Talk to Tellus: How We Create a Customer-Centric Experience
Have you ever had a frustrating experience when you’re on a call with a customer service representative? It can be taxing having to listen to elevator music for sometimes hours on end before you finally get to speak with a real person. Sometimes that person isn’t particularly kind or helpful, which just adds to the problem. That’s why we’re proud to highlight the stellar customer service you’ve noticed from us. For the past six months, we have only received positive comments about our customer service and we’re incredibly proud to have this effort recognized.
We offer a white glove service to our customers because we want to demonstrate how much we value and care about you! Without your continued support, we wouldn’t have been able to get nominated on Product Hunt’s Golden Kitty Awards for 2020 or increase our base rate to 3%.
We have a truly outstanding team of customer support specialists that we wanted to highlight so that you can get to know a little more about the people you may have spoken to when using our services. And what better way is there to get to know someone than to ask them directly? So we asked 4 of our support team members the same 3 questions about their experiences, their work at Tellus, and what advice they would share with other fellow customer support specialists.
Meet Navid, our Operations and Customer Support Lead:
What has your experience been like working in customer support?
I’ve had a challenging and positive experience working in customer support at Tellus. My previous work experience has always put me in high-profile, customer-facing roles, so this was a natural position to enter here at Tellus. I’ve enjoyed engaging with our users to address their problems and issues. No single day is ever the same; I work and learn new problems and solutions each and every day. Our primary goals in customer support are to not only address and resolve customer issues and questions and ensure our users succeed using the app. We have a customer-first philosophy here, making sure we also anticipate our customer’s needs, so the user can take advantage of all the features our app has to offer them.
How does the work you do fit into Tellus’ larger goals and mission?
The company’s goals are to pursue excellence, operate with integrity, and act proactively together. Customer support has a huge impact on these goals. We are the voice and advocates of our users and we need to be able to clearly communicate the needs, wants, and problems of our user base to be addressed by our internal engineering and product teams. We do push hard internally for issues to be addressed so our app features exceed the expectations of our users. We are transparent and act as a fiduciary for our user base. What this means is we don’t succeed unless our customers do, and that’s why we always put our users’ interests first.
What advice would you give to other customer service professionals?
Regardless of chat, phone, email, or social media as your portal to connect with your customers, always remember that the customer is coming to you because they have a real issue. You should wholeheartedly take time to genuinely address their needs. You should also consider how you would respond to that person with compassion and empathy if that person were sitting right next to you.
Meet Jason, our Finance and Operations Specialist:
What has your experience been like working in customer support?
Working in customer support has been a great learning experience. Communicating with our customers and adhering to their problems and needs have definitely helped me grow personally and professionally. As I begin to start my journey on the path I want to take, this experience has been helping me improve my soft skills and begin to have a problem-solving and process mindset.
How does the work you do fit into Tellus’ larger goals and mission?
Tellus’ mission is to help our community in alleviating income inequality and have more people to protect and build their assets. Working in support gives us the opportunity to directly communicate with and educate our users to protect their assets and build wealth.
What advice would you give to other customer service professionals?
Although the end result of customer service is solving a problem or answering a question customers have, customer service professionals should focus more on building relationships with the customers and work towards building positive interactions.
Meet Journ, our Finance and Operations Specialist:
What has your experience been like working in customer support?
After working for Tellus’s customer support for over a year, I’ve learned that there are a couple of core skills and qualities that are needed for an exceptional customer service representative. The skills I have managed to pick up along the way include communication skills, problem-solving skills, and lastly, a caring attitude towards our customers, the product, and the company.
Customer support is about listening to your customers and helping them to resolve their issues so that they can remain happy. This simple act of taking the time to walk customers through their problems and issues ultimately helps build trust between the customer, our support team, and the company. A huge part of the job comes with the team’s ability to problem-solve. We can expect to face different problems as our app goes through iterations of improvements, thus we need to stand ready to resolve any issues our users bring up!
Following these simple practices and culture set forth by our Operations team has enabled Tellus to build trust with our customers, resulting in increased ratings on our App and Google Play Store, and ultimately helping us grow the business as well as our list of happy customers.
How does the work you do fit into Tellus’ larger goals and mission?
We care about delivering the best possible support to our customers. We care for our users and support their experience with Tellus from end to end. We love hearing what’s working and what’s not and figuring out solutions to make their in-app experiences even better.
We go beyond just helping a customer solve their problems. We own the whole problem, thinking about the product and the user experience from their perspective and communicating this feedback during designated quality assurance calls with our development team.
What advice would you give to other customer service professionals?
Use a human-centric approach to assist your customers to solve their problems, every step of the way. Building this relationship with our customers goes a long way in establishing trust and getting the best, most honest insights about how we can continue to improve.
Meet Jim our VP of Finance and Operations:
What has your experience been like working in customer support?
Working in customer support has been an incredible experience of always trying to do more with less as our user base grows and our product offerings expand. We have the mindset of operators by day and builders by night - this means we learn from our interactions with our users each day and build solutions that make our lives and our users’ experience better at night for the next day.
How does the work you do fit into Tellus’ larger goals and mission?
We play a crucial role in gathering user feedback and questions. Additionally, we analyze and report user behavior trends to our product, marketing, and engineering teams so that they can iterate on the product for an even greater user experience. Furthermore, we problem solve and often are the first to discover bugs through user experiences. Not only do we have to escalate the bug to our engineering team, but we also have to deal with an upset or disappointed user.
What advice would you give to other customer service professionals?
It takes thick skin to deal with upset customers. You have to really want to make people’s days better to be able to get fulfillment from this line of work. What’s tough is that the users do not always want you to solve the problem; sometimes, they just want to vent and you have to be able to understand that they are not truly frustrated at you but rather the situation.
Conclusion:
Our team works diligently to provide the kind of services that elevate your experience with Tellus. The people on our Customer Support team are representatives of our company that you will interact with when seeking us out. Don’t be afraid to mention our blog to them if you speak to any of these great guys. Continue to let us know what you think about our customer service because we are always working to improve to better serve you.
Our support hours are Monday - Friday, 9am - 5pm PST.