The Economy of Helpfulness

I've spent nearly twenty years in service: front lines, back office, executive seat, sometimes all three in the same week. If you'd asked me at twenty-five where any of that was headed, "building software" would not have been my answer. But here we are!

Somewhere in those twenty years I started noticing the same conversation happening over and over and over. Someone in leadership would ask why there was so much focus on making sure customers are actually cared for instead of just closing the ticket and moving on. And I'd explain, again and again, that the "extra" time we spent genuinely caring about people was the whole reason those customers stuck around, renewed, told their friends, and forgave us when something broke. It wasn't a nice-to-have bolted onto the real business. It was core to the business!

After years of having that conversation in board meetings and leadership offsites I finally wrote it all down, in a book called The Economy of Helpfulness. Partly because I wanted a better answer than "gestures wildly towards amazing retention and referral metrics" the next time someone asked. And partly because once I actually sat down to write it down I realized the idea was bigger than any one company I'd worked at. Help people well and they help you back, usually more than you'd expect, and it compounds over time. That's the Economy of Helpfulness!

One section of that book that I think about constantly is something I call the Cycle of Integrity. It's so simple once you see it: however you treat the people inside your own company is exactly how your customers are going to feel, whether you plan for it or not. You cannot fake your way around this one. A team that is respected and trusted carries that into every single customer interaction.

Hyphen is that idea turned into an actual platform, built by support people, for support people, because I've been the one hunting through five tabs and three different systems for one answer while a customer waited on the other end, and I always knew there had to be a better way to do this: the hunting, the tab-switching, digging in a CRM, searching a Knowledge Center, all the stuff that has nothing to do with actually helping anyone. I want helpers to be able to help, and I want CX leaders to be able to see, clearly, just how much good their people are doing every single day, because they are, and it's about time everyone else got to see it too.