The Business Philosophy That Changed Everything: Customers First | SaaS Founders
We've been building Cleverific for 10 years. Customer service has always been our first priority, but we never actually discussed why until recently. We both came from service backgrounds long before we built software together.
The restaurant and the pharmacy
Tu grew up working in her mom's three restaurants. Learning to juggle multiple tables, stay efficient, and keep customers happy even when things went sideways.
One coworker asked how she made it look so effortless. Tu didn't realize at the time it was a skill.
Andrew spent his college years as a certified pharmacy tech. At 18, he was terrified to pick up the phone and call a doctor's office about a delayed prescription. Within months, that fear was gone.
He learned to navigate insurance claims and coordinate emergency couriers when patients couldn't wait. One weekend, he convinced FedEx to let a courier grab a prescription off their truck so a patient wouldn't go without medication.
These weren't just early jobs. They shaped how we think about solving problems under pressure.
The Kinko's brownies
Tu was working computers at Kinko's when a call rolled over from the print department. An angry customer was upset about an order that had gone wrong.
Tu's response: "I know you're frustrated, but yelling at me isn't helping because I didn't place your order. I'm just trying to help you."
It worked. The customer calmed down. Tu fixed the problem.
The next day, the woman came back with brownies and an apology. She looked for Tu specifically.
Why we never had to debate customer service
When we started working together, we never discussed whether customer service mattered. It was already built into who we were.
We both understood that helping people solve problems is the actual work. Not just answering tickets. Actually caring about what merchants are trying to accomplish.
That shared foundation made everything easier.
The T3 system: How we handle the toughest situations
We categorize support tickets into three tiers. T1 is basic how-to questions. T2 involves developers. T3 is our highest level of escalation.
A T3 is anything involving an angry merchant, an immediate blocker with serious consequences, or a situation with financial or emotional stakes.
When a T3 comes in:
First, we level with them. We make it clear we're on their side. Being responsive and understanding their emotional state often de-escalates things immediately.
Second, we act fast. Sometimes a fix goes out in 20 minutes.
Third, we never go alone. We use a buddy system. High-stakes situations can trigger your own emotions, so having someone alongside helps keep the focus on solving the problem.
We maybe see one T3 a year now.
The weekend support experiment that didn't work
A few years ago, we tried to get a Shopify certification that required 24/7 support. We hired a phone answering service for nights and a separate team for weekends.
Service quality dropped. Merchants complained about phone trees. Tickets would drag on because the person who started helping on Wednesday wasn't the same person responding on Saturday.
We jumped through all the hoops. The certification never came through. No follow-up. No timeline. Nothing.
When you're bootstrapped, that kind of wasted effort stings.
What actually works: The four-day work week
People ask how we do customer service with a four-day work week. The answer: we're transparent about it, and we're exceptional when we're available.
We have customers in the UK and Australia who've told us they don't even feel like we're in different time zones because our response time is so fast.
Laura, our head of customer support, has been with us for 5 years. She knows the product better than we do in many ways. She cares so much that sometimes we have to tell her not to respond on her days off.
The trick is setting clear expectations. Our customers understand that people need time off. They're fine with it because when we're working, we deliver.
Why our team stays
It took us a few years to get customer service right. We tried outsourcing. We tried different structures. We learned what didn't work.
What we learned: building a culture where people don't burn out matters more than anything else.
When we ask someone to go the extra mile, we don't get pushback. That's because we don't overwork anyone.
We also use cool down projects after intense periods. After a big push for BFCM, the engineering team works on lower-stakes projects for a while. Different area. Still important. But lower pressure.
From five-star reviews to five-star reliability
n the early days, we got five-star reviews constantly. Whenever something broke, we'd fix it in 15 minutes. Then we'd ask for a review.
Now we get very few of those types of issues. Most support requests are just questions about how to use a feature.
That slowed our review pace. But we'd rather have a product that works.
What customer service really means
After 10 years, we're most proud of maintaining the same level of support we had on day one.
We answer questions even when they have nothing to do with our app. Merchants figure out we're knowledgeable, so they keep asking. We just answer if we know.
