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You can use all Bootstrap plugins purely through the markup API without writing a single line of JavaScript. This is Bootstrap's first-class API and should be your first consideration when using a plugin.

That said, in some situations it may be desirable to turn this functionality off. Therefore, we also provide the ability to disable the data attribute API by unbinding all events on the document namespaced with data-api. This looks like this:

$(document).off('.data-api')

You can use all Bootstrap plugins purely through the markup API without writing a single line of JavaScript. This is Bootstrap's first-class API and should be your first consideration when using a plugin.
That said, in some situations it may be desirable to turn this functionality off. Therefore, we also provide the ability to disable the data attribute API by unbinding all events on the document namespaced with data-api. This looks like this:

$(document).off('.data-api')

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How to Rebuild Customer Loyalty After a Data Security Breach

No doubt you’ve heard of Equifax. The credit reporting company experienced one of the biggest data security breaches in history last summer when hackers exploited the company’s known security vulnerability and stole over 150 million customers’ information.

But Equifax is even more notorious for how they handled the crisis than the fact that it happened.

First, Equifax broke data breach notification laws by waiting a month to send a security breach notification and failing to disclose an earlier breach. Executives also sold off almost $2 million in company stock at the time of this second breach, leading the public to believe company leaders offloaded their shares before the their value tanked.

Equifax then built a new site for customers to check in on their data, which hackers quickly replicated. The company’s own social media team went on to tweet links to phishing sites, leading to more stolen data! Since then, Equifax has accidentally sent consumers affected by the breach the wrong notification letters and has given their former CEO Richard Smith a $1 million raise for his leadership.

This escalating series of missteps goes to show that data security breaches are treacherous ground for companies and customers. Beyond the breach itself, the mishandling of a data breach response plan can exponentially complicate a crisis.

As breaches increase in their scale, sophistication and frequency, it’s never been more important that your team takes a proactive approach to security infrastructure and — if necessary — to rebuilding customer loyalty after a data breach.

Create a data breach response plan

Just as in any crisis, you need a plan to minimize potential harm and prevent the same crisis from reoccurring in the future. A data breach response plan, or the process your company follows in the wake of a breach, requires company-wide accountability, the promise of transparency, and an overarching willingness to make things right.

When you tackle the response to an overwhelming customer service crisis like this, remember the “service recovery paradox”:

“Research shows that when a company recovers well after a significant service failure, it can benefit from higher customer satisfaction levels than before the crisis.”

Rebuilding trust requires that you go above and beyond — here’s how to start one step at a time.

Research data breach notification laws

If your company has been at the center of a data breach, it’s also subject to intricate, complex regulations that protect customers around the world. These security breach notification laws are becoming more rigorous as data breaches far exceed the rate that legislators expected. All 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, legislate data breaches. Other countries do, too, and their laws vary in severity.

As a business owner or leader, you need to understand the nuance of how the laws affect your data breach response plan. If you have customers across multiple states, you’re bound to comply with the laws of those states. For example, Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit against Uber for violating a data law protecting Pennsylvania residents. (At the time of this writing, there are no relevant regulations at the federal level, although a bill on data breaches was recently introduced in the Senate and there could be a national consensus soon.)

While you could try to untangle these laws on your own, your company would benefit from an attorney who understands the ins and outs of data breach notification laws and stays up on the latest changes in legislation. An expert can help you understand the granular elements of your responsibilities, especially if your company is based online and needs to adhere to multiple sets of regulations.

Assess the scale and source of the data security breach

A thorough assessment of the scale and source of a data security breach starts with a simple question: What data do hackers or inside leakers want and why? Audit the sensitive data your company keeps to understand how deep the breach could go. For example, maybe you keep addresses and credit card information of customers but never social security numbers. A simple rundown of the data can help you understand the severity of the breach for your community.

The same way that an expert can help you navigate security breach notification laws, a data security expert can also help you discover exactly what happened. Because hackers are becoming increasingly adept at breaking through security systems (and you weren’t able to prevent the breach on your own), you benefit from calling in the help of a consultant to complete a full post-mortem.

