I run http://www.wordfence.com http://www.wordfence.com - We provide customer support via Freshdesk for our paid customers (a ticketing system) and on the wordp

I run http://www.wordfence.com http://www.wordfence.com - We provide customer support via Freshdesk for our paid customers (a ticketing system) and on the wordpress.org forums for our free customers that use our open source product. I initially did CS myself along with my co-founder and it is tough work. The hardest is the context switching overhead. One minute you're coding or marketing, and then you have to switch into doing 2 or 3 hours of customer support. What is really tough is at the end of the 3 hour stretch, a customer with a real gnarly issue comes along and you have to do 30 to 45 minutes of actual work researching it to help them. You have to dig deep to go that extra distance. Once our revenue scaled we could hire our first full time customer support engineer and wow. It was so awesome to have someone offload this and let us focus on all the other stuff (which we would eventually have to hire for too!). We have a team now, some permanent and some contractors. So there's no easy way to do it and because it's a human intelligence task, it's super time consuming and super expensive. But I can't overstate the importance of great customer service. We are known for it in our space and it has really paid off. Competitors have dropped the ball in a big way and we have picked up the slack through excellence in customer service. A few things I learned: - Reply early, reply often. It's very important to most customers to simply be acknowledged. - Everyone has a bad day and 90% of the time, a polite response to a very angry customer will get you a surprisingly polite and grateful response back. - Twitter is great. Reply to customers, interact, but direct them to ticketing or forums for full customer support service. - Ticking system is essential. It's the only way to reliably track issues. Support via email and you will eventually drop the ball and it will bite you. - A FAQ will save you a huge number of support tickets. Put it front and center, maintain it well, make it as user friendly and easily navigable as possible. - Only hire people who speak your customer's language as their first language. Even the smallest grammatical errors are giveaways of offshoring and will irritate customers. - Depends on what kind of biz you run, but in our case our customers are surprisingly understanding when we have an autoresponder saying we will be providing limited support over the holiday season or over weekends. So pick your hours, and just communicate clearly what they are. Hope that helps. Edit: You asked about average time to handle customer queries. A ticketing system gives you that kind of reporting along with a ton of other metrics. I would think the average time to close a ticket varies depending on the business and product complexity and customer sophistication.