On “We’re the team behind the new 1Password Browser Experience, Ask Us Anything! 🎙”
Serious question: (and this is my opinion, of course) you guys are know for reading vocal, passionate, or rude user feedback and responding with long form emoji laden responses that tend to further inflame those responses of late. I know you have an internal style guide…
Thanks for reaching out with an incredibly interesting question. 🤗 I’m certainly the chief long-form emoji-laden author here. 😂 I really enjoyed seeing the way you framed your question and customer support is near and dear to my heart so…
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Thanks for reaching out with an incredibly interesting question. 🤗
I’m certainly the chief long-form emoji-laden author here. 😂 I really enjoyed seeing the way you framed your question and customer support is near and dear to my heart so I’m happy you asked.
First and foremost, 1Password exists today because of our customers. That’s true in many ways but the important bit for this conversation is word-of-mouth marketing. I think it’s fair to say that /u/roustem suck at marketing and if it wasn’t for our customers talking about us and recommending 1Password to their friends we wouldn’t have had the customers needed to make this our full time gig.
What we found most effective to spur word of mouth was great customer support. By answering people quickly, with relevant information, and enough flair to build a connection, we found people were more than excited to go tell their friends. And not only that, we learned what customers needed so we could make 1Password better.
Interestingly enough, that’s exactly how 1Password for Business came to be. We heard from many customers who had been using 1Password for years in their personal lives and then telling us they wanted to use it at their work.
As we expanded the company (feels odd to say that as at the time we were going from 2 to 10 while nowadays we’re at 500) we needed to instil this approach into the new folks joining us. We had some guides and such and the main message there was to “kill ‘em with kindness” and yeah, that’s my name which shows you how great I am at marketing. 😂
Anyways as we continued to grow and the questions got more and more diverse we codified a lot of the flows, which could be called an “internal style guide” as you named it. Here’s a screenshot of the homepage of our spell book (think Hogwarts):
https://dsc.cloud/28e490/pb-SXNql8uqEL-VMgyxgJtkCes.png
And here’s a screenshot of one of the guides that walks through one of the more controversial situations as I think in ties into your question about handling users that are not happy and who we might not be able to win over:
https://dsc.cloud/28e490/CleanShot-2021-09-23-at-13.55.27-2x-0muCuj81R028.png
In that particular this article tries to teach our folks about standalone vaults and our approach for helping them. It then has a set of sample emails and responses, and sample responses to responses. As you might imagine in the case of people having troubles syncing their standalone vaults our recommendation is to move over to a membership where everything is taken care of for them.
Certainly a controversial path for some but for the most part people just want their app to work and have their data everywhere they go and are happy to make the transition.
Now to your point not everybody will be happy there and can what do we do then? We could certainly say “don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out” but we don’t. Instead we try our best to listen and see if we can find ways to help users. To see if we can build a connection or some common ground that will give us a safe place to build a relationship before proceeding to tackle the contentious issue that has them upset.
At the end of the day people love 1Password and they react vehemently when they worry we might break their workflows or go in a direction they don’t like. With all the passion things can be said that are hurtful or rude as you say, and it’s human nature to want to fight fire with fire, but we’re professionals and in the fire fighting business professionals use water. Part of the long-form emoji-laden responses are an attempt to find a way to around the fire, build a connection, and add some humanity to the situation.
And as for emojis specifically, they’re awesome. 😍 I love how they bring some colour and levity to the world. And I especially love the approach Reddit uses with their Awards and hope something like that gets codified into Unicode someday. 🙏🏻
I hope that helps explain a bit about how we handle things behind the scenes and give some context to our approach.
Take care and stay safe. ❤️
++dave; 1Password Founder