Issue No.6

Richard Huffaker

Before I write anything else, I want to mention two things:

First, if you have a few minutes, we'd appreciate it if you could take our short survey on small businesses in the US and Canada. It'll help us better serve both our customers and potential customers.

Second, the co-founder and CEO of Zapier (who is a good friend of Quo) is conducting a Reddit AMA today on our new r/quo subreddit, and you can ask him any questions you have about using Zapier with Quo or just using Zapier in general right here.

A long time ago, I was the 4th employee at Weebly. It was a small, rapidly growing website hosting business that brought me on to build and manage their customer support.

Up until then, all customer support was handled by one of the co-founders. Let's call him Dan, because that's his name.

Dan had a lot on his plate as a co-founder, but he loved maintaining a personal connection with folks who needed help. The problem was that he'd become overwhelmed by the sheer number of emails he was receiving each week. At the time, it was somewhere around 500.

By necessity, his answers were brief and often required canned responses to issues and questions that came up repeatedly. Still, he was a founder, and people like hearing from a founder.

When I took over, some of the most common replies I initially got were:

"Can I talk to Dan?"

"Is Dan around?"

"I know, Dan, he'll want to talk to me. Can you get him?"

People loved having the personal touch of talking to someone who knew absolutely everything about the company. Now they felt they'd lost it because they were getting their questions answered by just some guy.

But a notable thing happened over time: they all got used to me and grew to like me, and mostly forgot all about Dan. I got to know a lot of the customers and could anticipate their questions and issues because I'd helped them before and knew their history.

It wasn't long, though, before the growing number of emails became overwhelming for me, too. There was a stretch of four months where I felt like I was doing nothing but answering questions non-stop. We were becoming popular worldwide, and I finally hit a wall while I was going back and forth with a rude guy in Australia about his website at 1am on Christmas Eve.

That was when I knew I also had to hire more people. It was hard because, much like Dan, I loved maintaining a personal relationship with customers. But me burning out and having a meltdown would not be good for either our users or me. So I went on a small hiring spree.

When I brought the new folks on, the most common questions that came up for them, especially early on, were:

"Can I talk to Richard?"

"Is Richard around?"

"I know Richard, he'll want to talk to me. Can you get him?"

But then the customers got used to these folks and built relationships with them, just as they'd done with Dan and me. Customers were happy, and the company continued expanding.

Growing the team and maintaining a very personal touch with a larger and larger team was a whole other challenge that I'll talk about in our January newsletter.

My point as I end this article is that you don't have to manage everything alone. Whether you're a founder or an employee on a small team, the personal relationship you build with customers is likely a huge and vital part of the business.

Bringing on more people or using automation tools that can act as an extension of you doesn't betray those customers or ruin those relationships; it helps you do more for them and keeps you from going insane.

Check out this story I wrote earlier this year about Zazzy Box, a jeweler based in Houston. Their owner, Asit, went through his own version of what both Dan and I did, and from there, he built something better for his customers.

And learn more about features that can help you avoid being everywhere at once in Quo below.

Justine and Kat explain Quo

Canned replies don't have to feel canned

Justine Delgadillo

Kathleen Buffington

Justine Delgadillo

Kat Buffington

One of the things Richard noted above was that he and his former colleague, Dan, used canned replies to manage the overwhelming number of customer messages they were dealing with.

Canned replies get a bad rap because the implication of using them is that no one put any thought into the answer. We all know the feeling of sending a message to a large company to ask for help and then getting a detailed, but clearly canned, reply that isn't really related to our message.

The problem in these cases isn't that the canned reply itself is bad; it's that they sent you the wrong one. It'd be a great answer to some other person's question.

What's nice for you is that you are not an employee of a 3,000-person call center. You're at a smaller company. You definitely know what you're talking about and are much less likely to choose the wrong thing to say.

If you find yourself answering lots of text messages, Quo has a feature called snippets that lets you save your most common replies. Instead of spending a few minutes typing or several more minutes searching around for a link or details you want to send someone, you can spend five seconds choosing a snippet.

To create snippets, navigate to any message thread in your inbox and then:

• Type /snippets in the message box
• Click "+ Create snippet" from the pop-up menu (you'll also see existing snippets there)
• Enter snippet details:
  • Snippet name (something that'll make it easy for you to identify later)
  • The message you want to create
  • Sharing preferences (should other people have access?)
• Click "Save" to create your snippet

To later use those snippets, go to the message thread you want to reply to and then:

That's that. You can also share snippets with other people on your team so they can access the ones you write, and vice versa. Learn more about snippets in our help center.

It's a shame this only works for text messages. It'd be nice sometimes not to have to think of every answer to every question when talking to someone.

While we don't have that (no one does), we do have Sona to answer calls when you and your team are not available. And Daryna gets into how our new jobs and transfers features make Sona better at acting as an extension of you.

Founders Corner

Using Sona's new Jobs and Transfers

Daryna Kulya

Usually, I share an abridged version of a longer post from my own blog in this section. But today I want to share a video I recently recorded after spending some time on a call as Justine set up Sona for one of our customers.

She really inspired me because Sona can now handle much more complex scenarios than before and do so in a way that feels even more personal. Watch what I learned below: