

How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff - j5eb6ach
http://lewsblog.newrelic.com/2010/07/29/how-to-support-5000-customers-with-no-support-staff/

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jacquesm
32 people is not a small company any more, and if every engineer you've got is
also a support person on call for your customers you can't really say you
don't have support staff, just that you don't have dedicated customer support
employees.

The article does make a very good point though, the best way to reduce
customer support is to improve product quality.

Customer support is one of the few areas in a virtual enterprise that does not
scale, the costs can very quickly eat up your revenues.

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noodle
i came here to say basically the same thing. "no support staff" is not the
same as using engineers as support staff.

i was expecting more of an article on a startup of 2 cofounders who are
managing things themselves.

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parallax7d
So was I. But technically "No Support Staff" means no one, on staff, doing any
support. Thus the customers would have to use a stack exchange or some other
type of self-sufficient system.

~~~
j5eb6ach
Because of its searchable Knowledge Base for customer self-help, we also chose
to use Tender (the SaaS platform used by New Relic).

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jasonkester
I can't overstate how awesome it is having tech savvy customers. Support
requests for S3stat (one of my businesses) more often than not come with
implementation suggestions. Everybody who signs up has to at least gotten as
far as to get Amazon S3 working for their site, so my userbase is essentially
pre-screened for smartness. They just plain figure things out on their own, so
if they contact you it's because something is actually broken. It rocks.

Compare that to the consumer-facing site I run where the biggest tech support
request I get is from people who can't tell the difference between
wordpress.com and wordpress.org, followed closely by people who sign up for an
account, never do anything with it, then demand to have their account deleted.

My next project will be another one targeted at tech-savvy users. I'm already
looking forward to the first bug reports with patches included.

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callmeed
We have about the same number of customers (maybe a bit more). We have 2 full-
time support staff plus another that does support half-time.

This article makes some good points (about product quality and fixing bugs),
but I would counter the article with:

1\. Just because you support X customers with 0 full-time staff doesn't mean
you do it well. I like to think of our support staff as a sales channel. When
you have a great support staff, it builds a reputation for your company and
results in a lot of referral sales.

2\. A product like NewRelic is for developers/sysadmins. That makes it a lot
easier to have engineers support it since they're usually talking to other
engineers. I doubt it would be as effective for Saas apps for Joe the Plumber.

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dazzla
Your product makes a huge difference. I'm a company of 1 working after hours
and I'm supporting 9,000 users with little more than email.

