> 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!
Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
51–60 of 205 posts
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#52As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#53I’ll tell you even more, in enterprise b2b saas, usually the company paying few thousand per month would have less questions and requests than the one paying few hundreds.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#54The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.
This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.
Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.
Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#55Thinking 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 ave…
There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions. You can't go to a local bakery and pay $24 for life to get fresh rolls every day.
Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#56Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems…
Having maintained and done tech support for both B2B and B2C products, as a small shop and often solo, B2B customers are far more predictable and less inclined to load you up with nonsense. And your weekends are always free. However, when they do complain, you're up at 6am on a Sunday. When you have a consumer complaint, you're welcome to sleep as long as you want.
This may seem trivial, but it's a proxy for saying that your feet are constantly to the fire with B2B deployments, in a way that you are not held accountable with B2C apps. I personally work better with the B2B stress and motivation... but it's not without its mental overhead.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
How so? I’m missing the irony.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#58Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems…
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#59Lots 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 t…
It's really not possible to avoid that when, at the end of the day, you're doing it to make a living for yourself and your employees, not doing charity work in your free time because you enjoy it.
> 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.
Yep, but that's then called market research, not customer support.
Re: Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
#60> 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?