Week 2 of Stepping Up SquareOne’s Customer Success Game

Hey! I’m spending 30 days helping SquareOne take their Customer Success to the next level with engaging newsletters, FAQs, community interactions, and tech tools to make it all more efficient. This post is part of my weekly project update series. Click here to view the full project!

The Plan

• 6 article rough drafts posted to Slack for feedback
• Blog about what I learned writing company content
• Set up Zendesk, get familiar with ticketing system
• Loom tutorial on how to set up Zendesk
• Scour SquareOne’s socials, compiling questions and comments that should be addressed. Translate comments from French and rewrite for clarity as necessary.
• Embed a Loom video on my process for finding and responding to comments
• Recap of Week 2 (this post)
• Update landing page

The Results

I ended the week feeling a lot better about the project than when I started.

I wrote six articles that would be a valuable addition to SquareOne’s blog or newsletter and wrote a seventh blog summarizing what I learned from the experience.

• 3 Reasons Kids Should Play Board Games
• 4 Reasons Board Games Won’t Die
• How to Start a Board Game Group
• Why SquareOne was Successfully Kickstarted
• 4 Difficulties Developing SquareOne
• SquareOne: Why Bother?
• What I Learned Writing 6 Articles for SquareOne

I set up Zendesk and recorded a tutorial of how to integrate their chat feature into a website, and compiled a list of comments, mostly from SquareOne’s Kickstarter page.

Most importantly, I gained clarity around how I want to focus my time next week. The articles will take a back seat, as making them look pretty in MailChimp isn’t a skill a Customer Success agent will utilize frequently.

I will, however, put more effort into answering questions and comments. The main difficulty will come from the fact that the community comments, and the answers the devs have given, are almost all in French. So I have to translate them, and then fix the horrible grammar that Google translate spits out.

Furthermore, because the product has not yet shipped, many of the questions are hypotheticals or customers unsatisfied with the communication from the team. Writing a really strong response to those will be important.

What I learned

I have a lot to learn about managing my energy and being productive. I thought I could bust out six articles and do a quick edit after each one, but my brain naturally wanted to write all six rough drafts, and do the edits after I’d had a couple of days away from them. This threw off my projected deadlines for the week, which led to a lack of clarity around getting shit done.

Documenting my work is a big part of this project. The SquareOne team could benefit massively from documenting theirs.

The vast majority of complaints from their backers center on not getting updates from the team on what they’re working on.

I know from my own experience this last week that it’s tempting not to give anyone an update on what’s up until you have a finished product, or can link to something to show your work. Seeing an example in the real world, for a real company, where this kind of thought process backfired is a serious reminder that people just want to be in the know. They don’t need to see a finished or perfect result.

I could not have made it through this week without my Trello board (an overview of which you can find here). I felt overwhelmed at times, but being able to do the next task on the list was a life-saver.

Ask questions earlier rather than later! I got valuable info and feedback about the project at the end of weeks 1 and 2, which I could have benefited from if I had reached out earlier.

Going Forward

Overall, I’m pumped to go into week 3. I’m more clear about where to focus my efforts, what’s important, and what should take center stage.

I’ve learned that I’m not ready for a 25/5 Pomodoro split. I generally need longer breaks in between work blocks or projects, and that’s fine. Starting resistance is my biggest enemy, and by promising myself longer breaks, I reduce that resistance. As long as I start working, I’ll get shit done.

Next week I’ll be focusing on:

• Reply to customer questions/comments for SquareOne
• Make a Prezi slide going over what issues SquareOne is handling well, what they’re not handling well, and what I did about it
• Make a Loom video walking through the slide
• Put canned responses in TextExpander
• Make Loom vid showing how to add those responses and use TextExpander
• Polish the 6 articles I wrote last week, add visual interest (pictures, formatting), and publish on Medium
• Blog post recapping week 3

I’ll see you next week when I’ll share a bunch of juicy mock responses!