

Make a great product, gain a user. Have great support, earn a fan - a4agarwal
http://sachin.posterous.com/make-a-great-product-get-a-user-have-great-su

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Lewisham
Couldn't agree more. Posterous has great support, Rapportive has great
support, I even had a useful, enjoyable live chat with Hipmunk last night.

I'd like to see startups have a full-time technically-literate support person
in the team by default. Have them sit in on meetings and such, but no time on
code, only customers.

The return policy for Costco costs them next to nothing in the grand scheme of
things. The loyalty they engender because of it, and the two or three extra
customers they generate from each of those fans, is worth so much more. It's a
great lesson for business large and small.

~~~
unohoo
>> I'd like to see startups have a full-time technically-literate support
person in the team by default. Have them sit in on meetings and such, but no
time on code, only customers.

+1 for that. Although I think having a full time support person might not be
feasible for small startups, overall, I feel that customer support is grossly
undervalued. Developers see tech support as beneath them. while management
teams tend to view support as a cost overhead. Not only can great customer
service lead to a extremely satisfied customer, it also helps close the
feedback loop from actual customers back to development / product features.

and i say this based on my brief experience working in tech support.

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drewbuschhorn
Have you actually experienced that 'Developers see tech support as beneath
them'? In the interactions I've had with both computer and science start-ups (
admittedly a small sample set, 3 companies ), I never actually seen this,
though maybe I've just lucked out. By and large the fellow devs or engineers
did either take care of it or make sure someone was taking care of it as soon
as an issue came in. It's not about altruism, it's just that's the best way to
convince people to part with their money.

As a 'support manager' / back-end coder myself now, I try to follow their
example. Got to agree with you that having a dedicated support person might be
nice, but I can't imagine it becoming common ... first for the reason you
mention, but also the types of people attracted to the instability of start-
ups usually wouldn't respond well to 'oh no, John, don't muck about with the
code/schematics, we want you to be customer focused'.

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RobIsIT
I don't think it's about support. I think it's about respect and honesty.

The collective mentality at many companies (web or not) relays things such as
"oh, they're just users" or "well, that's too bad it didn't work out".

It's easy to default into the general presumption that great support will
solve problems like these. However, the underlying issue isn't support, it's
respect.

It comes from the top and is echoed throughout the company right down to the
customer. Sometimes support issues can't be solved and when they can't,
respect defines the interaction. Even when problems can be solved, if a user /
customer / co-worker is treated with respect, they typically feel valued and
satisfied when they are treated with true respect.

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StavrosK
The odd thing about this is that I don't really think it's that bad to offer
good support. On my startup (historious) I see almost every user who's
emailing us be really surprised when we respond within a minute or so.

We're always at the computer and reading someone's email doesn't take that
long, or break your concentration very much. I know it's different for large
companies, but they have the kind of money to hire good support staff.

At those scales, though, you lose something that's even more impressive: The
ability to fix small bugs by the time you've replied to a user. If someone
reports a bug to us, we usually have it fixed and pushed in one or two
minutes, so when the user gets a response saying "thank you for the feedback,
we've fixed the bug, you can try again" within a minute of reporting, they
become really loyal to the service...

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daychilde
>earn a fan

Live in South Korea, die of fan death?

But on topic: I think the thing that infuriates me the most is when a support
person clearly doesn't read what I write to them. I can't count the number of
times I've had to reply and say, "Listen, I know you have canned text to make
your job go quicker, because most people haven't researched their own problem
before coming to you, but if you'd read what I actually wrote, you'd realize
why your response was completely unhelpful."

That's usually followed up by another batch of canned text. ARGH.

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storborg
Actually, I think this sort of infrastructure software may be the one area
where it's more important to have good pricing than good support, precisely
because the usage scales so large.

For example, take credit card processors: if a $50mil/year company has a
choice between a payment gateway that charges 1.9% and one that charges 2.1%,
they'll put up with a LOT of poor documentation, bad API design, and bad
support to use the 1.9% company instead--that price savings is $100k a year,
enough to hire a great engineer to deal with the bullshit.

Similarly, if you have a choice between an infrastructure company that charges
you $300k a year vs. one that's $100k a year, a $200k different buys you a lot
of "in house support".

When things scale big, pricing _really matters_.

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melissamiranda
Support makes such a difference. I just got locked out from my PayPal account
and there's no way to get it back without talking to someone on Monday (that's
48 hours away). Seriously, it's a huge company and they can't run a call
center on the weekends. I'm going to cancel my account and use the WePay guys
instead.

~~~
melissamiranda
It's no wonder that you hear "I HATE PayPal" from half the people who hear the
company's name. Here's a company with an arguably good product that's going up
in flames because of their terrible support.

