

CoSupport: Outsourced customer support by former 37signals-er Sarah Hatter - tptacek
http://cosupport.us/

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tom_b
Fascinating. Don't dig for gold, sell pickaxes.

Congratulations, I have no idea if this will work out longterm, but I find it
to be a creative idea. Reminds me of the Heroku/AWS/GAE play on hosting apps,
but applied to the customer support market.

Sarah, a quick question ( I noticed you're listening out there) . . .

Some years ago, before I became a corporate SQL grunt, I worked in an actual,
honest-to-goodness telephone support center (non-technical in nature). Is your
"scalability plan" to somehow identify those patterns of support for apps that
require the most hand-holding (e.g., live person-to-person contact) and
automate/FAQ/build some software to somehow win the 80/20 support race? Just
curious, since there such a huge range of customer tech savy out there . . .

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KevinEldon
"Get 37signals style customer support for $3k/month" is a pretty compelling
pitch. This type of service seems like the perfect fit for a growing startup.
The founders and early hires can focus on building product value and don't
need to get too bogged down in setting up quality support systems that ensure
customers are taken care of and retained. If you get too big for CoSupport
they have a training option that could help you move the support in house.

~~~
maayank
Isn't 3k/month too much for a startup?

and (sort of related) what would be the cost of one full time customer support
rep? It doesn't have to be the most technical person with a CS degree from
MIT, mind you...

~~~
tptacek
It costs significantly more than $36,000/yr for most companies to maintain a
full-time CSR headcount, and that's without factoring in the cost of
recruiting and turnover.

At the stated quality level, Sarah has priced this pretty aggressively.

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pamelafox
Small nit re the landing page:

I started reading the three columns "Copy", "Support", and "Blog", and by the
time I got to "Blog", I expected it to be another service that you'd offer
(i.e. writing blog posts about the supported service). It took me a second to
realize I was reading about your own blog posts.

Maybe it's just me, but I think I would relocate the blog section somewhere
else.

Cool site, otherwise!

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evandavid
I like the idea. I have two quick questions:

\- what happens when my site is experiencing issues and you receive massive
volumes of complaint/problem emails

\- how do I continue to integrate support in our product/feature management
workflow, to ensure that the voice of the customer is heard?

\- are you hoping to introduce phone calls and other support methods?

Thanks!

~~~
evandavid
Haha. Make that three.

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Rob1979
I thought this goes against 37signals advice to get actual real people doing
customer support?

~~~
tptacek
(a) Pretty sure there really is a Sarah Hatter.

(b) 37signals has a support team consisting of at least four actual real
people: <http://smiley.37signals.com/> (I'm not sure DHH counts as actual real
people).

(c) Sarah Hatter can do whatever she wants without somehow contradicting
37signals. She's ventured off into her own thing. She can even write --- gasp
--- Python code if she likes.

~~~
sarahhatter
There really is a Sarah Hatter! I'm her! 37signals is 200% supportive of me
and I can't thank them enough for letting me venture out on my own.

~~~
arkitaip
Maybe one day you will look back at this and be surprised how you ended up
acquiring 37signals to complement _your_ business. :)

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sammcd
While we are talking about outsourced app support just wanted to mention
<http://aptfolk.com/>.

While they don't have much info on their site, I've heard from friends who use
them that they are pretty good. Apparently they charge somewhere around
$25/hour so they are a little easier to get started with if you have a smaller
budget.

~~~
imagetic
I'll bump the Aptfolk mention as well.

I work on <http://tenderapp.com>, a customer support system that Aptfolk uses
with a lot of their clients.

Ash Ponders, the founder of Aptfolk, was doing support for Atebits Tweetie
back when I first heard about them, as well as a number of other higher
profile Mac and web apps.

They've done a great job with everything I've seen and are working on
extending out a number of of services like high-end screencasts and video
work, as well as documentation writing (something EVERY developer hates to
do).

I've been doing professional customer support for web applications for over 6
years now, not to mentions the countless moderator rolls and communities I've
been involved with over the years. This is definitely a market that's been
long overdue. It's probably one of the most difficult roles we have to hire
for here at <http://entp.com> as a small company with a tech savvy user base.
Not only do you have to talk the talk and be fairly tech savvy, you have to
understand and adapt to different types of users and cultures.

Culture is hard to teach though, and for an independent developer to be able
to offload support quickly when things grow to people who have a clue what
they are doing right out of the gates, that's a huge win.

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parfe
Is this another result of the random startup generator? What's with all the
clouds? What's with the Apple Product Placement?

~~~
brockf
I like the general site design, but they could have spent more time on the
blog:

<http://cosupport.us/blog>

YIKES.

~~~
sarahhatter
Hey Brock, our apologies! The blog is at cosupport.tumblr.com and we're
working on fixing those links!

~~~
brockf
Might want to tune up your 404 page as well :)

<http://www.cosupport.us/blog>

~~~
blankenship
Unfortunately, Virb doesn't let you customize 404 pages very well.

[http://help.virb.com/discussions/general/1970-custom-404-pag...](http://help.virb.com/discussions/general/1970-custom-404-page-
not-found)

But I'll see what I can wrangle.

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StavrosK
Hmm, how do you plan on getting to know the product/codebase intimately to
provide support? One thing people love about historious is that simple
features are added by the time I reply to their support emails and that I know
the entire codebase, this is lost with this sort of support scheme.

~~~
pamelafox
When I started in my role at developer support at Google, I was actually a
remote part-time contractor with no access to internal code, mail, or tools.
But, I was still able to provide decent support by being highly communicative
between the engineering team and the developer world, using emails, forum
posts, and weekly phone calls.

So, I do think it's possible to outsource a certain level of support without
codebase access, provided that there is a good communication line setup.

~~~
StavrosK
Oh, definitely, I'm just trying to see what the level of support is. Obviously
it can't be as good as having the actual developers provide support, but I'd
like to see how close to or far from that it is.

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gawker
It's a fantastic idea! I'm curious at how the support will work though? It
seems like you'll have to get the support people to learn the inside and
outside of multiple systems?

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izak30
Where is CoSupport for sales? This is an awesome idea.

~~~
tptacek
Like SEO, sales suffers from an adverse selection problem. Effective
salespeople are money generators and don't really need to market themselves.
There is a good chance that any salesperson who has the time and motivation to
market himself to the whole world isn't strong enough to be worth it.

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kawika
Is it Co.Support, Co.Support.us, or CoSupport? I see all three variations on
the company's home page.

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stretchwithme
shouldn't that be 37signaller?

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dabeeeenster
Is it just me that finds the homepage sexist?

~~~
arkitaip
i don't find it sexist at all. The illustration is of the founder and her cat
and it could be part of a powerful branding concept ("we are just as personal
and friendly as your own staff"), especially since they are name dropping 37
signals and the fact that the founder has worked there.

The design is not that corporate or web application-y and I like it as a
contrast to all these bland conversion centric / landing page SEO designs.

However, I have to say that I am skeptical about outsourcing support. I
consider it too core to outsource and, ideally, pretty much every person in
your small startup - their ideal customer [1] - should be involved in it.
Kinda funny how they reference Zappos, a company famous for their outstanding
in-house support.

[1] <http://cosupport.us/about>

~~~
sarahhatter
Outsourcing support isn't best for everyone, but for a 2-3 person development
shop sometimes it's the best bet for them. I would never suggest a company the
size of Zappos outsource their support, but they aren't our ideal customer
either!

