Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

switowski.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 441 posts

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#71

Post by QuantumGood »

parpfish wrote: post #29
_se wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to talk to an AI for customer support.

i've gone back and forth on this over the last few months. I started out thinking that we've all been conditioned by bad customer support chatbots whose only purpose is to look up facts from the FAQ and then tell you to call the real customer support line to actually handle your problem. the problem was that the chatbots weren't granted hee ability and authority to actually do things . wouldn't it be great if you cou…

Customer support isn't paid well, so they often aren't motivated to become very skilled beyond the level of a chatbot before they move on to other things. So the interface to bad docs doesn't matter much. And good docs are very hard to produce. AI magnifies problems when good docs are lacking.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#73

Post by justin_oaks »

pc86 wrote: post #44
a13o wrote: post #25

The wording in the fraud cancellation emails gave me a good laugh. "My payment provider said you used a stolen credit card. Why did you do that? I've revoked your access."

That gave me a chuckle too. The list of "reasons someone would use a stolen credit card" is what, 2 options?

There are 2 options? I can only think of "I'm a person with poor ethics who wants to get something without paying for it".

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#74

Post by angelkst »

crazygringo wrote: post #54
_se wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to talk to an AI for customer support.

Actually, I do. There's no wait in line. There's no waiting 2 min for each response in chat, or waiting 5 min on hold while the rep figures out what to do. And I've, shockingly, gotten issues resolved faster and better. Using one semi-popular consumer app -- once it pointed me to docs on their site that Google wasn't finding because I didn't know what keywords to use. And twice it escalated me to send a message to th…

[dead]

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#75

Post by Gustomaximus »

xyproto wrote: post #65
thehappyfellow wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of “polite but curt” tone? I’m struggling to see what you mean.

Thanks for reaching out. The issue you’ve described seems to be on your end. Please check your settings or consult our docs for further guidance. If the problem persists, feel free to get in touch.

Would it be worth putting a price to investigating? Message like:

"Our premium support can investigate this for $XYhr. If the fault is at our end we will waive any fees. Please let us know if you wish to proceed."

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#76

Post by worldsayshi »

lukas099 wrote: post #66
nashashmi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being ghosted after helping a customer I am one of those people. Gotta keep in mind to let people know that the solution worked

Usually if something isn't working it becomes a bottleneck so a lot gets built up behind it. Once the 'dam breaks' so to speak you're playing catch up plus you probably don't want to think about the problem anymore. This is also a reason things don't get documented.

Also its easy to verify that it doesn't work but hard to verify that it does. So often it might take time to verify that and when you're confident about it you've lost the chat session or closed the browser, restarted the computer, went home already etc.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#77

Post by zamubafoo »

101008 wrote: post #21
btbuildem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh... I think there's a balance to be struck. You could leverage AI to handle the initial messages (90% of which are tire kickers or scammers) and funnel worthy exchanges to continue the conversation manually.

Once people notice AI is responding they will skip it and will request to talk to a human. AI will look the same as FAQs or Chatbots, people don't want to interact with them, they want a human being that is able to understand their problem exactly as it is.

The right pattern is to put them directly in a queue to talk to a person, but have an system (AI or otherwise) in the queue to gather the minimal information. Like having the person explain the problem (and have something transcribe it) and have the system transfer them to the appropriate team after parsing their problem.

Or for really common cases (ie. turn it on and off, you're affected by an outage, etc), redirect them to an prerecorded message and then let them know that they are still in the queue and can wait for a person. 9/10 it'll solve everything, but also reduce friction of simple things that might be answered.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#78

Post by danenania »

anticorporate wrote: post #38

Some advice: If you're going to monetize a side project, and you do it in a way where you're providing direct support, be sure the customer base it targets are people you actually want to deal with. Whatever the niche, imagine the worst people you've encountered on it, and be sure you want to use your spare time talking to them. Otherwise, the juice is likely not worth the squeeze.

That's good advice. Unfortunately though I think the nature of support is that on average it selects for the more difficult people in your customer base, for the same reason that doctors spend a lot of their time with hypochondriacs (despite hypochondriacs making up a small percentage of the population).

Something that helps to offset this psychologically, and is also a good thing to do anyway, is to proactively reach out more frequently to all your users. It can be the case that 95% of your users are happily chugging along, while 5% are unhappy and complaining frequently for whatever reason. If you rarely hear from that 95%, it can start to irrationally feel like no one is happy with your product, since that's the message coming from most of your support interactions.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#79

Post by duxup »

shash7 wrote: post #37

Can relate, I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas over the last 2 years. It does get easier over time. I've learnt a few tricks for managing early stage pain points. - You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support. - Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending some time automating the heck out of everything. This will save a TON of time in the near future. - Inve…

>You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support.

And very focused responses in terms of action items.

You might think of 3 things to say, check, but sadly 90% of the people you respond to with a list will behave like they read just one of them. Sadly this also leads to dragging things out for everyone who can handle more than one thing at a time :(

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#80

Post by urbandw311er »

I can relate to so much of this! I've had a couple of relatively successful B2C products take off as side products in my time, and it is very hard not to develop a personal involvement in the support requests; whereas the detached, time-boxed, semi-automated approach is by far the best way to prevent it from taking over your life. Ultimately you're not a charity (unless you are) and, unless you specify an SLA, you owe these people almost nothing: I tend to suggest offering an automatic refund to anybody dissatisfied for this reason: then invest 95% of your time in whatever makes 95% of the profits.
Post reply on HN