

Extraordinary support? You’d better blow my mind. - mootothemax
http://tbbuck.com/extraordinary-support-youd-better-blow-my-mind/

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nmcfarl
Personally I’d never claim to offer extraordinary support - the expense is
insane. There are cheaper ways to brand - with much smaller downsides.

My experience is that people who are building things and doing things in a
company are actually not competent to offer support. There are real skills -
mainly people skills, that CSRs have that you didn’t hire the builders for.
Additional a giant percent of good support is speedy responses, and long
conversations. Both things that require lots of man hours. So you need a ton
of CSRs. Which is expensive in itself.

But then - customers have an insane way of finding critical bugs, and making
completely reasonable requests that had never occurred to you. Things that
require builder and makers of your product to be fully accessible to your
CSRs. So you need to staff for that as well.

And that gets you to good. How you move from that to extraordinary is some
thing I don’t know how to do (And I’ve read a lot of what Tony Hsieh has to
say), but I do know it’s going to be extraordinarily expensive.

~~~
praptak
> Things that require builder and makers of your product to be fully
> accessible to your CSRs. So you need to staff for that as well.

From the perspective of said builder/maker I can say this can grow into a huge
problem if not handled well. Once your product/service gets deployed in
multiple timezones, your support turns into 24/7, even if not advertised as
such.

Suddenly the developers whose jobs used to be nice cosy nine to five start
getting called at ungodly hours to offer some insight into customer problems.
Nobody likes that, especially not without getting paid.

~~~
nmcfarl
I know - I’ve been there. The obvious starting place is to hire people who
know this isn’t 9-5 gig, (so nothing is sudden). But of course that drives up
wages a bit :) Boy is this an expensive problem to solve.

~~~
toomuchtodo
24/7 support of complex infrastructure? That's always going to be expensive :)

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kylemaxwell
Puffery and hyperbole are all too common in marketing. "Extraordinary
support", "incredibly advanced technology", or my least favorite, "beautiful
design" (:puke:).

Nobody should ever believe a marketer when they say anything until the
delivery matches. Sure, you can set some tentative expectations (e.g. "this
payment processor will process payments"), but to go much further than that
could invite accusations of naivete.

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huhtenberg
It's just a rant about some poor support experience with name calling.

~~~
Hansi
True, but it does act as a word of warning against using their services I
guess.

~~~
pc86
It does exactly that, which is why I don't think it belongs on HN. I didn't
click on that link to listen to someone I've never heard of complain about a
service I've never heard of. I was expecting an intelligent opinion (and in
these comments, a discussion) about what exactly "extraordinary support"
means.

Anyway, I think you're exactly right.

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nodata
In fairness, it never said "extraordinarily _good_ support".

~~~
codegeek
Just talking semantics. But we all know what it was supposed to mean

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codegeek
As a customer, I don't really care about _extraordinary_ support. I care that
_when_ and _if_ I have an issue, you do your _best_ in trying to resolve the
issue. What I absolutely hate is being forwarded from one guy/dept to another
without a real resolution. Yes some problems are user errors, some could be
hard to solve right away but for me, extraordinary support would mean that you
took time to understand _my specific_ case and are working diligently towards
a resolution. Rest is all fluff.

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blindfly
This reminds me of a lone developer who balances hundreds of clients, where
each client expects same day personalized replies with nothing but the right
answers.

~~~
codegeek
"where each client expects "

The lone developer should ensure that client expectations are correctly set.
Honestly, it is their responsibility and not the customers. Customers always
want everything unde the sun. How you handle their expectations is the key.

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lubos
here is how to do extraordinary support: lower customer's expectations and
then exceed them.