With the eyes of an expert, you can see any vulnerabilities that led to the breach and build a comprehensive data security plan from there. Be aware that you may need to completely redesign your security infrastructure to protect customers’ data. Other situations, like human mistakes, are just as important to pinpoint, because you can address them with education and training.

Security best practices are numerous, but they include two-factor authentication, tiered access to sensitive information, encryption programs, monitoring software, automated detection, employee education, and regular testing.

Related: The HIPAA-Compliant Help Desk Software You Can Trust

Consider your ethical obligations as a company

Security breach notification laws list the bare minimum requirements for honoring the rights of customers, but they don’t show you how to win back the trust of your community. Doing the right thing in a data breach scenario means going beyond regulations to make things right.

J.J. Thompson, CEO at Rook Security, told Forbes there’s a “magic seven-day window” to present customers with a clear assessment of what happened and how you’re going to fix it. Your company needs to act efficiently to meet that deadline — it’s an all-hands-on-deck scenario. Although a week may seem like a short time frame, it’s a long time for customers whose credit card or social security numbers were leaked.

How to draft a security breach notification

A “data breach notification” is a formal term for the email you send to let customers know that there’s been a security breach. This is when it’s really important to follow the letter of the law. But even when companies follow data breach notification laws with exacting detail, they often fall short in multiple ways. There are a few keys to getting a breach notification right, and the most important one is to treat your customers as humans first.

1. Empathize with your customers

A data breach can lead to an escalating series of disasters for customers, like identity theft and credit card fraud. When you write to customers, imagine how they’re feeling about this breach. Empathize with their sense of powerlessness and their sense of frustration that they have to take steps to prevent real-life consequences. After all, they didn’t make a mistake. Apologize sincerely and specifically for what unfolded and take complete responsibility for the breach.

2. Be transparent about what happened

These breach notifications are not a time to be vague. Describe what happened with transparency and without jargon. For example, you could say, “Last week, a hacker made it past our extensive security (including a firewall and two-factor authentication) and stole the credit card information for 1000 of our customers.”

Also include clear directions on how customers can check in on the status of their personal data. People who want to know more about what unfolded beyond a brief description also have the right to that information, too. Direct customers to more documentation that details the breach and the company’s response in depth.

3. Outline the ways you’re fixing the vulnerability

If you’re managing the data breach response plan well, your team will be working around the clock to fix any vulnerabilities and make it up to customers. In the notification email, describe the ways the company has created internal accountability and collaborated with external experts to drive actionable change.

To trust your company again, customers need specifics about the strides you’re making to update current security infrastructure.

4. Pay for an identity protection plan

Data breaches are particularly challenging because the damage is already done. One of the most difficult things about breaches is that there’s not much you can do to make customers’ lives better. Offering to pay for an identity protection plan is a small but meaningful way to reduce the fallout for each and every customer. Make it easy for people to take you up on it — this step shouldn’t be an extra hassle for them.

5. Give an incentive for loyalty

Loyal customers always deserve a “thank you” when they choose to stick with you through thick and thin. At the end of the email, be generous and offer customers a discount on their next purchase or for their monthly service. This small token can help tip the scales in building trust, reassuring customers that you are willing to take a revenue hit to make the experience better for them.

Data breach notification example

The following (real) example of a data breach notification email may follow data breach notification laws, but it doesn’t speak to readers — i.e., customers — as humans. Let’s explore how this letter could have made better use of empathy, clarity, and follow-through.

NOTICE OF DATA BREACH

To the MyFitnessPal Community:

We are writing to notify you about an issue that may involve your MyFitnessPal account information. We understand that you value your privacy and we take the protection of your information seriously.

What Happened?

On March 25, 2018, we became aware that during February of this year an unauthorized party acquired data associated with MyFitnessPal user accounts.

What Information Was Involved?

The affected information included usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords - the majority with the hashing function called bcrypt used to secure passwords.

What We Are Doing

Once we became aware, we quickly took steps to determine the nature and scope of the issue. We are working with leading data security firms to assist in our investigation. We have also notified and are coordinating with law enforcement authorities.

