

"Community driven support can hurt your startup" – Interview with Paras from VWO - pocha
http://blog.supportbee.com/2011/01/13/community-driven-support-can-hurt-your-start-up-an-interview-with-paras-from-vwo/

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patrickyeon
A tangential matter, where community-driven support may not hurt you, but
providing your own support gives an advantage: If you're dealing with all the
issues as they come in, you get a good feeling for how people are using your
product, how they expect/wish it would work, and how they're mis-using and
breaking it.

I think of it as similar to top-quality brands that offer lifetime warantees
(MEC in Canada, similar to REI, offers it on everything in their store). This
way, if anything ever breaks out in the real world, the customer is likely to
bring it back. While they are fixing it, they can examine it, and if they see
a rash of broken straps of a certain design, they know to beef up that strap
on the next spin.

That's all before the advantages of customer loyalty, building a brand
image/voice, or whatever other reasons.

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TravisLS
Community-driven support offers benefits beyond cost savings, for one, it
allows users to get faster responses. Your email probably can't provide
answers every hour, but a vibrant support community will.

Additionally, it gives you a way to show publicly how friendly and responsive
you are (assuming you participate in the community), which can impact your
signups.

We always offer both, a public support option, community, or Facebook page,
and an obvious private email link. Most users seem very happy with that level
of interaction.

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sruffell
I agree that the public / private option makes sense to me.

However, regarding that the public option "...gives you a way to show publicly
how friendly and responsive you are...", it also sometimes forces you to deal
with people (competitors?) who want to use your forum to argue why your
product may be lacking. There is also the occasional person who is upset that
you or someone else hasn't taken up their issue that they mailed to the public
list.