Sometimes a merchant thinks about a problem one way, and we help them see a completely different solution. That's only possible when you actually listen.
Customer service isn't a department for us. It's a value we both brought from restaurants and pharmacies long before we built software together.
And it's still the thing we care about most.
Transcript
Tu: Hey Andrew.
Andrew: Hey Tu.
Tu: Today I want to talk about putting customers first. And what I realized is way back when, when we talked about wanting to do a product together, we both inherently knew that this was what we were going to do and it was our first hire, but we never actually said it out loud or I don't recall that we said it out loud. Do you?
Andrew: Yeah, I don't know that we did either. I think we just kind of came in and did the thing. It just so happened that I think we got lucky where we had the same type of customer service mentality or mindset where we always were in service of the customer and we would figure out how to do solutions. I think it comes down to, you know, like as consultants, as the type of work that we did consulting and bringing projects to life from basically nothing, from basically an idea that was in somebody's mind that eventually the types of work that we did with customers just translated really well even into the customer service world where we were always about solving problems and then working through even difficult conversations that a customer might be bringing up or bringing to the table.
Tu: And I think even going back a little bit further than that, that we both had customer service backgrounds. You know, my mom had three restaurants and I was a server in all three and you're at the pharmacy and I think that some of that trickled into our, like, when we got quote-unquote older in our professional life. But yeah, does anything like ring a bell for you like in those days before you were actually like a working professional? You know, for me it was, I think I remember someone saying, "How did you do it?" You know, you're busing and you're serving like four different tables and you make it so effortless, right? I didn't know it was a skill set I had at the time, but I do remember one of the girls that I worked with mentioning that, like, she didn't understand how I could just juggle so many things at the same time, be efficient at it also and just get things done, right?
Andrew: Yeah, totally. When I look back at the work that I did over time, especially what I did in college as a pharmacy tech, I was a certified pharmacy tech all through college. I was like a chemistry major because of course I was supposed to be either a doctor or a pharmacist or something like that, right? And I did something different instead, which is, you know, I went into software. That was a very big disappointment to my parents. But I would say that I really cut my teeth on customer service and how to do it working in the pharmacy. I remember being 18, 19 years old and basically scared to pick up the phone or didn't want to have to pick up the phone and talk to somebody in the pharmacy. Something wasn't happening with the doctor's office where, you know, a customer or a patient is waiting on their prescription and hey, we faxed them already, but they just, you know, didn't get around to it. You just got to pick up and call. We picked up the phone, we called the doctor's office, we said, "Hey, we faxed this thing to you. They're out of their medication. Can you just approve it or get the doctor to take a look at it?" Right. So very quickly, you know, any reservations that I had about picking up the phone totally cleared after at least a couple of months in the pharmacy there. And then there became situations where working in the pharmacy, you had to go and help a patient, at least the pharmacy that I worked at, which was kind of a small independent pharmacy in Montecito. We went the extra mile to help the patients, you know, basically navigate their insurance. And so I had to learn how to basically pick up the phone on behalf of a patient and help them navigate a prior authorization to make sure that they could actually get the medications that they were prescribed to them. And it was through that experience I think that I learned that, you know, even though you're serving somebody, they're behind the counter, it's ostensibly a product that goes over the counter to them and into their hand in a bag. It was really about problem solving for the customers, helping them navigate, you know, things that you deal with every day that maybe, you know, this is their first time doing it in general.
Tu: That brings up a memory that I actually hadn't thought about in years. I cut, I say cut my teeth, like what's the phrase, cut my chops? Something, I don't remember. But anyway, so I worked at Kinko's and the way that the phones used to work there, I worked in the computer department as a designer, right? And it was very formulaic, like we do business cards, menus, whatever else. But like the phones would ring for the entire store, and if no one on the copying side picked up, they would ring in the computer service department. And if I'm standing there, I'd pick it up, right? And I remember this lady being totally fired up over someone doing something to their order. She gave me an earful and I basically went and countered with, you know, I know you're frustrated, but yelling at me is not helping you because I didn't actually place the order and I didn't do anything. I'm literally just trying to help you. And I navigated her down from this place to where the very next day she came in with brownies, looked for me, and apologized. I was able to help her out, diffuse it. And I think like maybe there's something natural in us from way back when that we have always been these people. So maybe that's why we never even talked about it because it was just so much inherently already in our personality that this was just a given and I guess we were lucky too that we at least agreed on that.
