
How We Support 1,650 Customers with One Representative - duaneb
http://blog.statuspage.io/2-300-000-to-one-or-supporting-1650-customers-with-just-one-rep
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huhtenberg
Whether or not this number is notable depends squarely on the nature of the
product/service. One-man shareware shops routinely have tens of thousands
customers and handle all of the support _in addition_ to doing everything
else. And hardly anyone ever brags about this.

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odonnellryan
I worked for several years as corporate IT support back in the day. Each
employee represented around 2K user's nation wide.

It was very busy and we didn't do a good job (understaffed) but we did
everything. Supported ALL the applications. All hard ware. PC upgrades. You
name it. You handled your 50 calls a day. It sucked, that's why we all left,
but 2K+ for one person for one application stack... not that crazy.

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itsdevlin
This doesn't seem unreasonable. As a data point, we're just shy of 10k
customers with one full-time support person (and two part-time). In my
experience, it was the process of setting up the KB and process by which you'd
answer tickets that was the most arduous. 0-10 users, easy. 10->100 OMFG
EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE. 100->n becomes just an optimization problem.

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sandworm101
1650:1? What's Microsoft's ratio?

MS claims "1.5 billion people use Windows every day."

1500000000 / 1650 = 909091

Does MS have 900,000 call center people? I'm betting not. It may an apples and
oranges comparison (app v. OS) but 1650:1 remains nothing special in the world
of customer support. I would much rather then brag about how quickly customer
concerns are dealt with or how few are routed to voicemail.

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anhedonisticguy
I think you'd have to include a large majority of IT personnel in this figure,
as they are the likely first line of support for many windows installs.

That number is probably much higher than 1 million.

Apples to oranges, of course. The interesting part is that MS scaled their
support to include people paid by their customers directly because their
software was so business critical.

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odonnellryan
Even high-tier MS support isn't great. You may rely on it and `need` the
support, but you don't really need it.

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nostalgiac
What? I'm guessing you've never actually paid for an MS Support Call?

They will work through your issue no matter what until a resolution is
reached.

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odonnellryan
I'm sure I don't have experience with every tier of their support, but I've
dealt with both Microsoft Partner support and paid support contracts for both
Windows Server and SQL Server.

They will definitely help you, eventually, and the problem will eventually get
fixed. However, eventually (in my experience) has been usually several days.

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gscott
I ran a groupware platform that had over 1,000 daily users on it myself with
about 30 new organizations signing up to use it every day.

The key thing was to create help videos and help hover icons everywhere
possible. Eventually it was self-supporting no one ever had questions because
the answers were all right there.

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acconrad
I'd be asking for a raise if I were that rep.

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jo909
They rotate support duty, every engineer and even the founders do it for a
week each.

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odonnellryan
This is the most important part of the email! I almost got fired once for very
modestly bringing up the idea at a previous role ;)

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myohan
I think the challenge is not in the numbers but in the quality of support and
these guys are doing it well and substantiating how they did it with solid
evidence.

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FajitaNachos
Their call to action signup is pretty slick. Full page on page load, then no
longer accessible once you scroll down or refresh. First time I've seen
something like that in the wild.

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philip1209
Weird, the HTTPS Anywhere chrome extensions seems to be redirecting me to
status-page-blog.herokuapp.com