We are taking steps to protect our community, including the following:

We are notifying MyFitnessPal users to provide information on how they can protect their data.

We will be requiring MyFitnessPal users to change their passwords and urge users to do so immediately.

We continue to monitor for suspicious activity and to coordinate with law enforcement authorities.

We continue to make enhancements to our systems to detect and prevent unauthorized access to user information.

What You Can Do

We take our obligation to safeguard your personal data very seriously and are alerting you about this issue so you can take steps to help protect your information. We recommend you:

Change your password for any other account on which you used the same or similar information used for your MyFitnessPal account.

Review your accounts for suspicious activity.

Be cautious of any unsolicited communications that ask for your personal data or refer you to a web page asking for personal data.

Avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails.

For More Information

For more information, please go to https://content.mY.fitnesspal.com/security-information/FAQ.html.

Empower your support team with the right information

Data security breaches are a mess for customers, but they’re also a nightmare for support teams. Customer support professionals can (understandably) expect a flurry of urgent requests from furious customers who want to understand how and why this happened.

Give your support team everything they need and more to help customers understand the situation. Create clear guidelines about what and how support should talk about the breach, and give them all the context they need to understand the importance of every dialogue.

Near-constant complaints of this magnitude can test the patience of even the most experienced support professionals. Offer ample breaks and extra recognition to the team for rebuilding customer loyalty after a data breach.

Continue the conversation with customers

Even the most thoughtful and effective security breach notification isn’t the end of a successful data breach response plan. One point of communication will never be enough with a customer support issue this huge.

If you want to woo customers back, you need to follow through on the dialogue you started. Keep your community up to date on new security measures and become an advocate for taking preventative steps in your industry — after all, you’re in the best position to help educate the public on a topic we just don’t talk about enough before it’s too late.

Diversity and Inclusion at Help Scout: 2018 Update

Checking boxes can never fully capture the complexity of our identities. To build an inclusive company culture, however, we need to understand how people from all backgrounds feel about their workplace, so we have to ask the questions.

It’s been just over a year since Help Scout last conducted our first demographic survey and shared the findings publicly.

Last year’s survey was enlightening: Our company, then about 60 remote people, had moved closer to gender parity — 59% men, 41% women and non-binary people. We’d increased the representation of women and non-binary people on our Engineering and Design teams, but it still sat at 13%, and overall as a company, Help Scout was 81% white.

While we still had room for improvement in many areas, we were proud to share our results along with our strategies and learnings as a way to hold ourselves accountable, to add meaningful dialogue to what’s happening around diversity and inclusion work, and to demonstrate our company’s dedication to doing better.

Now in August 2018, we have new data and insights to share and continue the conversation.

Don’t forget the ‘I’ in D & I

Meaningful diversity work is more than just representation and numbers. 

 While increasing representation of underrepresented groups is a major focus for our company, it’s meaningless if we don’t all feel like we are supported and included. To that end, we added three questions to this year’s survey since it’s essential to know how people from all backgrounds are feeling about their place at Help Scout:

1. I feel like I belong at Help Scout.
2. I can be my authentic self at Help Scout.
3. When I speak up, my opinion is valued at Help Scout.

We wanted to collect this data to identify whether particular groups felt that their voices were being heard and whether they believe they belong at Help Scout.

We also added a few new demographic questions to learn even more about our company. After asking about living with a disability in our 2017 survey, we received feedback that the question could be even more clear — so this year, we asked a standalone question about whether respondents identify as neuroatypical, and another separate question about living with a physical disability.

To get a better sense of family status, we asked our team if they identify as a parent/legal guardian.

Last year’s survey asked respondents whether they identify as “male, female, or trans/genderqueer.” After getting great feedback from the comments on the blog post pointing out that trans people can identify as male or female, we made necessary and more inclusive improvements to that wording. This year we asked if our team members identify as a “man, woman, or non-binary,” along with a separate question about identifying as a transgender person.

The results are in

We had 72 teammates respond to the 2018 survey, our largest data sample yet.

