411–420 of 441 posts
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…
A couple of thoughts: As a customer, if I see firm boundaries set, (IE, read XXX before contacting me,) I usually assume that someone is under stress from nonsense like this. Then I try to be on my extra-best behavior. I know a lot of people suggested raising your price. Some alternatives are to: 1: Offer two price points: The $20 / month gets no support, the $100 / month is supported. 2: Consider some of the feature…
>Offer two price points: The $20 / month gets no support, the $100 / month is supported. Someone is paying you money and you won't help them? They are going to cancel and possibly badmouth you on social media. Also, how are you supposed to improve your product if you don't interact with most of the userbase? I try to help everyone who uses my software. Even if they are evaluating and haven't paid me a penny. Commerci…
> Someone is paying you money and you won't help them?
$20 a month is not a lot of money, and isn't enough money for personal attention. The kind of support that the author was providing costs at least $50 an hour, if not more!
This is why, for example, Lawyers charge hundreds of dollars an hour.
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Me: This very specific thing is broken in general for your product when I do a and b. Just like users x,y and z report on . (Siemens) Support: Before I can help you, please find the serial number via , and the exact version of subsystems . Me: Here you go, though I fail to see how my specific setup is relevant as the problem has been reported on forums for years, and it is easily reproducible Support: Please update t…
I wonder how flows like that happen. Is Support just completely disconnected from Engineering? Do they not have a way to report issues and indicate that many customers are having a specific issue? Does the company believe that giving a customer a runaround will make them less upset than saying "Sorry, this is a known issue. We're working on it but do not have a timeline"? Certainly at some point, some support person…
These flows are intended to dissuade problem reports, because the business is too big to care.
I once reported a ui bug to Discord(the game chat). This is how it went.
- me wrote an elaborate email and screenshots of the problem with step-by-step guide to reproduce it
- support responded me by asking build version, my os version, device type
- me screenshot all the requested details + manually wrote down in response email so someone can also copy-paste somewhere directly from my email
- support responds by asking me to clear my iphone cache(sending me a guide for Android's App data cleaning process) and see if issue persists
- me respond that it is not Android and since I knew what they will ask, I have uninstalled, reinstalled, logged-out, logged in and documented the whole process by recording my screen while doing it
- support, please try to logout, then uninstall and reinstall again
- me begrudingly do it again(record screen), send them everything
- support, could you try updating your device OS? - me check for updates, iOS says it is latest, me send screenshots
- support, can you try disconnecting and reconnecting to your network or rebooting your device?
- me follow the steps(by recording my device using another device) and send it back
- support, can you try factory resetting your device
- me get pissed off, I mean c'mon, the issue is that, the client is incorrectly handling the on-screen keyboard events and has nothing to do with my device, but giveup anyways and write on twitter that I tried to report an ui bug, is there some engineers I can reach out to?
- twitter official DM me and what do you know, it was the same person who was responding to my emails and tells me, if I tried resetting my device to factory default, else they'll close my ticket as not reproducible
I just gave up and uninstalled discord. I mean, sure there are lot of useless problem reports, but when your user goes on to extreme lengths to document an issue and cooperates, please take it seriously.
In most cases, the whole script is intended to deter the less patient consumers/users and not actually solve any problems. In some cases, the support is just an outsourced team with no connect/contact with actual team or the product.
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If you think getting charged asking price is getting fleeced, then you are kind of illustrating my point. I don't want a customer that thinks they are getting fleeced by doing business with me. I don't want a customer who thinks that paying asking price for a product is me taking advantage of them. I don't want a customer that thinks I am starting the relationship as an adversary rather than a partner in a mutually b…
> If you think getting charged asking price is getting fleeced, then you are kind of illustrating my point. No, that's explicitly not what I'm saying. Of course, you, as an honest business that stands behind their work, prefers customer who are happy to pay your asking price while not being a pain in the ass. But that's going to be exactly the same stance as your competitor who spends half the effort on their product…
I said that people that ask for discounts or generally fixate on the price are, in my and many other’s experience, bad customers.
I’m happy to sit and talk about the service, the features, etc. I’m even happy to discuss pricing if there is a circumstance that merits it like a bulk deal. But a huge red flag is when people focus on price exclusively.
This was a fascinating read, really. The potential customer base being basically suckers waving wads of cash to be taken from them. The wild contrast of how nice the author tries to be to every single person that interacts with the project -- despite majority being the equivalent of single-celled organisms poking the fb markeplace "is it available" button. Reading some of the messages from potential users is so eye-o…
I've done exactly one legit "SaaS startup" type venture around 2012-2015. I still think about the absolutely insane customer service requests we'd get. It was a very niched down Eventbrite competitor, so we did things like PDF ticket generation, QR code generation, attendance tracking, there was a big fundraising component as well so lots of payment infrastructure. We charged a percentage of ticket sales so any one e…
Don’t reply.
