This is my response to customer service post written by Andrew Scott, CEO of Rummble, mentor of Tech Mission London 09 and alum of Webmission08

Hey Andrew, interesting thought provoking article.

What most of us would love to hear is how you scale Rummble’s own customer service.

At http://edocr.com, most queries comes through “contact us”. We also use Twitter heavily, experimented with UserVoice and restarted using GetSatisfaction. Our FAQs are incomplete and we do not have a forum at present.

There is a further distinction that need due attention. I assume this is true with most tech companies. Our queries are classed into (not systematically, I must admit):

- Spam – don’t ignore this
- Visitors – those who drops in from time to time without registering
- Users – those who does not pay us
- Customers (those who pay us)

I assume everyone will appreciate the order in which each query type is handled. We also call this aspect of http://edocr.com, simply Service (not Customer Service).

Scaling Service will no doubt be a massive problem as we grow. One of the companies who excelled in this area is plus.net, and ISP sold to BT few years back. They automated this aspect as much as possible to ensure queries found responses easily and quickly. More than anything, those responses made it easier for the problems to be fixed by customers themselves as much as possible. Of course, escalation levels need to be in place.

Another thought on this issue is that the buck should stop at the CEO.

Wonder whether you may be willing to share more insight to how you handle these issues within Rummble.

By the way, let’s add this aspect to our Tech Mission London 09 Part II in October. We love you to return as a mentor.

Best regards
Manoj