New insights

Thanks to the aforementioned new questions we added to the survey, we learned that 14% of Help Scout identifies as neuroatypical. By asking the question and sharing the data, we hope to help reduce the stigma around mental health and plan to conduct trainings around supporting our neurodiverse team.

We also learned that 35% of our team identifies as a parent/legal guardian, a data point that reinforces the importance of meaningful work-life balance, and why we love the flexibility of remote work.

We were also stoked to learn Help Scout is 18% LGBQ. Awesome.

Wins

We moved a bit closer to gender parity, at 57% men and 43% women and non-binary people.

At the time of last year’s survey, zero teammates identified as Black/African-American. This year, we’re at 3%.

We maintained 50/50 gender balance at the manager/team lead level.

And on our Engineering-Design-Product teams, we moved to 26% women and non-binary people, a 62% increase from the past year!

And it’s important to note that while someone might belong to one majority group, they may also fall in another minority group. Again, identities are complex and a survey can’t navigate intersectionality in all its variations — it can only serve as a data point in a multifaceted and ongoing conversation.

How did we get there?

Publishing last year’s blog post helped us attract candidates from underrepresented groups by speaking candidly and honestly about our diversity and inclusion. Our own Chanita Simms recently wrote about how that post impacted her journey to Help Scout.

While many companies still hesitate to share demographic data for fear of being open about their shortcomings, we can’t stress enough how important it is to own it and talk about it. Being transparent and authentic helps build an employer brand that attracts the kind of team you want to build. 

After two years of surveys, we now have concrete data to show that the changes we made to the recruiting process were absolutely leading to an increase in women on our Design-Engineering-Product teams. When we launched the search for a new Head of Design, we experimented with adding honest language to the job description:

P.S. - Yes, it’s all dudes. Although we work really hard to build a diverse pool of candidates, we’ve fallen short of our diversity and inclusion goals on the Design team. We’re excited to partner with you to do much better moving forward.

That search, along with a heavy dose of sourcing and recruiting excellent women candidates, resulted in hiring the best person for the role, Linda Eliasen. The data show that when women are better represented in leadership roles, more women are hired across the board. The results on our Design team reinforce those findings — our once 100% male Design team is now 42% women.

‘I belong at Help Scout’

One of the most exciting findings from the 2018 demographic survey came from analyzing the data from the three new questions around inclusion. For each question, over 80% of the company agreed or strongly agreed that they felt like they belonged at Help Scout, they could be their authentic selves, and their opinions mattered.

When the data was spliced to see how underrepresented groups (who historically haven’t felt as included and welcomed in tech) responded to these questions, their responses were actually higher!

What we’re still working on

Over the past two years, Help Scout has remained static in terms of overall race, at 82% white. Considering that we’re a remote-first company unlimited by geography when we hire, we could really be moving the needle here. We have no sugar-coated rationales or excuses. We’ve simply not done enough, and we need to have some difficult conversations about next steps and strategies and will have more to share next time.

We also surveyed the team and asked what they’d like to learn more about, and many responded that they want to develop more strategies to combat unconscious bias, so we’ll be planning another training very soon. We also want to organize a training to learn more about the barriers and biases for people with different physical and mental abilities in tech.

We’ve added more private Slack channels around identity groups:

• #whoruntheworld — For those who self-identify as women, genderqueer, or non-binary
• #Rainbowscouts — For those who self-identify as part of the LGBQT community
• #POCscouts — For those who self-identify as a person of color

These function as remote versions of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which boost feelings of inclusion among underrepresented people in companies.

In the months to come, we’ll be setting new goals, continuing our recruiting and sourcing efforts, and continuing to encourage our team to expand and diversify their networks. This work is never done, and we look forward to sharing our progress in the spirit of openness, humility and transparency.

How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market

When we founded Help Scout more than seven years ago, we did so not because there was a lack of good customer service products in the market — there were several — but because there wasn’t one that mirrored our values.

Thousands of successful businesses, and most of my personal favorites, were founded as a result of a similar frustration. It’s a narrative that’s common on the wonderful How I Built This podcast. Entrepreneurs enter a “red ocean” — a crowded market, against all odds, and often without anything proprietary, patentable, or particularly unique.

