... felt like a good idea for many of our male users as soon as they saw the photo of our support staff member for the first time. In preparation for the upcoming Valentine’s Day, we present to you the results (obviously SFW) of a few months of live support using a female profile.
As we had offered only e-mail support at Stackfield during the Beta phase, we wanted to enhance our service offering by implementing individual support rooms. But herewith we were once again confronted with a big problem: who should handle the support? For us it was clear from the beginning that we would not hire additional people for support, but we first had to clarify who of our team would be the most suitable person for performing this activity in addition to the daily tasks.
To test our processes and to keep the discussions short, we simply created a fictitious employee named Carolin and we were kindly allowed to use the photo of a friend for this purpose – and so the fun began.
While conducting our test in regards to support processes and answering requests as we normally do, our fictitious support employee received a lot of offers, including an invite to stop by for a coffee at the user’s office, if she was ever in town. Or compliments on how great she looks and how knowledgeable she is in terms of encryption and technology. However, the absolute highlight was a user that begged Carolin to add him on Facebook for days and just woudn’t give up. We have compiled below some of the funniest and boldest support-hit-ons: have fun!
Rather harmless, but nevertheless very exaggerated: constant compliments about what a gorgeaus „girl“ Carolin is. We’ve read such comments more often than we would have liked to.
„Hey, you seem nice – fly in sometime for a coffee in Buenos Aires“ – seems to be completely legit.
3 messages trying to get a friendship requests are partly bearable – but this sociable user repeated them for 17 more times.
A compliment about her beautiful eyes, but then to ask about her eye color? Seriously?
User: "Do you like champange?", follwed by "Would you prefer sparkling wine? Stackfield is based in Munich, isn't it?" - Unfortunately, we had to decline that offer – he wasn’t even one of the paying customers and used Stackfield for free. We would have probably received only Freemium-Champagne.
A normal day at work – a person that just wanted to say „Hello!“.
However, this article is meant to be more than a funny background. We were surprised by the amount of flirting that takes place in support channels – and even more by the changes that we’ve seen in the conversation climate once we had finally completed the test and defined all our processes. After replacing Carolin’s image with my name and my photo, people showed more politeness and trusted my advices on a higher level. We just hope that these results are not symptomatic for the IT industry and the support area and that they only appeared in our case.
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