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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

#31

Post by orphereus »

sharts wrote: post #23
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…

It’s for these reasons LLMs are going to chip away at silly subscriptions. When many projects get 70% of what the user needs and the maintainers aren’t willing or able to address what paying customers want…why bother paying anymore when you’ll soon be able to have just those bespoke features/fixes/integrations built yourself? It seems to often boil down to the fact that paying customers are paying to solve a problem…

"...you’ll soon be able to have just those bespoke features/fixes/integrations built yourself?"

How soon is it? Tomorrow? Next week? 10 years?

People are so sure that LLMs will change everything >>soon<<.

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

#32

Post by dabluck »

designerarvid wrote: post #30

Sure, people want a personal human answer. But not as much as they want the correct answer. Also, I think that we want to communicate with a company (Human or AI), and not a person, quite often. As you’re supporting a business transaction, not making friends. There’s a certain anonymity that comes with the business transaction. I wouldn’t ask for a refund from a friend.

This is a good point and was a good learning for me. Sometimes people just want to vent or whatever to a corporate email, then they actually aren't delighted at all when a person answers addressing their concern.

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

#34

Post by mmarian »

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.

Same here. I feel it's what every software owner thinks, but no one is willing to admit because of the backlash.

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

#36

Post by amirathi »

> We have never heard this before. User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized

> We have heard this before, but we cannot see it or replicate it. The user gets to do work for us and/or get no resolution

Well, if you're not willing to resolve individual customer's problem then don't expect to build goodwill with just prompt reply on support!

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

#37

Post by miki123211 »

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…

> you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself.

Which is exactly why HN's anti-telemetry stance is so unjustified.

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

#38

Post by RossBencina »

Lots of worthwhile observations in the article, but I think the framing is a bit off. It sounds transactional and by the numbers.

I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.

You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.

By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.

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

#39

Post by stevoski »

To the writer of the article: you missed a big opportunity with this article by not having an obvious link straight to your product, Castro, and by not telling us in a few words what it does.

It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:

> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…

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

#40

Post by dabluck »

stevoski wrote: post #39

To the writer of the article: you missed a big opportunity with this article by not having an obvious link straight to your product, Castro, and by not telling us in a few words what it does. It’s not too late to change the first sentence to: > I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…

Yes thanks added. Next article: "What I got wrong: Marketing 101"
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