SEASON 2 - EPISODE 140 - JANUARY 22, 2025

Support is a Feature

Customer support is more than just a department — it’s a core feature of any great product. In this episode of The REWORK Podcast, Kimberly Rhodes chats with Chase Clemons, Head of Customer Support at 37signals, about the company’s view of support as a product feature. They discuss 37signals’ approach to helping customers, the value of ongoing training, and how AI can fit into support strategy without sacrificing the personal connection.

Key Takeaways

00:37 - Meet Chase Clemons, Head of Support at 37signals
02:12 - Customer Support is a feature, not a cost center.
04:09 - Support should focus on the customer experience
06:36 - Using case studies to train your support team
07:49 - Team members are trusted to use good judgment
09:58 - Maintaining a friendly, conversational tone with customers
11:27 - Measuring success in Customer Support
14:12 - AI vs. the human element in Support
17:25 - Encourage customers to reach out

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and this week I am not joined by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, but another member of our 37signals team. Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to introduce you to some of our team so they can tell you a little bit about their portion of their work at 37signals, and this week I’m joined by our Head of Support, Chase Clemons. Chase is a no stranger to the podcast. He actually was on an episode, it’s been almost two years now. Chase, welcome back. Thanks for being here. Before we dive into our topic, which is customer support as a feature of the product, tell us a little bit about you and your tenure here at 37signals.

Chase (00:45): Yeah, thanks, Kimberly. Glad to be back after a two year break.

Kimberly (00:49): Time flies.

Chase (00:50): It does. It does. So yeah, I’m head of support here for, so if you’ve seen any of our onboarding messages or talk to us on support, there’s a good chance that I’m one of the folks that you talk to. Been here since 2011, so basically ancient in internet years at this point. I started out on the front lines and then, yeah, I’m head of the support team now, so we’re, it’s been a fun ride.

Kimberly (01:14): Chase, tell us how big your team is that you’re overseeing.

Chase (01:18): Yeah, there’s 14 of us and the reason why we’re kind of larger like that, even though we’re a small company overall, is we use the power of time zones when it comes to coverage. So when you’re talking to our team throughout the week, we’re here 24 hours, right? And the way that we are able to do that is not by asking us folks to work overnight or graveyard shifts or anything, but by having two people over in the EU and then two people in what we call APAC. Having them on the team means that we can provide 24 hour coverage without me working at midnight, which I appreciate.

Kimberly (01:56): Yeah. Well, that is part of our topic here is how support is viewed as a feature of the product. I know I’ve heard Jason and David say that many times. I’m sure they’ve said that to you as well. So give us your thoughts on what does that mean, overall? Support is a feature.

Chase (02:12): For a lot of companies out there Support is often looked at as a cost center, for lack of a better word.

Kimberly (02:18): Right.

Chase (02:19): How can we minimize it? How can we maximize the return on whatever we put into it essentially, and when you do that, you end up optimizing for all the wrong things for us. Those kind of cost centers mean that you keep the team absolutely as small as possible, that you deter customers from contacting you if at all possible. You use AI or phone trees or whatever other automated mechanisms there are to, again, deflect as many people as possible. For us, when we talk about support as a feature, that means when you buy Basecamp, you buy us, essentially. We’re part of the package. I’ve using Basecamp since 2011. There are several people on our team who have been here for as long or longer than I have. I was talking to Jason one day and we did up the math. It’s something like 50 or 60 years of experience…

Kimberly (03:12): Oh wow.

Chase (03:13): …on our team when you add everybody in, and we’ve seen everything. So when an accountant emails in and asks a question, we’ve worked with accountants before on how to use Basecamp so we know what works and what doesn’t work. Same if you’re a tech company, same if you’re a school, same if you’re any small business. Whatever problem you’ve seen, we’ve probably seen it before and can offer up our experience on it. So yeah, when you buy Basecamp, you’re getting Basecamp, which is pretty awesome. It’s going to help out a lot. You’re also getting access to our team and to our community where you can think of us as your experts for hire almost. We’re there to help.

Kimberly (03:51): And obviously we don’t want to make this a Basecamp commercial, but I think people who are listening can take that kind of idea of support being something that you’re also selling regardless of what kind of business you’re in.

Chase (04:02): Yeah, Kathy Sierra had it right. She wrote a book called Badass Making Users Awesome.

Kimberly (04:08): I have it right here.

