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> We've built and shipped 7 products recently and if there's one thing we've learned, it's that your personal relationship with your customer is your secret wea
by wtmt 7y ago
> We've built and shipped 7 products recently and if there's one thing we've learned, it's that your personal relationship with your customer is your secret weapon as a startup. Having customers email support@company.com or message a bot via Intercom doesn't feel personal.
Agree with the personal relationship with the customer part. But if the email is <realname>@company.com, wouldn’t that be personal? I do see giving a phone number as way more involved with the customer.
> From a customer’s perspective, they’re just texting a single number. They’re not frustrated with messy tickets or being routed to 3 different people.
Isn’t that what happens here in the backend — some messy ticketing system in Slack (which I gather isn’t a ticketing system) and several people handling responses for the same customer/issue and a potential lack of coherence in responses?
I don’t mean to pick on you. I really see value in providing a phone number to customers and telling them they can text or call anytime. But somewhere your marketing message seems a bit off to me, and doesn’t make sense on the points you’re railing against.
All the best!
- parthi 7y agoThanks for the feedback! A phone number is a lot more personal and immediate than email. We intend for this to be used with your most valuable customers, where you want to give them a direct line to someone senior at the company. We started with Slack since it's an easy way to get your team on board without them having to adopt a new tool. We've already started speccing out a web-based tool to handle more complicated triage tasks. The point on marketing message is appreciated. FounderPhone has worked well for us and our customers right now, and we think it can work for keeping account managers or founders close to their VIP customers, where you really want to be on top of any of their issues. We'll think about how to message that more carefully.