Customer support has always been at the heart of NationBuilder’s offering. Our software is designed to help leaders do big, challenging things, and with that comes a responsibility to serve customers of varying technical skill in a way that meets their needs. We’re in constant inquiry about how we do that better, and the first part of this year has brought big change.
To that end, we took a radical step in February and March of 2022 – initially as a pilot, but now as a more permanent shift – by making the decision to focus on chat support as our primary channel for fielding and responding to customer questions and technical issues. This meant that we stopped offering a general phone line for inbound support queries (though email support is still available via [email protected]).
So why did we make that decision? A few reasons:
- The vast majority of our customers already use chat as their primary channel for getting help, and we can make that experience far more responsive, more human, and more helpful by leaning all the way into it.
- Chat is more effective at ensuring continuity and clear sharing of information in both directions when solving complex problems. Screenshots, documentation, and links are all an essential part of troubleshooting, and they’re not possible over the phone.
- Chat gives us a much clearer picture of where our most critical gaps are in getting customers the information they need (for example, where our documentation isn't answering the right questions), so we can make changes faster and with more confidence.
These changes are not the endpoint, though. They’re just the beginning, and we plan to keep evolving and improving the support experience. Here’s a sneak preview of where we’re headed:
- We know some questions and issues are just better to talk through live. We also believe that the live experience can and should be better than trying to verbally navigate technical details on a phone call, so we’re exploring options to make live support accessible directly from chat in a format that’s more conducive to effective troubleshooting.
- We’re also working on the next evolution of support for our enterprise customers. Our goal is for the experiences of proactively working with an Enterprise Account Manager and troubleshooting issues with our Support team to feel as seamless and complementary to each other as possible.
- And we’re continuing to refine our approach to chat support, so please keep the feedback coming! We’re excited about the path we’ve chosen, but getting it right will require iterating as we keep learning.
We’re looking forward to sharing more information soon on all of the above. In the meantime, thank you again for coming along with us on this journey, and thank you for being a NationBuilder customer!