Chase (04:09): There you go. Right. It’s almost required reading also, not an ad or commercial or anything for that, but also you should go out and buy the book because it’s awesome. And yeah, we talk about she has a core concept in there of out teaching the competition, right? One thing that sets us apart from whether it’s other competitors we look at or even just email and pen and paper, one thing that sets us apart is the experience you’re getting, and that’s a big selling point. I remember, so as a very real world practical example, a couple of years ago I needed a new lawnmower. I live in a couple of acres down here, and you’ve got to have a decent sized lawnmower to cut your grass. I could have went to a big box store and picked a cheap model off the line and brought it home and everything else, but going out to a Home Depot or a Lowe’s or wherever to do that, it’s going to be a very transactional experience. You’re going to go in, buy it, come home, and then you’re kind of on your own essentially. Instead, I went to a local lawn and care place, I guess whatever you want to call it, a local small

Kimberly (05:14): Like mom and pop?

Chase (05:15): Mom and pop shop down the road from us, told ‘em what I needed. They walked over and said, hey, here’s the models that we have. Here’s the one that’s going to fit best for you, and then they actually ended up delivering it, which was really cool. They walked through all the setup and what I needed to know right there on our property, which was really cool, and then six months later, the guy shows up on his way to work and says, hey, your mower needs servicing. I’m going to load it up and take care of that and then bring it back to you on my way home. It’s like, that’s amazing. A big box store is not going to do something like that, and I think that’s the perfect, yes, we sell tech software, but as a practical, real world example, if you buy something like that and have the owner of the store stop and pick up the product and service it for you, that’s a big differentiator. That’s why they get all of my word of mouth business. That’s why anything that I buy in the future is going to be with them.

Kimberly (06:11): Okay. Chase, let me ask you this, because you have a big team. I’m assuming there’s some training that happens as someone new is coming onto the support team. How are you guys training so that a new person coming in knows how important support is and that we actually try to sell support as part of the product? Or are there things that you guys do that most support teams aren’t doing or things that set us apart in terms of training those folks?

Chase (06:36): Yeah, I think part of it is we give them Badass and tell ‘em to read that, right? That’s a part of it, and there’s also, we keep lots of, for lack of a better word, case studies around. So this library of these interactions with customers went really, really well and why. These interactions didn’t go as well, and here’s how we would’ve done them better next time, because the thing with teaching support as a feature is that it’s all about experience, and so those of us that have been here for 12, 13 years, we have to distill all the experience we have into that new hire essentially, and the best way to do it is doing the case studies. It’s walking them through, especially in their first couple of weeks, walking them through case by case and going, yeah, here’s what you can do on this one. Here’s what you can’t do on that one. Here’s this time that I did this and here’s how it worked out. Essentially, it’s a lot of hands-on one-to-one training, and you can’t replace that with a guide or an instruction book or anything like that. That experience is one where the new hires going to have to get it on their own, but also you can make it easier by showing what support as a feature looks like and has looked like while we’ve been here.

Kimberly (07:49): Okay. That also makes me think, we talk a lot about hiring managers of one and valuing people who are self-managed, managing their own projects. I kind of feel like in support, I could imagine that that is important too because they’re handling their own cases and making decisions on how they’re responding, when they’re going to pick up the phone and those sorts of things. Do you guys talk a bit about that internally?

Chase (08:11): Yeah, we’re looking for good judgment, so we want people that if I was gone for the day, that they would still make good decisions because let’s face it, I’m not in every single customer interaction that they’re going to have each day.

Kimberly (08:23): Right.

Chase (08:23): You’ve got to be able to make those good judgment calls on your own, essentially, and yeah, part of it’s also celebrating those good calls.

(08:31): So if somebody does go out of their way to do something, to see it and recognize it and celebrate like, yes, you did the right thing. And there’s also for the cases that don’t go quite as well, the people that we’ve hired know when things are going south and know to get it over to somebody else that can help out with that. A lot of times if you’re talking to a bigger company, you’re going to be stuck with whoever you’re stuck with. Even though you’re sitting there saying, hey, I want to escalate. Hey, let me talk to your manager or whatnot, it’s probably not going to happen.

(09:03): A lot of times if a conversation with a customer goes south on us, that’s fine. We can slide it over to somebody else to give a fresh voice and to use their judgment and their experience to get things back on track. The other good thing in all of this is that, yes, Basecamp’s important to a lot of our customers. It’s also not the end all be all. We’re not building rockets, we’re not doing surgery. We’re just helping you out with projects that you’re running, essentially. So if a new hire makes some mistakes early in the beginning, that’s fine. You can let the customer know like, hey, yeah, this is my third week, and they’re often gracious in understanding that you miss something just because you’re new. So yeah, it’s one of those where we do hire good people and we do train them to be managers of one. We’re also really lucky with a customer base that understands we’re humans because we talk about ourselves as humans here to provide support.

