As part of our series on the importance of company culture, we’re highlighting our company values here at UserVoice. Find more posts about culture here.

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I used to work at a place that thought it was fun because it had a game room. The company was dry, lacked culture, and didn’t empower its employees to ever actually have fun at work. They took themselves excessively seriously, but assumed that having a game room meant they were a fun company. Know how many people used that game room? Zero. I never saw it used once. We all know companies that do this. It can be a pool table or a monthly happy hour, but if your corporate values don’t make those activities feel natural your employees won’t have fun

At UserVoice, we make a commitment that we won’t take ourselves too seriously. Creating that expectation allows for the real fun to happen – an impromptu Nerf fight, an unexpectedly sweaty match of air hockey, or random singalongs to Taylor Swift. We care deeply about enhancing our product, fostering our community, and making work a productive place to be.

Our Head of Support Ted integrates this value into the way he handles customer interactions, “Lightening up the support interaction humanizes it, and customers definitely prefer it.” Better support by being less serious!? We know. Mindblowing.

Real fun isn’t scheduled or confined to a game room – it has to be baked into how your company operates. Whether it’s a separate room in HipChat for the fun stuff, or not chastising people for a coffee run, we know that we’re encouraged and allowed to let loose. When a balance of fun and professional is met, it makes for a much happier and productive workplace.

Thanks to a Christmas gift from my brother, I’ve recently gotten into The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. To be honest, I’m a little embarrassed…Stephen King books are often considered a bit trashy. But this is an epic fantasy series, which is kind of right up my alley. After voraciously consuming the first two books, I marched to the book store (I like to support local shops) and had them order me books III and IV. They said they’d call me when they arrived, in about a week.

A week and a half later I had received no call. Since I work a block from the store, I stopped by to check in on the status of my order.

The staffer behind the front desk gave me an exasperated look. “WELL, did we call you?” I said “no”, a bit abashedly.

Exasperated look still in place, he pulled out the order log (analog, despite the 1980′s DOS-based computer they had on the desk). “Your name is Evan? Are they Stephen King books?” I nodded. He reached under the counter and pulled out my books. He avoided eye contact.

Had they just checked when I asked, I would have forgiven them not calling (maybe they just came in, maybe they’ve been swamped, etc). Instead, they made me feel bad…so when it turned out to be their fault, I mentally crucified them.

This probably won’t stop me from going back, but it’s strike one. Not every customer allows you three strikes.

Don’t assume, check. Or you’ll make an ass out of you and me (the customer).

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Photo courtesy of toddalert.

Ben (name changed to protect the innocent) spent 20 years in the US Navy before moving into civilian work. At this point, he told me, he had seen “a lot of cultures.” “Culture in the Navy – maybe most places – is driven by those in command. There are a lot of different types of commanders in the Navy.” After living in this strict universe, Ben was ready for a more relaxed environment. He didn’t really care where he worked; his wife wanted to end up in North Carolina, so he took a job with a tech company in Raleigh.

“I now realize that the warning signs were there immediately,” Ben told me. There was no onboarding process or introduction. Ben was given a desk and thrown into the fray. On his second day, he had his first encounter with The CTO.

The CTO had previously been The Founder. We’ve discussed how leaders are a huge part of the cultural vibe previously, and this was no different. The Founder had a short stint as The CEO, but when deemed unfit for that job he was “shoehorned” into the role of CTO. He started setting the foundation for the culture when he founded the company, and continued to singularly define it as The CTO.

Ben’s first experience with The CTO was illustrative. Ben was in a coworker’s cubicle, talking about something work-related. The CTO, who he had never met before, interrupted and attempted to push past him to speak to Ben’s coworker. Literally push. Not ask him to move, but push. The man was an angry, self-important steamroller.

The culture that The CTO built was one of self-preservation. He wanted things done his way, and if they weren’t he would throw a fit. Ben remembers him once blowing up and saying “fine, I’ll just sit here and do nothing, I’ll do whatever you want.” Like an angsty teenager.

It would be one thing if this just meant people didn’t like him and avoided him. But again, it built a culture of people trying to protect themselves from him. That meant not innovating; he hated any ideas that didn’t come from him. That meant not acting on customer feedback; he didn’t think it was as important as his ideas. That meant not doing MUCH; better to do nothing if it meant he wouldn’t spot you.

It’s easy to say “well, this isn’t culture, this is just a bad apple.” But it was a culture. Before Ben took over leading the Field Services team, most of what they did was commiserate. All day. They were good people and saw solutions to many of the problems in the company, but they were culturally trained to do nothing. It was “like a florist being forced to watch their greenhouse burned to the ground while they hold a fire extinguisher in their hand.”

