to me, but then the search results show nothing like what I am looking for.

So I roll my eyes and think of another way to phrase what I am looking for. I usually phrase my search as a question and take out the question words, so “how do I change my password” becomes “change password”. Sometimes this makes the search results better; sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, by this time, I am getting pretty annoyed, and may give it one more shot. If that doesn’t help, I mutter some foul words towards the design of the Help pages and take off for somewhere else. I just don’t have the patience to dig that much– the monsters of a bad search have basically caught up with me and finished me off.

So the question of the day is—how much are you willing to dig for help? Do you do one search and then if you don’t find your answer, that’s it? Or are you wiling to keep digging until you find your answer? Or does it depend on what you are looking for? Or do you not even search at all?

And most importantly — has this Dig Dug experience happened to you on Yahoo?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we can begin to leave the digging to video games?

Thanks for the help….

Ben

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Help Us, Help You

Published at August 17, 2007 in Miscellaneous. 1 Comment

Remember the scene in Jerry Maguire? Of course you do. Jerry Maguire (played by Tom Cruise) and Rod Tidwell, (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. in his Oscar winning role). Jerry & Rod shouting at the top of their lungs over the phone at each other “SHOW ME THE MONEY!”. It was a classic film that spawned not one, but two cinematic catch phrases for a generation. Of course, ‘Show me the money’ lives on. Sales people, stock brokers, loan sharks & hordes surrounding the craps tables, all say it daily. It was the 90’s version of ‘Greed is Good’.

But the other scene, which was equally legendary, was when Jerry, tired and beat down, looks at Rod and explains that he wants to help him. You can see it in his eyes. He wants to help him so badly. He wants to make him the kwan. He wants to get him paid. He wants to show him the money. So he asks. He asks one of the most important questions that you can ask your customer. He asks how? He asks ‘Help Me, Help You’.Today, with the launch of this Yahoo! customer care blog, I am asking you to help me, help you. If you’re reading this blog, you are either a huge Yahoo fanatic or you found this because you have a problem with one of our services. In either case, it can’t all be fields of puppies and poppies when it comes to using Yahoo, so help me, help you.

Over the past 12 years, Yahoo has provided customer support via email, phone, chat, forums, blogs and pretty much every other medium besides telepathy. Sometimes we do a great job. Sometimes our agents are close to perfect. They understand the issue and they nail it. They get it so right that you don’t even recognize what went into helping you out.

And sometimes, we fall flat on our face. We screw up and send the wrong answer to your question. We don’t reply. We aren’t empathetic. Sometimes, we screw-up so badly that you question how we’ve managed to stay in business this long. You curse us and vow that you’ll never use one of our services for as long as you live. And for that, speaking on behalf of the entire company, I’m sorry.

But truth be told, we want to make it right. From Jerry & David to each individual customer care agent, we want to make it right. If you have a problem, we want to do the right thing and get you the right solution in a timely fashion. Yahoo’s really do love our users. Nobody wants to do a poor job when it comes to helping you out. We really do want to do the right thing (different movie).

I personally think that our customer care has come a long way and, per recent reports, many of you seem to agree. Still, we are always trying harder. We want to do the best we can all the time. I’m asking, ‘Help me, help you.’

What can we be doing differently? Seriously. I want constructive criticism around a past experience (positive or negative) and what we could have done differently to make things better. Tell us, when you have a problem, how you’d like to let us know and how you’d like us to address it. Help us, help you.

The future of this blog will be up to you, our readers and Yahoo members. We (Ben, Sarah & I) will regularly be asking what else we can be doing to make things better in the customer care team. Help us, help you. We will also be offering up tips & tricks to make your Yahoo experience the best that it can be. Finally, when the opportunity presents, we will keep you abreast of these ideas, cool things that we are working on, and many, many opportunities for you to interact with us.

We want to help you. Help us.

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Welcome to Help Yahoo Help You

Published at August 8, 2007 in Miscellaneous. 12 Comments

This first post is going to be short and sweet. All we really want to say is: Welcome. Thanks for coming. And please … speak up!

We really do get how important customer service is to you. We know that you’ve had it up-to-here with companies who don’t respect your time, energy and value as a customer.

Which is why we want to ‘partner’ with you to get a better idea of what you want:

Phone?
Live chat or messenger?
Email?
Discussion groups/Bulletin Boards?

Now’s the time to join the conversation. We’re listening.

Cheers,

Ben and Sarah

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