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Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

uncommonapps.nyc

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Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#11

Post by timv »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #2

I started off reading this article thinking "well, anyone who has ever maintained an open source project has almost certainly experienced the unending entitlement of users even when working for free". But after reading the article, I'm not surprised your users dislike you more after communicating with them... > I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email. > User can…

> You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products.

This was the biggest (1) complaint for me - in light of what you discovered from your actual support experience, why was your expectation so off?

Was it that you expected support to be full of "how do I do this complicated thing?" questions that can be answered by an expert? That's an unrealistic expectation, but I guess now you know.

Or was it that you really thought that customers would be happy if you just took the time to explain your pricing model to them (also unrealistic).

It is kind of obvious from the types of emails you get, and the types of responses you give that it was not going to lead to strong customer relationships. If all you're doing is writing a 100 words to say "No, I'm not going to do what you want" that's not going to make things better.

(1) Actually 2nd biggest - the biggest was talking about "buying Castro" but having no explanation/links about who the author is, what Castro is, or how/when/why it was bought.

Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#12

Post by stephbook »

Indeed a helpful article for it's detailed insights. Once you think about alternatives, it's clear why everyone else is on the well-known path (such as unhelpful support.)

I've often heard stuff like "telecom provider support sucks" or "IKEA furniture breaks easily."

When you ask people whether they researched support quality before deciding on a provider or whether they considered a $3,000 heavy-wood furniture the boomers had, they immediately sense the accusation in the question: It was their decision to suffer these fates. They then tend to get mad fast.

People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill and to disassemble their furniture in 5 minutes. It's exactly why everyone is optimizing for it.

Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#13

Post by speak_plainly »

Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.

Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.

It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#14

Post by dabluck »

timv wrote: post #11
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #2

I started off reading this article thinking "well, anyone who has ever maintained an open source project has almost certainly experienced the unending entitlement of users even when working for free". But after reading the article, I'm not surprised your users dislike you more after communicating with them... > I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email. > User can…

> You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. This was the biggest ( 1 ) complaint for me - in light of what you discovered from your actual support experience, why was your expectation so off? Was it that you expected support to be full of "how do I do this complicated thing?" questions that can be answered…

Pricing is a bad example I guess I should've minimized that part of the post.

I guess I didn't think about it enough, but if someone emailed in with a feature request, or with an opinion that this tab should behave differently or whatever, I thought giving explanation would be helpful. "I actually tried it that way, but it didn't work because X, and Y, and I didn't even think about Z which breaks the whole concept, etc etc." As a dev, these types of explanations would seem meaningful to me. But in reality, these conversations are mostly not helpful for either party. That was the point I was trying to make in the post.

Fair point on 2, I honestly didn't expect anyone to read this tonight and had another post planned I thought might get comments on HN, but I just put this up for now until I could finish that one. I will do better at giving context next time.

Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#15

Post by ikawe »

I know this isn’t a very interesting comment, but just to provide some balance to the mostly negative comments I’m seeing:

It’s interesting that you did the experiment, and I appreciate you sharing your results. It all seems reasonable, even if a bit depressing.

Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#16

Post by aldonius »

> When emails overwhelmed me, I asked a thoughtful user who emailed frequently and seemed to know as much about the product as I did if he’d help answer the emails, so I paid him to do that. And he did a great job, especially in terms of directly solving user problems.

Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!

Let's review some common areas.

- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.

- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.

- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.

- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.

- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.

Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#17

Post by jdlshore »

Thank you, @dabluck, for sharing what failed. I think stories of failure are incredibly valuable, and more useful than stories of success, which are often post-hoc rationalizations.

I’m sorry all the airchair geniuses in this thread feel compelled to express how they’re so much smarter than you and would never fail… or at least, never admit it.

Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#18

Post by mcmcmc »

dabluck wrote: post #9
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #5

One suggestion — when you have an unsatisfying answer for a customer like “I can’t reproduce that”, or “I won’t build that feature”, the customer may not appreciate the amount of effort you have invested in that decision. A 30 minute phone call/video call may communicate more effectively the depth of care you have. Even if you convey the same information, people _love_ talking to the owner/founder, it is a very stron…

Thanks it's hard to find time to do 30 minute calls as this is a glorified side project, but I actually had the same idea and recorded some calls with customers for public consumption as I thought might improve some of this communication, but I never got around to editing it and wasn't sure if the content would be compelling. Definitely feels like some form of video might be superior vs email, which is easiest in som…

You know what’s also great? A five minute phone call. Cuts through endless email chains and creates an instant human connection. You don’t need 30 minutes if you have competent support personnel who know how to deal with needy customers.

Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#19

Post by philipswood »

speak_plainly wrote: post #13

Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pri…

I find this:

> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...

Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

#20

Post by papertigerau »

ikawe wrote: post #15

I know this isn’t a very interesting comment, but just to provide some balance to the mostly negative comments I’m seeing: It’s interesting that you did the experiment, and I appreciate you sharing your results. It all seems reasonable, even if a bit depressing.

This was also my thought! OP is going to get a lot of arrows for this article, but it's a genuinely great write up that matches a lot of my experience with mass-market products.

It's a great account for people to reflect on. I've immediately sent this article to several early-stage founders who are burning astounding amounts of time on undesirable customers.

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