Andrew: Yeah. It's interesting because I had a similar story. There was a time at the pharmacy, there was a patient at the pharmacy where we were shipping their medications to them and this was a medication that they absolutely had to have, right? And when you're shipping, you know, you don't always know if it's going to make it there. And so these prescriptions that we were shipping to her were shipped via FedEx, but for whatever reason, it was a weekend day or something like that. Maybe the next day was Sunday. FedEx at the time, you know, they didn't deliver on Sundays. And so FedEx wasn't able to make the delivery yet that day. It just didn't make it on their list or something like that. And she was going to be without her meds for, you know, the rest of the weekend. And this was something that we had to figure out a solution for, right? Here's somebody who is entrusting you with their care and you did your end there, but there's a last mile that has to get fulfilled. And that was the time where I learned that you could just, you could ask the other person on the line, you know, basically you assemble an impromptu team there, hey, what are the possible solutions here? Right? I remember being on the phone with the FedEx person at the time and I said, "Hey, what could we do there?" And she said to me, you know, maybe you could get a courier. I said, "Oh, I had never even heard of a courier. I was like 19 years old and I didn't know that was even an option." And so I said, "Well, could you recommend somebody?" And then she did. And then we just paid them the $50. They went on the truck, grabbed it, you know, they sorted out the box, grabbed it, and then in 20 minutes, the prescription was in the patient's hand. And this was somebody who is now not only extremely grateful that we were able to deliver for them, but also, you know, it's a customer for life and who could have been potentially either in lots of pain or in a health emergency otherwise if she didn't have her prescription.
Tu: You always learn even after all these years. This is a new story for me. I never heard this one from you before. And I heard through the grapevine that you also have one about Oprah that I kind of need to hear.
Andrew: It's not as interesting of a customer service story, but it's just a fun story. We're in Montecito. Oprah lives, I don't know, somewhere around the block or around the corner or something like that. I didn't know that at the time. I don't know anything as a 19-year-old. And one day, you know, at 6:00, 6:00 on the dot, we lock the door so that I could get out there. And at the time, I was working, you know, most days of the week. And I wanted to get out the door so I could go to like judo practice. Just as I'm locking the door, somebody knocks there and I open the door. I said, "Sorry, we're closed." I close the door on her and lock it. And then my colleague sees who it is and she runs by me as I'm walking away and she says, "That's Oprah, you idiot." And then I, I think, you know, sometimes I think about that and I think about what we do here today with our customers and we certainly have our VIP customers, right? We have the merchants that we work with who are our VIPs. Sometimes it's not always what they spend with us. It's not always what plan they're on or even how long they've been with us. Sometimes it's all about, you know, what kind of relationship we've developed with them over time, right? The merchants who talk to us, the merchants who help us with case studies or even if they just bring interesting bugs to us. There's nothing I love more than an interesting bug that we are able to solve and then help them get on their day and smooth that out. I think that's something that I wish more people, well at least with us and our customers, like more people would realize like we actually love to talk to them and if they have an issue we actually love to hear about it and try to solve it, right? Like some people are like, oh I'm not going to bother with customer service because they're not going to help anyway or they've been defeated or deflated by their experience elsewhere and they don't feel like reaching out will help solve their problem, right?
Tu: And I think that that's just comes with territory, but it's kind of unfortunate because I would love to, like even if we couldn't solve it, I'd love to hear it because maybe we can or more importantly, we have done this in the past where we realize they're not thinking about the problem in the same way and we found like a completely different way to help them solve their problem that they weren't thinking about. And it just goes back to that, you know, two heads or three heads to solve a problem is better than one because you may just be stuck in the way that you're thinking about something and getting a fresh perspective was all you actually really needed.