Kimberly (09:58): Well, I also think it’s interesting because when I’ve worked in support, so everyone here at the company does a support shift. I know you’ve definitely pushed the sounding like a real human, not sounding too business. It’s like you’re a human. You’re Kimberly, who lives in Dallas answer like Kimberly having a conversation with the customer. I’m assuming that’s probably part of that training of our support team as well, or actually the whole company since everybody does it.

Chase (10:22): Yeah. We give a couple of guidelines, kind of starters, essentially. So when you start working with us on Everyone On Support, we’ll send you like, this is kind of what we think the Basecamp style and voice and tone and all that is, right? It’s not a very lengthy doc by any stretch of the imagination, and it really does focus on be fun, be friendly, don’t use corporate-y, businessy, enterprisey, jargon. Speak like you’re speaking to a friend. Speak to somebody like they’re literally right in front of you and you’re talking about Basecamp or working out a problem. Essentially. A lot of the hires that we make, especially in Support, have come from industries where they did have a lot of face-to-face customer interactions. For me, before I was here, I was working at restaurants, and so I was used to working with people face to face on good days and bad days and all the rest of it. So when you bring that mentality into, yeah, it’s an email or yeah, it’s a live chat, but there’s another person on the end and you can work with ‘em and be yourself, you’re going to have a good experience for you and for the customer at the end of the day.

Kimberly (11:27): Amazing. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about how you’re measuring success, if you will, metrics for the support team. Are you looking at response times as a guide or is it five star ratings from customer interactions? How are you judging the success of your team?

Chase (11:44): So on the front facing side, the customer facing side, the one that we keep an eye on is how quick we can what’s called a first reply time. So when you send us a message, how long does it take us to get back to you essentially? Since I’ve been here, we’ve kind of gone through different stages in what we thought about that number. Sometimes we’re really, really loose with it. Sometimes we were striving to answer within a minute or two minutes or three minutes.

Kimberly (12:10): I mean, I’m not going to say crazy. That’s aggressive.

Chase (12:14): Yeah. The idea there was we borrowed a little bit from Amazon, so when Amazon said we’re going to start doing two-day shipping or one-day shipping, right? The idea there was when you buy something online, you can never get it too quick. If you buy something from a store and it arrives on your doorstep that afternoon or the next day, you’re not going to look and go, wow, that was too fast. Please take it back and take longer next time. Nobody does that. So that was our thinking. Can we ever reply too quickly to customers? Turns out you can. When you get down into the single digits, essentially somebody sends you a message and you answer back within a couple of minutes. The first question is, are you a bot?

Kimberly (12:55): It’s probably even more common now, I feel like in the world of AI.

Chase (12:59): Yeah, even more common now, you’re also wondering, not only is this an automated thing, but now you’re going, is this an AI bot that thinks it’s going to, is it going to give me the right answer more than anything?

Kimberly (13:10): Yeah.

Chase (13:10): So you can’t be too quick. You can also take too long. For Basecamp customers we found that there’s a sweet spot within about an hour, so if we start stretching out more than an hour during the week, that’s when we start pulling in reinforcements to bring that number back down essentially. HEY has a little bit more flexibility.

Kimberly (13:30): Sorry to interrupt. I was going to say we also have the functionality of an emergency. If someone needs to escalate the request, then it’s not sitting around for an hour.

Chase (13:39): Exactly. Yeah, so when you send us a message, if it’s an email, you can just tell us, Hey, this is urgent, which most people do. They’ll throw it in a subject line and we will see it and get to it quicker. If you’re using our in-app support, that little question mark in the corner of Basecamp, we have an option in there. You can say, this is an emergency and we’re going to hit that up as quick as we possibly can. Customers care about getting the right answer more than the fast answer, and so if it takes you an hour, but it’s a thoughtful, well done answer that gives them everything that they need, they’re good with it.

Kimberly (14:12): That is leading me down the path of AI because I’m sure customer support is one place that AI is very prevalent, whether it’s a chat bot or an automated email. Kind of give me your thoughts on AI and the customer support role as it exists here at 37signals.

