Category: Customer Support

Everyone Does Customer Support (at Streema)

Posted on by Streema Team

Today we wanted to share a practice with you that we started in mid-2013 and has been doing great at Streema.

First, a short story that may sound familiar…

There was once a young company that wanted to grow quickly. This company learned that, to build things fast, many times it was better to just focus on as few activities as possible. And with such a focus and lean operation, there was only a small amount of resources dedicated to things like Customer Support. As a matter of fact, the Customer Support team was a very thinly stretched operation (one person, very little time) that addressed the questions, concerns, and in some cases, even complains of the users. 🙁 Then this company grew to a point that they could have more people dedicated to Customer Support and be able to actually “support” many more user issues. That company was Streema.

Around 6 months ago, at Streema we reached a stage where we could choose to move a little slower in one area, to move faster in another, and for our users – at least those who write us – it has been a great change good. 😀 So, by the end of August 2013, we – the two people who did Customer Support at Streema – proposed to have a “Everyone Does Customer Support” policy, which consisted in having all the members of the company dedicate one hour every two weeks to do support – ranging from the intern to even the CEO.

These were our main goals:

1) Understand and empathize better with our users.

2) Develop tools to make better our support experience.

3) Add a stronger customer orientation to our company culture.

We’re not going to say it was easy but it has been a great success so far and the results were above expectations. At the beginning there were many questions about how to answer user inquiries, or how to use the tool, but with time and patience we really took our support culture to the next level: not only have we’ve been answering customer issues better and faster, but we’ve also had to ask some of our developers to not dedicate too much time on customer support. :S

Just as a side comment, when it comes to Customer Support tools, we happily recommend Desk to manage your support – with the flex hours option you can add as many people as you need and only pay for the time doing support.

And finally, as you can imagine, if you send an email to info@streema.com or you use our help center contact form, you’ll reach any of us. 🙂

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS. If you want to read more about this topic, check out the following articles:

Whole Company Support with Nick Francis

Humanity is Required

Don’t Keep Customers Waiting

You talk, we listen – fixing user pain points

Posted on by Streema Team

In our quest to bring you a better product at Streema, over the past few months we’ve been spending more and more time talking to our users to learn about their pain points while using our service.

So we emailed our registered users and also used a live chat client called Olark to communicate with our non registered visitors. These were the most recurring answers:

1) “I can’t listen to a particular station”
2) “I have issues looking for stations”
3) “I can’t access the whole Streema directory on my mobile device”

As for the first issue, not being able to listen to a particular station, this is the most complicated one. It can be caused by several different reasons, and here are some of them:

  • Required plugins are missing which are needed to get our player to work.
  • Codecs that the stations use aren’t supported.
  • Streams have changed recently and we don’t have the latest one.
  • Stations aren’t streaming online anymore or simply aren’t broadcasting at all.
  • Geographical restrictions exist, likely due to location-specific licensing issues.
  • Connectivity issues happen while trying to listen to a station.
  • Listener capacity is full.
  • And the list goes on…

So what are we doing about all these issues? Our technical team is currently working on adding new codec capabilities to our player, but it is very difficult to support ALL the codecs that exist, so it might take a while to get your favorite station to work on Streema.

Also, our content team is currently working together with radio station owners to keep our database up-to-date, with as many working streams as possible. And of course, we are constantly upgrading our infrastructure to service our growing user base.

The truth is that there are many issues and since it is almost impossible to solve them all of them immediately we arrived at the conclusion that it is essential to communicate WHY you can’t listen to your favorite station and WHAT you need to do in order to listen to it. That is why we’ll be working hard on enhancing our player’s notifications to the user. And by doing so, we can continue to build Streema as the go-to website for listening to broadcast radio.

As for the second biggest pain point, which is to be able to easily find stations, we have something in the works. As we mentioned on our previous post, we are currently working on a restyle of Streema’s website for desktop users, and as a part of this process we are re-thinking and improving how our users discover radio stations. We will have some news really soon! 🙂

And finally, regarding our mobile users, we will continue to build a better mobile browser version while we start planning our next move. Who knows, there might be something ‘native’ in our near future… 😉

Thanks once again for your feedback, and please, be patient, we are working hard to improve our player and we really look forward to have the best listening experience on the web.

That’s all for now. Please do let us know what you think!

The Streema Team