Andrew: Yeah. Sometimes it just takes a different perspective to, you know, rephrase the question or the problem in a different way in order to find the solution. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Do you recall some of our kind of spicier customer service moments while working on Cleverific? I know that we had spicy moments. Yes. And I know that you recall them better than me. I don't know why that is, but I definitely feel like you have a memory for these things that I don't have.
Tu: I have a feeling and I know for a fact, like I know the one time there was the tax issue and someone threatened to sue us. Like that was pretty spicy, right?
Andrew: Mhm.
Tu: That was really really early on. And obviously I know there's a couple other funny ones that came across our desk as well.
Andrew: Mhm.
Tu: I mean we call them internally T3s and we definitely had plenty of those but enough to learn from them. But yeah, I'm not very good with these specific details or maybe I just want to avoid them and not recall.
Andrew: Yeah, you know when I think about the T3s. So we have a process for our customer support where I think this is pretty common. Support teams will often have categorization levels and they'll have their tier one support, their tier two and then tier three, right? And so this is where we get these T1s, T2s and T3s. They don't stand for the terminator, they stand for just tiers. And so our top tier, you know, our highest level of escalation is a T3. And we have processes in place to handle those and how to get the best outcome out of there. Generally T1s are the types of things that are, you know, hey how do I do X, Y or Z and our Laura and our support team basically fulfills all of those tickets with flying colors. T2 is anything that could potentially involve a developer or an engineer. Our whole team handles that really really well. Tier three tickets or T3 tickets, when those come in, those always represent for us, a T3 is anything that represents somebody who is angry or they're in a blocker that is an immediate blocker for them that could have wide ranging consequences either financial or even personal or emotional. We have a process for handling that. The first thing that we do is basically level with them and help them understand that we are there to help them and that we're on their side and that we're working with them to basically resolve the solution. And part of that is making sure that we are highly responsive to whatever it is, whatever their situation is at that point in time. Oftentimes being really responsive and understanding their emotional state so that you can deescalate basically turns a T3 into a T1 sometimes. We've definitely seen that but then other times, you know, you have to do a little bit more and go the distance where hey, a fix is going to go out for this within the next 20 minutes and we've certainly done that before. We've done that before for T1s and T2s too. But one of the other things with T3s is we have a little kind of checklist rule there which is don't go alone on your T3s. Always bring a buddy. So, we use the buddy system for that where when you're responding to a T3, you always respond with somebody so that the other person will kind of help you because you know sometimes those are high stakes situations or somebody said something that gets your emotions going there and it's really helpful to have a buddy alongside and pair with you on that response to make sure that we have the real goal in mind which is actually just to help the customer. As far as remembering things, you know, we haven't had, we have like one T3 a year at the most. And so they really just don't happen that often. You know, knock on wood, of course. But I think we've done a really good job with our system and reliability and how we handle support that T3s just really don't happen that often. And so sometimes we look at a T3 and, you know, sometimes we look at that situation and, hey, maybe a customer is frustrated but it's not necessarily a T3. And then sometimes, you know, they are really actual T3s but sometimes those T3s are really just not about an emotional state or anything. It's really about hey this is a very high priority problem to solve here.
Tu: I kind of have some crazy stories from the agency days and some of them were notoriously bad. And when I mean notoriously bad, I have had developers that I have literally had to drive over to their house, make sure one, they weren't sleeping in or they were still alive. Like it was that bad. Like can you imagine? We have something on a deadline and maybe I don't know how we found some of these people. They were on the team and at that point in time I was hired onto this team. So it's not like I picked who I worked with. This is just who I got on this team. But I remember literally being one of the two designers, hopped in a car, went and knocked on the door of a developer's house to see where the project was. It was that bad because we were not getting answers. Like can you imagine that's mortifying. And so what do we do in that case? Well, we quickly try to find a replacement quietly in the background, but internally we try to solve the next problem at hand, which is we still have to deliver something. Can we get it out of this person? Do we have to find an emergency person like ASAP? And at the end of the day, you just, like when you're in that kind of position, you don't throw a person under the bus. Like you're just busy trying to solve a problem, right? And your problem isn't to blame someone or blame that person. Your problem is to solve the thing that you need to do, which is, hey, I need to deliver this project. I am stuck. I'm stuck with something that is totally out of my control. And what are the ABC options to get this project out the door? Obviously, we have to buy some time. Like, that's always the first thing. And unfortunately, you're going to have to make some stuff up sometimes to buy some time because you can't, you may want to be honest, but there's certain circumstances like I can't find my developer and he slept in or who knows what. Like that's not any, that's never a viable excuse. So we can't run out the door with the truth there, right? But that's the truth which was WTF? This guy's still asleep. Like I don't even know.
