Nicereply Blog

Klout Inc.  provides social media analytics for anybody that’s an individual user or a brand. Klout allows you to connect all your different networks (facebook, twitter…). You can then see what your influence is for the networks that you are in and for the topics that you are interested in. You can also find people that are interested in topics that you might like. Klout also partners with brands to reward you for your influence.

1. How big is your “helpdesk team” and how many customers do you have?

We have currently about two people at our helpdesk right now. Given that we have over a hundred million scores in the system right now we are a pretty small team. The Klout team altogether is a little over 60, just to give you an idea.

 

2. What’s the main reason, you care about your customer support services?

For us, we’re a user facing company, we need to make sure that we take care about our users. For me personally, Customer support is really important to me, which is the reason I got into marketing, community management and customer support. I really like making the connections with people and trying to help solve their problems, i.e. if they have a problem connecting to their network or they’re just trying to figure out more information on some particular issues they might have.

In the end, the user is the most important for us, especially due to the product, because if the users don’t like the service we offer and they don’t care about what’s happening in their account, we end up loosing those users.

Typically, we get around 150 – 200 emails per day to our customer support, and that’s not taking into account the messages on our social media channels.

3. What kind of metrics are you using to measure customer satisfaction and performance of your agents?

For customer satisfaction, we are deliberately using nicereply.com, for any of our other metrics we use Assistly (or Desk.com). We are using a tagging system to figure out how many e-mails that we’re getting in are bugs or general information and so forth.

4. Do you have any special motivation programs for your help desk agents?

Currently we do not have a program in place, but I think it actually might be a pretty cool idea.

5. What is, in your opinion, the future of help desk systems?

It really depends on the company you’re in. For us, we’re a big social media company, so it doesn’t really make sense to do phone calls for us. It would be pretty cool to measure customer satisfaction on social networks.

6. What’s the most important virtue a help desk agent must have?

I have to say patience. Patience is a really big skill to have when dealing with customer service. Also just basic general understanding. And also the ability to make sure that you give personalized service, because nobody likes to feel like they are being cookie-covered and that you’re giving a generic response.

7. What’s the average issue you run into in Klout?

It really depends. One week it might be a bug, but it fluctuates pretty often. Some of them are just clarifications on how our algorithm works others might be troubleshooting our customers networks and so on.

8. Do you have a funny story from your help desk that you would like to share with us? (We know that there’s a lot of them)

I try not to keep track .