But what they do have is a unique passion for an underserved subset of the market.

How to make your business stand out from the competition

One great example of a company breaking through a crowded market is the story of Timbuk2, founded in San Francisco’s Mission District in 1989 by bike messenger Rob Honeycutt. Although messenger bags had been around since the ’50s, Honeycutt wanted a bag rugged enough for his brothers and sisters in arms, but functional enough for hip urbanites looking to trade in their backpacks.

Honeycutt quit his job, taught himself to sew, and started making bags by hand at a rate of 10-15 per day. Within a few years, he was selling custom bags in about 50 local bike shops. By 1994, Timbuk2 was the first company to start selling built-to-order custom messenger bags directly to customers, which they still do today. Walk the streets of any busy metropolis and you’re bound to see one of their signature bags, all of which include a lifetime warranty.

I’ve been carrying Timbuk2 bags since I was a teenager — what started as a fashion statement turned into a 20-year love affair with the brand, their values, and the quality of their products. I’m so proud to be a customer that we give every new employee a Timbuk2 bag with the Help Scout logo on it during their first week.

It all came full circle when Timbuk2 became a Help Scout customer a few years ago. Not only was it exciting for me personally, but it validated why we followed in their footsteps and decided to create a new product in a seemingly crowded market.

How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market

So what is it that enables a small company in a crowded market to stand out and achieve runaway success?

I’ve been asking this question for years, and what stands out to me in every case is the company’s ability to position their product. They know their market so well that they can craft a brand that’s differentiated from everything else, and uniquely resonates with “their people.”

How we differentiate in a crowded market

Choosing a customer service platform feels personal, because customers are the most important asset in your business. The platform you choose is customer-facing, so it’s at least partially responsible for their experience with your company. It should be a reflection of your brand, your values, and your priorities.

Back in 2011, the position we set out to own was the best customer experience. Not our customer, but our customer’s customer. If we could create the best experience for them, then surely the world’s most customer-centric companies would want to use our product. We’ve been focused on it ever since.

Positioning a product in the broader market

While the end-customer experience is still our main focus, we recently started to look at the problem in a different way, visualized by two axes: the Relationship axis, and the Sophistication axis. This was our view of the market.

The Relationship axis describes both the quality of the end-customer experience, and the level of relationship context that’s typically required to deliver a great experience.

“Transactional” may seem like a negative way to describe a relationship, but we all have transactional relationships with businesses that don’t require anything more formal. When you order fast food, for example, or stream a Netflix movie, both sides are happy with a transactional relationship.

My favorite brands differentiate in crowded markets by investing in the relationship, though. I’ve bought running shoes from Marathon Sports in Boston for the last seven years. I don’t live in Boston anymore, but I still purchase my running shoes there when I’m in town. Why? Because they have my information on file, they’ve watched me run, and they know what kind of shoes I like. We have a relationship, and by way of that relationship, they can give me better advice than anyone else. It feels good giving them my money. We built Help Scout for businesses that partner with customers in this way, so being much higher on the relationship axis is really important.

The Sophistication axis refers to the product and its capabilities.

A sophisticated product can do anything you want it to do, but that comes with a host of challenges and complexities as well.

I liken this axis to the process of purchasing a suit. On the “simple” side, you buy something off the rack. Maybe there are some light alterations, but generally you are buying a suit that was mass-produced for someone that looks like you. On the “sophisticated” side, you buy a custom suit, requiring multiple fittings and 6-12 weeks before you have a finished product. Every detail is stitched to fit you and you alone. It’s one-of-a-kind, and there’s a price to match the effort that goes into it.

It’s worth noting that you can find high quality and craftsmanship on either side of the axis. The difference is more specific to the purchasing and manufacturing process.

The customer service market is full of sophisticated products, which is one of the reasons we chose to keep it simple. We wanted it to be easy for folks to get up and running in a few hours or less. Taking an “off the rack” approach allows us to focus our time on quality over quantity of features, offer better pricing, and provide free support and training to everyone.