Andrew: I never knew these things, like this, that this happened to you that you basically do a wellness check on a developer. Yeah, that has definitely, cue up the things you never thought you'd be doing as a designer in a design firm is like go find someone that you have to hunt down for a project. But from that kind of, I think this is where you and I also shine, like just bringing it back into Cleverific, which is every business is going to have some ups and downs, right? And in those times, we know that we need to go solve a problem and the last thing we want to ever do is point fingers, right? Because that doesn't really solve problems. It's like, hey, what do we need to do to change the trajectory of where we're going now? Because it's not looking good. And how do we solve this? And how do we solve this efficiently and effectively? And you know, that being said, you still have to learn. Going back into some of the problems that we also have or some of the things that we're trying to solve, like you said before, they're not all monetary solutions. Sometimes they're time solutions or let's say someone comes in, I'm totally pivoting, but pivoting to an actual merchant experience here is sometimes, you know, when they come in the door, they ask a tall ask that we can't deliver, right? And sometimes that ask is super simple and we couldn't deliver it right away. So every single one is different and depending on the schedule that we have, the time of year, we can solve a problem immediately or we can't solve a problem at all. Right? And so where do we find the balance for how we decide that we can solve a problem? I don't think there's a fixed answer for that one. It just depends on what we're doing when that actual problem comes in. Right? I'm not talking about T3s. Just talking about helping people in general when there's not really a timeline or stress if you will and prioritizing the things that we've already agreed that we're doing versus putting them on pause to help someone out, right?
Andrew: We do generally have a philosophy behind that or a framework for how we work through those types of scenarios. Interesting thing that happens with us is that because we're able to solve problems, sometimes merchants come to us with a particular, you know, question, right? Maybe it's about a product, maybe it's about Shopify in general. We'll always answer the question for them, right? Or we'll always work to point them in the right direction. And Laura has taken the torch on that really really well and does an amazing job on that in having learned the platform and learned our app inside and out. And you know, I mean, she of course has worked with us for the past 5 years or so. And that gives her a really great capability on doing that, but she's carried the torch for us on that and how we always did that. And an interesting thing that happens when you are actually able to answer questions for merchants where maybe Shopify isn't answering questions or is actively avoiding answering questions is that they'll ask you more things, right? And because you can solve problem A, they come back to you with, hey, can you guys solve this problem as well? And sometimes it's completely out of left field where, you know, I have to tell them like, hey, let me point you to another app. Let me refer you to an agency here because, you know, that's not necessarily our wheelhouse, right? And we kind of want to do things in our wheelhouse where we can, where we have the unique capability of doing that. Speaking of unique capability, you know, merchants will come to us with problems and one of our key kind of framework points here for how we decide whether we will or might offer a professional service solution for that merchant is whether we're basically uniquely suited to solving that problem for them, right? Is there an insight that, you know, that we know that only we can do, right? Because having worked with orders and Shopify for 10 years, you know, slicing and dicing orders, we basically know everything that you could do to an order, everything that you could torture an order to do and all through all the integrated systems that an order might flow through as well. And so if it's not kind of in that wheelhouse, if it's something that, you know, hey, there's plenty of other agencies that could do that, right? Say like front-end development or something like that, then we always refer those out. We only take the things that are completely, you know, in our area of expertise where we're uniquely suited to solving.
