Written by Tyler King, CEO of Less Annoying CRM
Customers are the lifeblood of this company. Without customers, none of us would have jobs. The best thing we can do for our customers is to make Less Annoying CRM the best place to work in the industry, so that we can attract the best people who will in turn give our customers the best experience possible.
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase: The customer is always right. It sounds like one of those obvious business truisms that doesn’t merit any debate. But that’s not how we operate here. Generally speaking, we prioritize our employees ahead of our customers.
Also, we regularly get rated as having the happiest customers in the industry, and our customers tell us almost daily that we offer the best customer service they’ve ever experienced.
On the surface, these two things might seem contradictory. If we want to give our customers the best experience possible, surely we should be doing anything and everything to please them. We should bend over backwards, do whatever they want, and put their needs first. That’s how you make people happy, right?
Here’s the problem: If a company takes the approach of doing whatever it takes to give the customer anything they want at every moment, it creates a pretty terrible work environment. Anyone who has ever worked in food service or retail has horror stories about overly demanding customers, unsustainable hours, etc. and that all comes back to the idea that the customer is always right.
And the thing is, that’s not even what customers actually want. What makes them happiest is to deal with capable professionals at every step of the process. Capable professionals understand their worth, and they don’t want to work in places where they’re treated like doormats. The best thing for our customers is for us to put employees first which allows us to hire the best people possible, and they will in turn make the customer experience fantastic.
As nice as it would be for us to offer 24/7 customer service, the reality is that very few people actually want to work the graveyard shift. The best employees have plenty of options in terms of where to work, and they wouldn’t choose to work here if we required them to work through the night.
The entire LACRM team works weekdays from 9am to 5pm central time by default. Individual employees can choose to shift their hours earlier or later to suit their preferences, but there’s no expectation that anyone does so. This means that customers might have to wait a bit longer for a response if they try contacting us outside our normal business hours, but when they do get a response, it will come from a well-trained expert who is empowered to actually help them.
Note: We do offer limited weekend support. We take turns covering weekend support (each support person ends up working roughly one weekend every 2-3 months, and they are given additional time off during the week to make up for it).
At most tech companies, when planning a project, management sets a deadline. That’s the date that a project needs to ship. The team works towards finishing it in time, but as the deadline draws near, if they’re not on pace to have it ready, they go into “crunch mode”. That means working nights and weekends, chugging coffee, sleeping under their desks, and just generally doing whatever it takes to finish on time.
Crunch mode sucks. It’s stressful, and it can lead to burnout. There’s the short-term benefit of shipping a feature a bit faster, but the long-term damage can be devastating.
That’s why we avoid deadlines. Each employee is expected to be productive during their normal work hours, and we try to finish projects quickly, but ultimately a project takes however long it takes. If things are taking longer than expected, we’ll do what we can to keep it on track (maybe by cutting scope, or changing the approach we’re taking) but there are no hard deadlines, and there’s no crunch mode.
We work with small business, and for the most part, they’re amazing to work with. Our customers represent a diverse group of people from every imaginable industry and over 70 different countries. For me, personally, talking one-on-one with customers is one of the most fulfilling parts of the job.
But with over a decade in business and 25,000+ users, it’s natural that we have had to interact with some customers who aren’t so pleasant. We try to be as forgiving as possible, because we know that sometimes people might just be having a bad day, or in some cases they might be legitimately upset because we did something wrong. In times like that, we do everything we can to make things right, and get the relationship back on track.
But some people aren’t capable of having healthy relationships based on mutual respect. Some people come in looking for a fight, and things turn unpleasant no matter what we do. Even though those situations are extremely rare, they can be a massive source of stress for our CRM Coaches. If we want to employ the best people possible, we have to provide them with a healthy work environment, and that means protecting them from toxic customers.