Chase (14:28): At the end of the day, for us anyways, AI is a tool that we reach for every now and then. It’s not the end all be all, essentially. When we’re talking about Basecamp, a lot of the questions we get are not the how do I do X? It’s the how and why. Like in this situation, how would I do this and why would I do it that way, essentionally? We talk a lot about in Basecamp, there’s the Basecamp way of doing things, and that’s hard to teach an AI. You could give it book on book on book of what Jason and David have said, and then for it to spit back the idea of the Basecamp way and how it applies to the small business in Texas or whatever. It’s very hard for a bot to do that and do it with our voice and do it in a way that genuinely makes everyone feel good about it. It can’t do that. What it can do really well is answer the easy answers from a help doc kind of questions. So if you wrote to me and said, Hey, chase, I need to reset my Basecamp login. Okay, an AI could probably answer that quicker than I could get you a reply out on any given day, right? It could have an instant answer for something like that. So yeah, AI in that sense, it works and works well, at least for us anyways.

Kimberly (15:46): I also think because Basecamp as a product is so flexible and people can use it in so many different ways, it does make it a little more challenging because there’s not always just one answer that an AI bot could spit out. There’s often the need for a human to interpret what someone’s trying to do and translate it into how it can actually work within the product.

Chase (16:08): Exactly, and we talk a lot about with Basecamp, HEY is a great example too. HEY is one of those where customers typically come to us with either a pretty easy question, here’s the help guide. Here’s the article about that gives you the answer to that essentially, or it’s going to be a very tricky rabbit hole type question that’s going to send us looking into the inner workings of email, essentially. The thing with HEY is that an AI allows us to run one person working on HEY cases because the AI can pick up the easy, how do I reset my password stuff and leave the much harder ones to the actual human support where it’s going to take ‘em an hour to figure out, so in that hour they can actually focus on the customer and the tricky question essentially, instead of getting their time split between the how do I reset my password questions?

Kimberly (17:02): Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Chase, to kind of bring this full circle, we’re saying customer support is a feature. That’s something we’ve heard internally from both Jason and David on the customer support side of things. How are you getting that message out to customers other than just having great support? Are there steps that you guys have taken so that customers really feel like support is a feature?

Chase (17:25): Yeah. I think one of the biggest ones is that we try to encourage people to talk to us as much as they possibly can, so the onboarding message that messages that we send out, you sign up for Basecamp, welcome to Basecamp. Here’s how the basics of Basecamp work, and then we try to wrap those messages in either things that point toward our support, so it could be a video that we’ve done to introduce me or the team. It could be, here’s our phone number if you want to call us. Here’s our email if you want to send us a message. It could be things like that. It can also be things where we just straight up ask a question, essentially. Some of our onboarding messages end with a question and the effort to get them to reply with an answer to us, because once you’ve experienced our support for the first time, you know that we’re reliable. You know that we’re pretty quick. You know that we’re going to have the answer for you every time, and you start coming back to us over and over and over after that. It’s kind of like the lawnmower guy from the beginning here. I know how good their service is now because I’ve used it once and I’m going to go back over and over and over because I can trust it, essentially. The key thing is getting people to talk to us for that first time.

(18:40): Really, once you do that, you’re going to be sold and you’re going to spread the word to other people too. Basecamp is spread by word of mouth a lot, and one of the reasons is you can say, hey, here’s this great product, and their team is really great too. We do the same thing when I’m referring people to other products. Yeah, I’m referring people to the product and the team behind it as well, so yeah, make a big deal out of it. Put it on your marketing page, put it in your welcome videos, put it in the onboarding messages that you do. Do whatever you can to get people to try to get them to take you up on that offer for the first time, and you’re going to have pretty happy and sold customers after that.

Kimberly (19:20): That is great advice. Is there anything else before we wrap it up that someone listening who might have a business with a customer support team might learn from you on this whole support as a feature concept? Super open-ended question for you, Chase.

Chase (19:34): Super open-ended, super open ended. For small business owners, right? As your company grows, there is a tendency to focus on running the business and sometimes you stop doing these support things, that front line answering customer questions. Carve out the time for it. You’re not going to get a better look at how your business is doing outside of going in and working support cases with the rest of your team, going in and talking to your customers on the front line and that kind of thing. So yeah, again, make every effort you can to get people to talk to you. Don’t hide behind phone trees or AI bots or help guide. Get your customers talking to you because it’s going to be worth it to you in the long haul.

Kimberly (20:17): I love that. Well, with that, we’re going to wrap it up. Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube, and if you have a question for Jason or David or Chase about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 7 0 8 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also text that number or send us an email to rework@37signals.com.