Last Friday I was in San Francisco for the first ever UserConf. It was a fan­tas­tic day filled with great speak­ers and fun con­ver­sa­tions. Like I men­tioned on Twitter, it was the best con­fer­ence I’ve been to in a long time.

The wifi was sketchy dur­ing the day so I just kept my note­book, the paper kind, handy for jot­ting down ideas from the talks.

Richard White, co-founder and CEO of UserVoice, opened the day by talk­ing about the cur­rent state of cus­tomer ser­vice and what moti­vated UserVoice and CoSupport to put on UserConf. He char­ac­ter­ized busi­nesses as defined by two types of sup­port: the tra­di­tional model and the web-native model.

The tra­di­tional model of sup­port is that which grew up with older busi­nesses. It’s mas­sive call cen­ters, phone trees, and a world where only 29% of com­pa­nies reply within a day and only 20% reply across mul­ti­ple medi­ums. It’s a world defined by ITIL and other arcane acronyms.

The new, web-native mode of sup­port is what grew up along­side the inter­net. It’s fast-paced, multi-medium, and focused on oppor­tu­ni­ties. 83% of com­pa­nies reply in under a day, 89% reply across mul­ti­ple chan­nels, and 87% reply on Twitter. This model of sup­port is one that gets back to busi­ness basics and is an inte­gral fea­ture of your product.

Richard also set down the guide for the rest of the day’s talks. As he put it, no one goes to school for cus­tomer ser­vice but every­one at UserConf knows it’s vital to their busi­nesses. For that rea­son the day was going to focus on the how of sup­port, not the why. It wasn’t going to be a day about argu­ing why you should reply to cus­tomers over Twitter. Instead it would focus on how you can craft kick-ass expe­ri­ences for all of your cus­tomers, every day. If you can keep your cus­tomers happy you can keep your customers.

Jessica Semaan, from Airbnb, was the next to speak. She talked about how Airbnb was able to scale its cus­tomer sup­port team from 3 to more than 200 peo­ple. Jessica described it all through a metaphor relat­ing cus­tomer ser­vice to a love relationship.

At Airbnb they started with all sup­port run­ning through the founder’s cell phone. That didn’t scale so well. As they grew the team they wanted to find a way to help more peo­ple more quickly while still hav­ing the high level of ser­vice and trust.

To get started they set trust as their defin­ing goal. As part of that they hired peo­ple from within the com­mu­nity, those who were already hosts or had fre­quently stayed with hosts. They spent 6 months con­sol­i­dat­ing data from Zendesk, Contactual, and other ser­vices they were using. As Jessica phrased it, they need infor­ma­tion not data. They want to be able to track con­tacts per trans­ac­tion, top issues with each prod­uct and team, and cost per sup­port interaction.

Jessica also talked a lot about what phone sup­port is like at Airbnb. Multilingual phone sup­port costs six times what offer­ing mul­ti­lin­gual email sup­port does. Once you offer phone sup­port you then need to offer it in many time­zones. Each of those time­zones need some­one for each lan­guage you sup­port. Suddenly your 2 per­son sup­port team becomes 12.

Later in the day Kevin Hale, co-founder of Wufoo, who talked about how they designed soft­ware that peo­ple loved using. He opened by describ­ing Wufoo as “Microsoft Access as designed by Fisher Price.” Pretty awesome.

From Kevin’s talk, every­thing about Wufoo seems extremely well-crafted and focused on pro­vid­ing a stel­lar expe­ri­ence. They keep response times to around 12 min­utes, which is phe­nom­e­nal. The “Help” tab within the inter­face goes directly to the rel­e­vant documentation.

One of the best tips Kevin men­tioned was how they include an “Emotional state” choice in the sup­port con­tact form. 76% per­cent of their users filled it out ver­sus the 78% who filled out what browser ver­sion they were using. Customers also didn’t game the sys­tem by always mark­ing “frus­trated” or “angry.” On the whole they used it honestly.

Later in the day Kevin posted the full slides from his talk over on Speaker Deck. Check them out, there’s some great stuff in there.

Chase Clemons also talked about sup­port at 37signals. His talk was filled with lots of tips, tricks, and words of advice. One of the first things he men­tioned is that every prod­uct on the web should have domain.com/help redi­rect to sup­port docs. ¹

He also talked about how 37signals, while not pro­vid­ing phone sup­port on a reg­u­lar basis, still uses it for cer­tain cases. Chase’s guide­line is that if some­thing takes more than 3 replies with the cus­tomer he’ll work out a time to chat with them over video and/or screen­share. meetings.io was men­tioned as a tool for doing this. It lets you spin up on-demand video meetings.

37signals has also started exper­i­ment­ing with live, online classes. They do two, 30-minute classes a week; one is about becom­ing a Basecamp pro and the other is a gen­eral Q&A. Over the last 8 months they’ve helped more than 10,000 peo­ple this way. Pretty amaz­ing when you think about it.

They also did the first ever Basecamp Delivered event last month in Austin. That was an all-day, in-person help ses­sion for any­one in Austin who had ques­tions they needed answered with Basecamp. They had two rooms with 30-minute time slots in each where peo­ple could come by them­selves or with their entire team and learn more about Basecamp. I love that idea.

Most of the speak­ers at UserConf were from rel­a­tively small web com­pa­nies. Doug Turnure was not. He’s a Visual Studio Program Manager at Microsoft where his team has 100 mil­lion users. At that scale, as he said, sup­port becomes all about hav­ing the right con­ver­sa­tions with the right peo­ple at the right time. One of the things they’ve done with Visual Studio is to add in-app record­ing and anno­tat­ing so that bug reports come in with more detail. Doug’s talk was fas­ci­nat­ing. Learning how a 4,000 per­son prod­uct team devel­ops and sup­ports some­thing as big as Visual Studio is mind-blowing.

There’s also a recap post up on the CoSupport blog with more notes and links to everyone’s slides.

Overall, UserConf was fan­tas­tic. The best con­fer­ence I’ve been to in a long, long while. They’re plan­ning on hold­ing another one in the Spring of 2013. If you’ve made it all the way to the bot­tom of this post then you should be at the next one.