Our Customer Manifesto - Part 1

This might seem like a weird topic to cover, but we’ve all viscerally experienced how customer service is one of the first things that gets sacrificed on the altar of shareholder value.

Traditionally, customer service is viewed as a cost, absolutely necessary but always ripe for cutbacks and reductions to lower costs.

To us, customer service is a key part of the promise we make to each and every customer. It’s important that customers can access the training and help they need in the format that works best for them.

Right now, while we’re relatively small and in the “startup” phase, everyone gets a high degree of personal support, usually directly from one of the founders. Not to toot our own horns, but the support you get from a company that is at this level and really cares is among the best you’ll ever get. However, this obviously won’t scale.

Everyone at Ethos has extensive experience in the software as a service world. Our frustrations with treating the customer as an inconvenient bump on the way to higher profits are a big part of why we exist as a company.

Fortunately, our founding team already has the expertise in how to build out a customer support experience that will delight, rather than disappoint you when you need help. It starts with a very simple foundation: care for the customer and viewing them as people, not numbers, is critical to avoid the experience degrading as you grow.

Today, we’re going to talk a bit about our values when it comes to customer support and what you can expect as a customer going through the journey of growth with us.

Teams, especially small ones, look to their leaders to understand what’s important to the business. This is not about saying “we care about our customers”; literally every software company has had their leaders say that in many meetings. It’s about how those leaders act in the day to day that sends the real message, and the employees will pick up on it and emulate it.

This foundation of care is exceptionally important; without it everything you build up will eventually crumble. Think of it as regular exercise, incredibly simple on the surface, but requiring a great deal of discipline and constant vigilance to maintain.

From this base the next step is alignment, one of our company’s guiding principles. Often different levels of support and training are locked behind different price levels or available as an extra charge. Customer support and training is not an “optional add-on” full stop. Including full-featured customer support in all of our paid plans brings us in alignment with our customers’ interests.

Wherever possible, we try to create a system where our interests and our customers’ interests are aligned. In practice this means what’s good for us is also good for our customers. As systems grow this is one way to avoid the mission drift that can happen at scale. In simple terms, when support is included at no extra cost, it’s in our best interest for it to be as efficient as we can make it, solving issues as quickly as possible. When a vendor charges extra for these basic building blocks, it creates economic incentives that are out of alignment with the client’s interests. Paid support and training increase profit; therefore, a product that requires support and training is incentivized vs. a product that is intuitive and requires minimal training and support to operate.

This should give you a pretty good understanding of the intention and thought behind our customer support philosophy. Next time we’ll be digging into the nuts and bolts of what that looks like in the mundane day to day.

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