Tu: Speaking of solving problems, we were talking about, hey, what do we want this business to look like? And when we solve problems, like where do we define setting boundaries, right? We have been known and we say this quietly because we don't want to be well known for it, but we have worked nights and weekends on certain problems for sure when we know that it's very meaningful and it would be a big deal to solve it in the time that we need to solve it in, right? And no one wants to advertise for that because no one wants to do it and we don't want our team to be working nights and weekends too. And that's kind of the fine line time boundary that we have where like this week we bug someone on their day off and we try to do that very very lightly and the least amount of times as possible, right? Because we all value the time away from the work, right? I remember not being able to set those boundaries when I was in the agency days and I would work like 21 days straight and I'd be a complete ogre to everyone who lived in the house with me and no one liked me anymore. And that's the unfortunate truth to where, you know, my husband was like, "You need a day off because you are now not the person that I want to be hanging around with anymore." And that's those boundaries where, hey, I recognize that I don't want to be in that situation anymore. In Cleverific, we also try to be very very mindful of that when we try to hit a goal for someone, but also be mindful that other people have lives outside of just work.
Andrew: Yeah, totally. And you know, that comes down to our philosophy that the work is important, but it's important because it enables the life that you want. And we're all a do what it takes sort of team. But I think everybody's willing to do what it takes because, you know, at the end of the day, those are few and far between, you know, for all cases. And, you know, we really do stick to our four day work week promise for the entire team there. So, I think it's something that I'm personally very proud of about how we work.
Tu: Yeah, I'm pretty proud of it, too. And I think like I mentioned this before, but it really shows because when we ask someone to step up, we don't really get that much friction, right? Because we don't overwork anyone. No one's working 12-hour days, six days a week, right? So when we ask them, I wouldn't say like an extra favor, but hey, could you take a look into this if you could? We don't get feet dragging.
Andrew: One fun thing that we do too is we have this kind of idea of a cool down. It's not just a cool down as a time frame, but cool down projects, right? And so, for example, we were doing a bunch of work over the last month or so getting some big things done for BFCM and for the engineering team. What we ended up doing afterward is we have a number of projects that still all move the ball forward, right? But they're in a completely different area and they also are kind of lower stakes there. So, you get some time to breathe and, you know, kind of let your brain recover there, still at the same time get, you know, the stimulation knowing that you're working on something that's actually important. It's not like they're not working on something important at that time. And what this does is that it helps you basically not burn out, right? And so when we manage that workload, you know, I think a lot about like, hey, these are big important things. We're moving fast here. We're building these things that really matter. And then after that there's a sense of, you know, like releasing the pressure valve, so to speak. Kind of like a short off season or break. You're still working, but it is kind of a mental break that maybe, you know, it's not as demanding or not as high stakes.
Tu: Yeah, I would say that, you know, I'm very proud that this sounds odd, but I'm very proud that we prioritize everyone all at the same time. It sounds weird, but you know, everyone has what they value the most. And we take all of that into consideration. You know, when we try to solve a problem, it's like, okay, what can we do to move this forward and make a merchant happy? What can we do at the same time to ensure that the team isn't burnt out as we're asking them for that extra mile? Back to that whole releasing of the pressure valve. It's something that we take into probably every decision that we do. It's natural for us. We don't really think about it anymore. We just kind of do it and this is the automatic checklist for ensuring that all these things happen, like hey, have these needs been met and we're not throwing anyone under the bus while we do it, right? It took us a few years to get customer service right. Right. We did a lot of things right right off the bat. But you know it was learning about how to frame messages, right, tickets if you will, responses and so on and so forth in the right manner to deescalate, right? And to get the information that we needed and to be able to, when we were first doing it, we did it so we didn't have to teach anyone, right? And as we grew, we had to translate this knowledge to someone else who, just because they're in customer service, they don't know your customer service or how we would approach customer service. And so all of that had to be translated to someone else who, back to what we were saying, we do it naturally. So we didn't realize how much we had to put down and train someone else, right? And then to train the right person on top of that or to find the right person on top of that took a few years. You know, we did it because we're bootstrapped at first. We tried to outsource it for a short bit of time and found out that definitely didn't work. We tried to do some weekend stuff when we were transferring information from one team member to another one, didn't really work. And so yeah it was trial and error to where we are just a smooth sailing machine right now where I feel there's two reasons for that. Customer service team, like Laura specifically has been with us for 5 years, right? We've built a culture to where, you know, usually customer service, they can easily burn out because of the high stress of the job or usually not being able to provide some relief from the pressure, right? And so when we kind of figured out this formula over time, we knew that we had a successful one because more and more of our team stayed for longer. But it took us a bit of fine-tuning to get here.
