> I’m happy to explain why an essential app is worth your money
This is a podcast app. It's in no way essential, how did you use to explain this to your customers ?
Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
41–50 of 205 posts
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#42Thinking 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 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.
And for some subscription situations, you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you.
There's a 'PhotoSync' app that offers a premium option for either $1/month or $24 for life. Presumably because they looked at the average subscription duration and found it was in the region of 2 years. Modulo the time value of money and per-transaction processing costs.
Personally I much preferred the one-off purchase, even though it's not clear I'll be using the app in 24 months, because it fits a lot better with my (somewhat chaotic) way of managing my money.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#43Indeed 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 b…
> People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill
It's rarely 0.03 though in my experience. More like 10 a month or even more between the cheap options with bad support and the better ones. Even if you have one issue every year (sounds high to me), that's over a hundred per support phone call. Makes you think twice about the trade-offs.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#44> 99% of the time, no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email.
When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freebie) and they do not care about anything else. It’s the digital version of the “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Some times you’d get a little satisfaction from someone who realized there was a person who cared on the receiving end of that email address. Made it feel worthwhile.
Most of them are just doing some transactional game where they think that they can exercise some power over the company if they complain loudly enough.
This also has a lot of cultural differences. Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean. There were casual threats of violence from time to time and 90% of them came from one country, which I’m not going to name but I’ve added it to my mental list of places not to visit. It was weird that it was so consistent.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#45[flagged]
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#46Thinking 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…
> 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.
Yes and no.
You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%.
On the other hand, you probably don't want enough telemetry to detect that customer Jim Smith has trouble with WebRTC when joining calls without a microphone while using Firefox and Cloudflare Warp with split tunnels enabled.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#47Switch your brain from problems to solutions.
Every line item there has a solution. Even if it is just 4 different email addresses.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#48> 99% of the time, no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email. When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freeb…
> Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean.
genuinely curious. Which country was it?
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#49I built and ran a couple of large games and sites for which I was the sole coder, the daily show runner, and the buck-stops-here responder to support requests for everything from bugs to feature requests to fan mail to "my computer crashed and I got kicked out of the game".
Building rapport is not the reason for doing this. Being liked by everyone is an impossible goal. And yes, there is a class of customers who are power users who think their input should dictate the development roadmap. And yes, there are users who become psychologically reliant on you as their personal Geek Squad. And yes, there are non-technical people who encounter hard to reproduce bugs, who it's worth taking the time to work with if they can help you isolate the problem.
But doing it for "likes" is a terrible idea. I was once put out as a coder to be a public face of a big AAA game, on their dev forum, to interact with fan requests, and I think that was catastrophic both for my own sanity and for the company that chose to field fan mail that way.
With your big fans, you see what you can do about their feature requests. Never promise anything. With people who encounter real bugs or otherwise provide signal, try to turn them into sleuths and get them to beta test your next release. Draw boundaries. Letting your users be your testers is enormously valuable, so respect them and don't stop listening to their feedback. But the overarching goal here is to get value out of the process. Explicitly not to waste your time on being "liked". Because the kind of people who become obsessive over your CS responses are actually the worst customers who don't want to pay for anything anyway, and expect everything to be free.
What I'm saying does not mean to pull back on customer service, at all! It means that the goal is to improve your product, not to suck up to all those categories of customers in the hopes they'll like you more. They will or they won't like your product, and in the end, whether they personally feel that affinity for it is based on their enjoyment of it. If it's based on their sense of importance at being able to order you around, they're not your real customers anyway.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#50While working for a telecom operator, I tested the idea of having people paying more for dedicated support. We did a market study.
I turned out that customers are not ready to pay for support. Cognitively, paying for a service and paying on top for this service to work well is not consistent.
As a result, people have minimal support and complain. But they don't value good support either.
NB: companies do pay for (insurance) support, especially for swift resolution. But consumers or small businesses don't want it.