

Ask HN: How much customer support time would 100,000 users take? - techiferous

Let's say I can bootstrap a SaaS web app that would attract 100,000 active users.  I have no problem with the technical part of managing that traffic, but what about the customer support part?  How much time should I expect to spend in answering user emails?  Obviously it depends on the nature of the web app, so let's say for the sake of discussion that a user would use the web app once a week, its complexity would be similar to meetup.com, and if the web app doesn't do its job the user is significantly inconvenienced.
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patio11
How long is a piece of string? This is going to depend on how sophisticated
your users are, how sophisticated your application is, what your users'
expectation for handholding is, and how optimized your processes are for
dealing with user issues before they get to your inbox.

The great thing about words like "active user" is that they mean whatever you
want them to mean. For certain definitions of active user such as "Has
downloaded the trial version of my software recently", I have a hundred
thousand of them. (For very strict definitions of active user, ~2,000 or so.)

My support burden averages out to well under an hour a week.

On a very bad day, it is four emails, three of which will be about
transactional issues ("I paid but didn't get my software!" "Begging your
pardon, ma'am, but the payment processor doesn't tell me about it if you don't
hit the confirm button on your confirmation page." "Oh thx!"), forgotten
passwords, and lost Registration Keys, and that will take twenty minutes. An
average day sees _checks stats_ 1.2 emails. Many days have no emails at all.

It has not been my experience that support scales linearly with user count. It
is closer to logarithmic _but_ with major decreases when you take affirmative
steps to resolve the 20% of the issues that take 80% of your time.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_"It is closer to logarithmic..."_

Why would this be?

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samratjp
Find ways to help your customer find ways around common stumbling blocks -
"FAQ"s. A subtle tour may not be too bad (think new YouTube).

As about customer support scaling at that volume, it is a good problem to have
when you do hit that milestone :-) Having said that, do reverse customer
support, i.e. preempt their questions by educating your customers. Better yet,
get your users to write some of your FAQ's for you and delegate support to
your nicer members via some sort of forum.

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oomkiller
Not enough info about your idea here to give you any useful information. You
should share more about your idea, we won't bite!

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honopu
i'd say find a way to weigh and rate the most common queries(human
intervention i know it sucks) then eliminate those through tooltips or faqs

You really need to sit your Mom, Dad, wife, golfing buddy, whoever else is
close to your target market and get them to interact with your app to find the
inherent flaws.

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coryl
100k active users might mean its time to hire customer support so you don't
stretch yourself to do it.

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hajrice
I don't wanna come across as a spammer or anything, but I'm building something
that'll hopefully solve that pain for you.