Ben, a military man if nothing else, didn’t think his people deserved that. He defended his team, getting into fight after fight with The CTO. He begged the CEO – a genuinely good person – to get The CTO in line or out of the company. It wasn’t going to happen…neither the board nor the CEO could do it due to the amount of stock The CTO owned.

In the end, Ben managed to insulate his team. He took a beating while they actually tried to help customers and fix the things that needed to be fixed. He did something rather remarkable: he built a new culture within the existing one. Customers loved his team, and he suspects Field Services was often the only thing keeping some of these customers from leaving or – as many threatened – from suing the company.

But one man can only take a beating for so long, and Ben finally moved on. He ended up at Target…one of the primary reasons being that “culture was a huge part of the interview process.” Ben beats himself up for not realizing what he was getting into, or making more of a difference, or getting out sooner…but from an outsider’s perspective you can see that he did as well as one could in that situation.

The company, Ben says, is fairly close to bankruptcy. He knows that most of the employees (many of them his friends) are looking for new jobs. And without him leading the Field Services team, he expects many of the hanging-by-a-thread customers will leave. “It’s a shame,” Ben says. “It’s a great technology and could have been a successful company. But not with that culture.”

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Scream photo via Bigstock.
Sign photo courtesy of Valerie Everett.

Ben Congleton had the shortest talk at UserConf 2012, but it was a fantastic one. While many companies try to get their support teams to shield their development teams from customers, Olark has done the opposite. They realized that keeping the team separate from the customers was hurting them…so they got everyone involved.

It’s a great story and some fantastic food for thought. Enjoy!

This is part of a two-month series on the importance of company culture. Find more posts about culture here.

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Recently I read the kind of story that makes a customer care professional’s blood run cold. From Adrian Swinscoe’s blog (emphasis added by UserCentered):

“It [turns out] that last December there was a problem with Karen Millen’s online card processing system and, although I received an email saying payment had been taken, they had [actually] failed to take the correct amount from my credit card.

Four and a half months later they are now sending me curt emails saying I had ‘kept’ the clothes and not paid for them. I felt like they were blaming me for their error and accusing me, in effect, of stealing from them. They refused to acknowledge that it was their mistake and that it was an unacceptable delay. No one called me personally to apologise.

I have been a loyal Karen Millen customer for years. I will never buy anything from them again. Ever.”

Most likely, Karen Millen customer support agents are better at support than this. Hell, they’re a high-end brand…they probably have fantastic support agents. But the finance department clearly never got the great training or cultural focus that support did.

Tragic, isn’t it? All that money, time, and training spent making sure their customer service was great…and one uncaring finance employee ruins it all and loses a loyal and evangelistic customer.

So are all your departments treating customers the same? A recent Ask Your Target Market survey sponsored by UserCentered said a whopping 59% of employees think so. [Tweet this] You’re probably in that group. But do you really know? Have you actually explored what happens to a customer, for example, if they’re late to pay? I know I certainly hadn’t thought about this until recently. I found out our accounting firm at the time had been chasing down these late payments! They’re nice people but not our people, working under our values. How could I count on them to be empathetic? (We now do this all in-house.)

Late payments is a bit of an extreme (though still relevant) example. But what about your sales team? They’re trained to sell…are they trained to care? Are they only being nice when it closes a deal, or are they even nice to people who end up choosing a competitor? These employees talk to just as many people as your support team, and often in more public settings. If they’re not living the same values, you’re liable to end up with a situation like the one above.

Train ALL your employees in company culture and values (including edge cases like the finance department). You never know who might talk to a customer or potential customer. If you don’t have everyone on the same page, then all the work you do in the Support and Community departments could be wasted.

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Photo courtesy of eliduke.

As part of our series on the importance of company culture, we’re highlighting our company values here at UserVoice. Find more posts about culture here.

Working at UserVoice is a little like being in the movie Inception. We’re expected to use our own platform to talk about our platform. If that sounds super meta, it totally is. And there’s a good reason for being that way: if you’re a software company using your competitor’s service, why should your customers use you and not them? For instance, at UserVoice we do customer feedback and helpdesk tools.

Our idea forum for feedback is a UserVoice forum. Our ticketing platform is our own helpdesk. We’re literally using our own services to talk about our services and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s called eating your own dogfood. There are few origin stories of where the phrase came from, but my favorite tells the story of the CEO of a dog food company who would eat a can of his own product during board meetings to display his confidence in its high quality.

