

How Your Startup Can Deliver Support That Will Increase Sales - jasonlbaptiste
http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/21019/11-Ways-Your-Startup-Can-Deliver-Support-That-Will-Increase-Sales.aspx

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patio11
As implied by Kevin at Wufoo, repetitive support requests are a form of waste,
since a solution would have saved the time for both you and your customer.
I've closed an A/B test or two which was indecisive in terms of impact on
sales in favor of the one which caused less support requests. I think one of
them in particular (ditching the downloadable version, which literally cut my
support load to 10%) probably saved my life this October -- I added something
like 20k trials and at previous rates that would have crushed me.

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jasonlbaptiste
yup, great points. the biggest difference between machine and human scaling is
evident here. You can spawn up ec2 instances fairly fast to accomodate for
machine bottlenecks ie-20k more users. Spawning up the support staff for that
is nearly impossible, you'd just drown.

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stakent
_I suggest that all tickets are made public and viewable by users._

No. Don't do that. If I pay for the service I do expect confidentiality of my
support request.

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jasonlbaptiste
We had that happen the other day and they emailed us. A good alternative would
be: mark this as private request. Depends on the company, service, issue,etc.

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stakent
And what did you put in Terms of Service.

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jasonlbaptiste
you misunderstood. they didnt want to make the issue public, so they emailed
us. they didnt post, thinking it was private and it was public.