Defining these axes allowed us to identify what position was most important for us to pursue in the market.

Help Scout resides in the upper left quadrant, valuing a simple approach focused on building relationships.

The axes in which you choose to position your business will vary depending on your market. We tried a bunch of different ones before landing on these. There are many ways to think about positioning — and I encourage you to lean into several of them — but this approach was really helpful in our case.

Positioning is always a challenge, but it’s worth the investment.

 A mastery of positioning has the potential to set your business apart in any market, no matter how crowded, and pave the way for long-term success.

What’s the Difference Between Customer Support and Customer Success?

The difference between customer support and customer success has sparked a number of lively discussions. The roles share similar skill sets and goals, but they implement different approaches.

Customer Support teams resolve product-related issues and educate the customer about how the product works. They work with other operational teams like Engineering and Product to improve existing features while gathering customer feedback for upcoming release cycles.

Customer Success teams, by contrast, proactively work with customers to understand their business goals and help them find success with the product, thereby increasing the lifetime value of the customer.

Both teams have the same goal in mind: to help customers and deliver amazing experiences.

Let’s take a closer look at the definition of both roles and discover how these teams can work together to create value for the customer.

Defining Customer Support and Customer Success

The definition of customer support continues to evolve as the expectations of today’s customers grow. Quality customer support is timely, empathetic help that keeps the customer’s needs at the forefront of every interaction.

Skilled customer support professionals understand the product and care deeply for the customers with whom they interact. They empower customers to find answers (e.g., via self-service), and they report on customers’ challenges to the product team. Chase Clemons, a member of Basecamp’s Customer Support team, sees customer support as a feature of the product.

The customer relationship, however, goes beyond SLAs and Happiness scores. Customer success focuses on fostering intimacy by helping customers grow and empowering them to succeed with your product and, by extension, with their own jobs.

The primary focus of customer success is to identify what success means to your customer, and to work hand-in-hand to help them achieve it in every aspect of their customer journey with your company.

Help Scout’s Customer Success team, for example, uses data science analysis to dig deep into how new and existing customers use the product and to jump in when they need help. Depending on the company size and where they’re coming from — another help desk or email — a set of segmentation questions determines the engagement path each customer will take: specific educational emails and other self-service content, one-on-one sessions with a member of the Success team, or long-term discussions with an assigned Account Executive.

Indicators such as whether the customer has interacted with the customer support team help determine the current stage of the customer’s journey during the first 90 days since trial sign-up. Based on those indicators, the Success team can jump in to learn more about the customer’s experiences and nudge them toward features that’ll benefit their teams and encourage them to fully use the product.

Customer Support vs. Customer Success: The Difference

With these definitions, you can already spot a few differentiating qualities between customer support and customer success. Let’s break it down further in a definitive list:

1. Approach: Customer support receives and responds, while customer success proactively discusses and strategizes.
2. Objective: Customer support focuses on issue resolution and avoidance, while customer success works to achieve desired business outcomes as the customer journey continues.
3. Metrics: Customer support metrics measure quality of the service provided, resolution times, and overall customer satisfaction; customer success focuses on metrics related to business impact like customer retention, expansion, and overall lifetime value.
4. Skills and disciplines: Customer support professionals possess skills that coincide with engineering, marketing, and operational teams; customer success can extend to a wide range of disciplines and industry expertise and are more consultative. Both roles require practitioners to be empathetic, resourceful problem solvers with a comprehensive understanding of who the customer is.
5. Business impact: Customer support is integral to running a business because customer questions always need to be answered, while customer success is often a value-added business function, driving revenue and expansion.

Customer Support and Customer Success are complementary

While each team assumes specific responsibilities over the customer journey, together they cover all aspects of a great experience with your company. Companies that acknowledge this harmony by grouping customer support and customer success teams together can create more impact for their customers and the business, as opposed to siloing the two as stand-alone functions or departments.

By uniting Customer Support and Customer Success, your customers feel everyone is on the same team. As you work together to support your customers in their journey to success, you can foster trust and brand loyalty from the first point of contact to the most recent customer conversation.