At UserVoice, we eat our own dogfood (and like it too). Why? Because using our own product shows our customers that we have enough faith that our product gets the job done to use it ourselves. It forces us to have a deeper understanding of how our tools are used that, in turn, helps all of us, from support to sales to UI, empathize with what our customers need. And that’s the other awesome thing about dogfooding – the better you know your product, the more efficient you are at improving it. For example, our Head of Support Ted had these words on the subject:

“Eating our own dogfood is crucial in improving our product. I don’t understand how a company could not do this. It adds an extra layer of personal investment in the product.”

We care about making UserVoice as excellent as possible, and we couldn’t do it without eating our own dogfood. It’s a best practice we readily accept as an integral part of our company culture.

This is part of a two-month series on the importance of company culture. Find more posts about culture here.

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As I discussed in my post on mapping out company values, your culture isn’t and can’t be what just one person thinks or wants. This means that, at some point, cultural practices may become common that you, as a manager, may not have expected or especially wanted.

Like a plant, you can’t tell culture how to grow. You can try to guide it, but you can’t control it fully (except by killing it).

One could look at trying to stop culture change as negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement – providing negative stimulus until the correct behavior is matched – can work, but can also have downsides. One study shows increased learning during negative reinforcement sessions…but also increased “inappropriate behavior”. In other words, you can be negative about behaviour until your staff complies, but they’ll act out in other ways. [Tweet this]

Here’s my example: when I worked at a previous job, we moved from the moderately-hip downtown Mountain View to the fairly boring Redwood City. The adjustment was hard, especially when it came to lunch options.

That is, until we found out that Redwood City has the largest number of taquerias per capita. Being foodies and techies, we launched a grand plan: every Tuesday we would go to a new taqueria, then add it to a custom Google Map along with a rating. We called it Taco Tuesday. You can find the map here.

This was great fun and united the whole team: devs and marketing alike. Seeing as how some of the taquerias were far from the office, our Tuesday lunches would often stretch to 1.5 hours.

When our CEO discovered most of the company gone, he was very perturbed. He asked what was going on and the practice was explained. And, as I remember it, we got a stern word of warning about leaving for so long.

Our CEO didn’t want a culture of people who took a 1.5 hour lunch. That’s what he saw. What we saw was some fun in our day and better connections to our coworkers. At the end of the day, that’s worth extra-long lunches. [Tweet this]

If the extra lunchtime was truly damaging things, he could have tried to retain the cultural benefit and lessen the downside by offering to have the company sponsor Taco Tuesday, but limit it to once or twice a month. Instead, he created intense dissatisfaction in the company and damaged an evolving culture.

Does this mean you should accept everything your employees do? Certainly not…you should discourage truly destructive or problematic trends. But be sure to look at them through the lens of culture-building first. Tacos might be more important than you think.

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Taco photo courtesy of Alejandro Lavinjr.

Panels at conferences usually suck. But earlier today I was on a panel at DeveloperWeek (where UserVoice is a Top Innovator award-winner) about using analytics to make a better product…and it was actually quite good! Aside from myself, it featured Chris Kelly from New Relic, Dan Kador of Keen IO, Hugh Reynolds of Swrve, Bill Magnuson of Appboy, moderator Geoff Domoracki, and myself. Here’s what came up.

Yes to data (right away)

In case you were somehow unconvinced, everyone on the panel agreed that data is incredibly powerful and we should all be collecting it. There was a definite sense of urgency about this. Start measuring as soon as you launch your app; it might only be a little data (though more is better) and you might not analyze it right away, but there’s no reason to wait.

Data is about humans

Don’t forget that your data is about real human activity. Don’t let the lure of 1% increases in activity or deep data analysis distract you from that. Bill described it this way: “Analytics are a band-aid because we can’t go watch every customer use our app.” [Tweet this] So use data to find human problems, and then make sure to follow up with actual user feedback. It’s easy to misinterpret data, so always pair it with customer feedback. (Not sure how to start? Check out UserVoice Feedback.)

Data only informs decisions

Despite being so pro-data, the group was careful to point out that data should only inform decisions, not make them for you. I harped on the fact that talking to users can often clarify data that you might have otherwise misinterpreted. Hugh recommended rolling out changes quickly to small groups of people to see if your assumptions are actually correct (his best suggestion: roll it out to your free customers, rather than crucial paying customers). If you’re scared of being controlled by customers or data, don’t forget that you can say no.

Analytics should be a regular part of your process

Analytics, the panel insisted, are not something you look at once a quarter or every board meeting. They should be part of your process (whether you’re using agile or waterfall methodologies) every cycle, otherwise you are missing opportunities. Chris said it best: “You don’t wait to change your oil until the ‘check engine’ light goes on…you change your oil regularly and get tune-ups to avoid that light.” [Tweet this] Another great observation came from Bill: “The most dreaded word that customers say is ‘still’. ‘T