You have to judge which requests are “crazy” of course, which isn’t always easy. “If you could just do this one thing, I would gladly pay for a subscription” has to be weighed with how much work it would be, and whether you think it would apply to other potential or existing customers.
But a reply explaining your rationale for politely saying “no” simply gives the potential customer a reason to stay engaged, often leading to indignation when the inevitably feel dissatisfied with your reasoning. After all, they don’t care about your other customers, they just want their problem solved.
Many, many prospective customer inquiries don’t deserve answers, and you’ll find yourself buried in unproductive back-and-forth if you don’t do the simplest thing of ignoring them.
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In my first job in a software maintenance project, I was overenthusiastic and was closing issues left and right. My manager called me to his office and told me that if I solved all the issues, the project will need much lesser people when they renew the contract, which might lead me, the junior most person, to be sent to the bench until they get a new contract.
Sounds like something that could be turned into an opportunity. Immediately start looking for a different job, and on the interview explain “I left previous job because I was too efficient at solving problems. After X time, there were no outstanding issues so I was no longer necessary. I’m looking for the next place where I can make a difference”. There are plenty of places that see fewer issues a positive.
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In my first job in a software maintenance project, I was overenthusiastic and was closing issues left and right. My manager called me to his office and told me that if I solved all the issues, the project will need much lesser people when they renew the contract, which might lead me, the junior most person, to be sent to the bench until they get a new contract.
To give you the other side of this, I have had service providers obviously do this to us. It didn’t result in more billable hours at renewal. We just systematically moved teams leadership to a competitor - we have found that mixing companies of origin in teams keeps everyone more honest - and removed developers we thought were not meeting the productivity standard we were looking for. Cheating your customer is a dang…
This comes at a decent time for me. I am pondering a new piece of software and customer service is the number one thing on my mind. I've mostly decided that the first hire I would make if it were to become any kind of success would be customer service. But the economics of hiring are brutal. Customer service don't get paid a huge amount but if you consider vacation, benefits, taxes, and all of the other costs of empl…
Surely you can just outsource customer service to an offshore provider that is (a) cheaper, and (b) just a company that invoices you for their time (i.e. not your employee therefore not directly owed benefits taxes etc by you)? I haven't looked into it, so I don't know exactly what price range is involved (and I don't know if it's a price that one could justify, depending on the exact income involved in your side pro…
I think it is natural to see customer service in some industries as the kind of thing that gets tucked away into a call center or similar type of industrialized or factory-line like situation. However, I have seen the result when the customer service team is embedded within (or at least closely adjacent to) the development team.
Often these roles are more like "customer success" and they border on account management in many cases. They are part community building, part moderation, part customer training, part evangelism, part technical support.
So this wouldn't be a role in the vein of "answer X tickets in Y amount of time" but rather a much wider remit of ensuring overall community happiness by engaging in forums, answering questions and escalating technical problems, contributing to FAQs, etc.
My feeling is that trying to fill that kind of role with temporary workers, especially ones that are managed by some other company, would mostly defeat that purpose.
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I’m observing this for many years and it feels like there are two types of people. Those who perceive lists as a whole and those who list.shuffle().pop(). Try asking your colleagues/etc three semi-related questions in one message and you’ll get only a partial answer in a significant number of cases. When confronted (constructively, much later) they usually get evasive and can’t explain. I could theorize it’s a learne…
Same conclusion here. At my last job we had a customer who was famous for doing this. Since he generated a significant amount of sales, we couldn't just sideline him, so I learned to only ask one question at a time on email. Otherwise, if you asked e.g., three questions, it was a complete tossup as to which one he would decide to answer, all the while reminding you that this was a "hair on fire" issue for him. Compou…
"Try this one thing: ....
If you are a detail-oriented person, you could also save us both some time and try these things also ..."
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Idk. It’s totally ok to just ignore those types of requests. Even a lot of the requests the author was getting. They’re just fishing and there’s Practically zero chance they’ll even ever follow up to see why you never responded. Mega corporations get away with awful support of paying customers, people don’t actually expect you to jump at their command as a startup or even as a toy side project. If you’re able to igno…
I reply to every support request that isn't an obvious scam. It feels rude not to.
Thanks for your message, please know that we are limited on time and only respond to critical issues. However, also please know that we do eventually read and monitor these emails;
- Bug reports or issues on our current application: we will respond within a week, usually within 2 days
- Feature requests: we are unable to confirm when or if a feature will be added. We typically put it on a log and review them quarterly.
- Requests for source code or how our tool was built: we're glad you're curious however we do not share this information.