Andrew: Yeah, it certainly did. I remember iterating towards a 4-day work week and there were some reservations before that, right? And so we ended up with every other week off for a while. And then one day, I think it was a couple years ago now, we were thinking about, we were talking about it. Hey, why not just try 4-day work week for the summer? We were looking at the number of days and it turned out, you know, hey, if we did it for the summer, it just adds three days. Is that really a big deal? Right? And so we just did it, right? It's something I'm never going to go back from, right? And I think it's one of the reasons why I love the work that we do. And also we have so much longevity in the work that we do is that we have this really incredibly sustainable lifestyle and pace that we go with. Not to say that we're not ambitious, we're highly ambitious on what we want to get done and the types of merchants that we want to serve and the level that we want to serve them at. But we're able to do a lot within that amount of time. I think it's in part because, you know, the way that we're able to recharge after the fact. You mentioned something about, you know, kind of weekend support a little bit earlier. Do you remember getting that in place and doing that and the reasons why we did that?
Tu: Yeah, totally.
Andrew: Do you want to share it for our viewing audience?
Tu: Do you remember?
Andrew: I do remember.
Tu: Okay. So, you just want me to get really annoyed right now is what you're saying.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. I'm teeing up, this is less of a softball and more of, it's like a rage room thing, you know? So, go ahead and swing.
Tu: I'm only going to talk about this if you give me a bat and a printer at the same time.
Andrew: There you go.
Tu: So, basically we had to jump through some hoops for a Shopify certification. And the certification required that we need 24/7 support. And at the time, the problem with trying to solve for that is not only do you need nights and weekends, but you need like basically when you're sleeping, who's going to do this? So, we tried to solve it the best way that we could. And so, we had the dedicated standard full-time person. And then we hired out a phone answering service to do nighttime hours and then we had a whole other team on the weekends which was just pretty much three days because we were already 4-day work weeks at that time. And so I think that's definitely when service suffered a little bit. I know that we got some complaints over a phone tree, right? Like they didn't get to the right person and the person who worked on the weekends wasn't as knowledgeable or invested really in the work like our full-time dedicated person and it kind of shows the difference. You could talk to, for instance, there was a ticket that would go a few days, right? And you would talk to one person that you really liked on Wednesday and on Sunday night or Saturday you would talk to another person that was like what is this person talking about, right? Like they're not aligned at all even though one was trying to pass information to the other one. I think, you know, trying to get this certification and jump through these hoops caused a lot of friction for us at that point in time in customer service and it didn't turn out the way that we wanted to because there was no, to be honest, no timelines or follow up with that. So it was definitely a wasted effort and I will have to say that when you're bootstrapped, things like that hurt and things like that just kind of make you, to be honest, a little bit bitter.
Andrew: What I would say because people actually ask me this, like how do you do customer service with 4-day work week? That's a question I don't know if you've had asked, I've had that asked, right? And to be honest, you're just transparent about it because everybody wants a 4-day work week, right? And they understand that people need days off and we have had no friction about that at all because we're very clear about how we communicate it. When we're around, we're spot-on with our response time and they know that we're there. We have customers that are in, you know, the UK or Australia, and they have told me that they don't even feel like we're in a different time zone because we're so responsive. And quite frankly, Laura, our head of our team here, deeply cares and we actually, speaking of trying not to overburden, she couldn't help herself sometimes where she just loves a merchant so much. She'll just respond at some crazy time. And I'm like, Laura, you can't do that because, you know, you need some time for yourself and you can't set that expectation because we can't fulfill it all the time, right? And so, I'd have to actually dissuade her sometimes from responding too quickly and to be able to take some time for herself and to do it during work hours and just kind of really get people to understand what that rhythm is.
