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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

#111

Post by 1dom »

dabluck wrote: post #106
1dom wrote: post #101

> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation. This is the opening paragraph. I think a lot of t…

People keep talking about how much flack I got but I don't think I've ever written anything that has resonated more with people. I'm not mad I got feedback guys I can take it. As for your comment, the title of the piece includes "what I got wrong" so I think it's pretty clear where the learnings were.

That's fair, thanks for the response.

I'd like to respectfully disagree with it being clear what the learnings are. Your conclusion says:

> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.

The failure here, based on the article, is you had an idea about customer support, and you bought a company to test it. Personally, before getting that far I would expect someone to do some googling or research or conversations with people in the area and they would have told you what they do and why, and why your idea would not work.

What happened? How did you get this far? Did you ignore people, or not talk to people? What was it you had or thought you knew about your idea that lead you to believe it would result in something different?

Another learning from your conclusion:

> Because building loyalty or rapport at the moment something isn’t working and the user is frustrated hasn’t worked. The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product, so that’s where we’re spending our time.

Again, this is common sense! I refuse to believe this is new to you or anyone else!

I appreciate the response, sorry for the harsh feedback, and thanks for taking to time to actually try and improve customer support. I think you sincerely have some great learnings and experiences from what you've been through here, I just don't think you've really got to the bottom of them with what you've written here yet.

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

#112

Post by GrinningFool »

bluGill wrote: post #109
jbstack wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't the same thing at all. If I buy version 2 then it's mine and I can continue to use it for as long as I want, if I'm happy with the feature set. I can ignore version 3 or choose to buy it. If I buy it then I now own two products instead of one. Sometimes the older version might even be better (e.g. features I like have been removed or made worse). With a subscription model I'm forced to pay again and again…

In theory you are correct but realistically you will upgrade.

The difference is without subscription, I can be pretty sure the next major version will benefit me.

With subscription,the only thing certain is that the seller wants to do as little as possible to keep taking my money. This tends to result on product updates that benefit them.

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

#113

Post by Uvix »

michaelt wrote: post #96
jwr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you 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.

> There is no such price If it’s sustainable at $1/month, and a customer is willing to prepay $1200 for a 100 year subscription, that sounds sustainable to me.

It’s sustainable at $1/month at current costs, but those costs will go up over time. The subscription price could be raised accordingly but they can’t go back and ask for an inflation adjustment from people who bought it.

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

#114

Post by Telaneo »

jbstack wrote: post #87
simiones wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest tension between software and one-off purchases is related to bugfixing, and especially security. It makes sense that you don't expect new features for a product that you paid for once. But, what is the case with bugs? If the product mostly does what it promised to do, but sometimes crashes, do you expect those crashes to be fixed for your version, or not? What it you're using a 10-year old version and a n…

There's some merit to your arguments, but not enough to justify a subscription: - Subscriptions are marketed as being a lot more than just bugfixes - new features being the big one. But there's usually no cheaper "bugfix-only" subscription, which means that someone who doesn't care about new features has to pay for them anyway. - To be honest - yes, I do expect bugfixes for free if I've paid to buy the product. After…

Heck, I'd pay to explicitly not get the new features and only get the security and bug fixes in several cases. The "new" features is in some cases just a reshuffling of the UI and removal of features I actually do use.

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

#115

Post by carlosjobim »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #102

The author hired someone with technical knowledge, but that's not enough. Technical knowledge and people skills are different things. If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you. If your response is focused on "educating the customer" or is too conscious of what's fair for the business itself, it will probably not impress. Great customer support is the kind t…

> If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you.

Quite the opposite. If somebody has a bad first impression, they will not bother contacting a business. They'll find an alternative.

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

#116

Post by Grombobulous »

Uvix wrote: post #113
michaelt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no such price If it’s sustainable at $1/month, and a customer is willing to prepay $1200 for a 100 year subscription, that sounds sustainable to me.

It’s sustainable at $1/month at current costs, but those costs will go up over time. The subscription price could be raised accordingly but they can’t go back and ask for an inflation adjustment from people who bought it.

Technically you could invest the money that hasn’t been used to cover the lifetime user’s costs.

Even leaving it in a the right checking account, it’ll earn interest.

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

#117

Post by keepupnow »

faangguyindia wrote: post #110

>I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation. I run an app with 16,000 users and receive 2–5 support tickets per week. I read every one of them. Around 20% of my app has been built based on user suggestions. People…

What app?

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

#118

Post by Grombobulous »

jbstack wrote: post #71
vladms wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends though what you pay for the one-time price. You can pay an offline version of the application (no extra costs afterwards), or a limited period of SaaS application updates (let's say 3 years). I agree that paying a one time price and expecting continuos updates and new features is not reasonable.

For the majority of software I use, I don't really care about continuous upgrades and new features, as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for. A great example for me is the Xodo app on Android. It's by far the best PDF editor that I've found on Android, particularly for annotating with a digital pen. Some features are locked. If I want to unlock them, it's $5 a month. I get nothing out of that which is…

As you have demonstrated with this comment, customers don’t really understand that there’s no such thing as “the product is done and costs are no longer incurred” even if the product is 100% done, and this is especially true on commercial app stores.

It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted.

It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phone number)

It costs $10/month for a mail forwarding service (or else Apple will publish your home address)

It costs ~$100/year to maintain an LLC.

A developer must buy a new Mac every 10-12 years or so just to maintain basic OS support (we can call that ~$50 a year for a MacBook Neo, but if you want your code compile to not be painful you’ll probably grab a MacBook Pro).

Domain name? $15/year. Business email, $10/year.

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

#119

Post by Grombobulous »

egorfine wrote: post #88
jbstack wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the majority of software I use, I don't really care about continuous upgrades and new features, as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for. A great example for me is the Xodo app on Android. It's by far the best PDF editor that I've found on Android, particularly for annotating with a digital pen. Some features are locked. If I want to unlock them, it's $5 a month. I get nothing out of that which is…

> as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for. Yes. On the exact major OS version you signed up on.

It’s worse than that, stop paying Apple $99/year and all your apps get pulled.

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

#120

Post by zzzeek »

faangguyindia wrote: post #110

>I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation. I run an app with 16,000 users and receive 2–5 support tickets per week. I read every one of them. Around 20% of my app has been built based on user suggestions. People…

This is all going to hinge in a tremendous way based on what kind of app you have and who your users are.
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