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. And when it comes down to it, you know, in our support lives there, you know, when we were running support and then even just knowing what the data looks like now, the number of tickets at the end of the day on Friday, Saturday, Sunday are so small because we've built so much reliability into the service and the product itself, even during BFCM. We've done so much leg work ahead of time. All it really takes for us is to continue on our pager rotation, right? Which we've had since day one and then just, you know, be able to come in on Monday with all the expectations set there. Yeah, it was unfortunate about that Shopify certification. I remember the effort that we put into it that we cleared all the hurdles and put everything in place and then, you know, it's just crickets from that Shopify team there and it turns out, you know, it's not about clearing the hurdles for them, it was about them deciding that they wanted you to have that certification and it actually didn't matter what hurdles you had cleared in the first place. So, that was a really frustrating thing there, but you know, so it goes. We've moved on from that. I think that, you know, going down to a 4-day work week and having those expectations set really clearly with merchants, especially given how well we deliver during our business hours there, you know, it's honestly better than 24/7 support.
Tu: Yeah. And then I would say after 10 years, I'm probably really proud of the work that, I'm proud of a lot of things, but the work that we put into really making customer service and customer success really effective has really shown because we get so little of the types of tickets we used to have at the beginning, right? Like remember that was like most of our day at a certain time when we first started, right? Because, you know, we got the app in poor shape, right? And then there was an amount of time where no one was responding to anyone. So we had this backlog of people that we had to apologize to and dig out of that stuff and then make the app less and less buggy from how it originally was to where it is today. So we don't have any of the same frictions and those are nice things to remove off your shoulders and not have to worry about it so that we can solve bigger problems.
Andrew: Yeah. You know and what's funny about that time is that, you know, those types of problems are almost a two-edged sword for us these days, right? We used to get so many five star reviews all the time during that time if you'll recall. And it's because oh there was a problem, we would just solve it and then boom it was fixed within, you know, 15, 20 minutes or something. And, you know, all of the advice out there about oh how do you get five star reviews in the app store on Shopify is about oh you take a support interaction and you turn it from, you know, whatever problem they were having, you turn it into a positive interaction then you ask for the five star review. The problem with that these days for us is that we get so few of those types of issues that, you know, the people who are emailing us for support are just asking questions about the product, right?
Tu: If they can do something on it or how would they do this and that or we can point them in the right direction. You know we get very very few actual problems. It's also slowed down our five star review pace, but
Andrew: That's true.
Tu: You know, at the same time, you know, it's the right way. We'll figure out the five star review thing later on. It's better to have a very stable product that actually works than, you know, have bugs for the sake of getting five star reviews, right?
Andrew: Absolutely. Customer service is really the core of our personalities. Like I don't think that we're ever going to have a business where we don't take that as top priority or we could actually even remove it from our personalities. I don't think that we're those people where it's just so natural that we prioritize this. It's just going to be an unspoken thing that is number one if not number two in the back of our heads.
Andrew: We're really just about helping people, you know. So when we're working with them or whether there's any gain from us about it, that's just what we're about. And it was fun talking about, you know, kind of going down memory lane on some of the support issues and how we got to where we were, especially with regards to support there because it's something that I think because it's in our DNA to just kind of do and because we've, you know, I feel like we've got it down so well, we don't have to worry about it too much, which is great for the whole business in general.
Tu: Yeah. And I think for next time I think what would be maybe fun to talk about is what kind of service things have you done outside of work for people, i.e. wear a pickle costume and what I was doing last week when I was just helping a friend because I think we do that just as much offline as well. You'll find us picking up, helping friends with brands or helping, I was helping a friend with some print making for her small shop, right? And just was helping her get her products together and I helped another friend set up a farm store. And those things are not chores for me. They're just kind of fun, right? Just go out here. It's like you get to do something with your hands while you're getting, basically catch up with a friend, right?
Andrew: Mhm. Yeah, totally. That sounds like a fun conversation. Well, this was a fun time here. Thanks for hopping on and chatting about this and sharing it with everybody else, too.
Tu: Yeah, thanks, Andrew. And I'm sure I will see you later. Bye.
