16 ms·

As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support (2017)

395 points by artkulak 5y ago

danpalmer 5y ago
I can't seem to access this with Firefox, the certificate is valid for *.sixcore.ne.jp, not plumshell.com.
- shaicoleman 5y ago
  Works for me. The site doesn't support HTTPS. Your browser is probably automatically redirecting HTTP to HTTPS. Do you have the HTTPS Everywhere extension installed?
  - danpalmer 5y ago
    Ah yes! It's HTTPS Everywhere. Thanks.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Does HTTPS Everywhere just blindly redirect you to an HTTPS equivalent? That's crazy! (As you're finding out) there's absolutely no requirement that a site that responds to HTTP will also respond to HTTPS, or will respond with the same page even! Could be completely unrelated content. Could be controlled by a different party!
      - tialaramex 5y ago
        By default HTTPS Everywhere falls quite far short of "everywhere". It just has a list of things to try, where there's a popular site often linked to by HTTP for which HTTPS exists. It even handles cases where the sites have different server names e.g. https://secure.example.com https://secure.example.com versus http://www.example.com http://www.example.com which was a big trend at maybe the turn of the century. So, if you want more you ask it to instead try to upgrade everything, by simply replacing http-> https. I don't use HTTPS Everywhere, but, I do run Firefox. Firefox includes a feature called "HTTPS Only Mode" which is default off for now. In HTTPS Only Mode (which you can enable for Private Browsing, if you just want to ensure your porn doesn't get swapped for Rick Astley; or for all tabs if you like me would prefer unencrypted HTTP to go away now please) Firefox behaves as follows for all URLs whether you typed them in, clicked a link on a page, or in an email, or whatever: * If rewriting http as https "just works", that's what it does. Yes, in theory https://pig.example/ https://pig.example/ could be a site about pork farming while http://pig.example/ http://pig.example/ is a site about how awful the police are, but nobody actually does that on purpose unless they're being deliberately contrary - so there's no reason to care about it. * If the HTTPS site does not exist, Firefox tells you there is no secure site available, it says the most likely reason is mundane - there is no secure site, but it's possible something nefarious is happening. One click takes you to the HTTP site you originally were linked to. * If the HTTPS site "exists" only in the sense that if you typed that HTTPS URL in manually it would give an error on another browser (or indeed Firefox) that counts as not existing for this purpose. e.g. bad certificate, terrible SSL configuration, somebody doesn't understand how ports work.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > the certificate But it's an HTTP link. Where are you getting a certificate from?
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Phone them up, their number is on the web site.
  - Aachen 5y ago
    Related: I tried calling [insert virtualization company] support because I had issues with the website, and of course the issues only started after paying for the product. When I press 1 for technical questions, it refers me to the website's ticketing system and hangs up. (The sales line had me queueing for 3 hours 11 minutes then went to voicemail.) You're doing it too! The person is having issues reaching the site and you're referring them to the site :D
1123581321 5y ago
I really enjoyed reading this. It makes me want to call the developer for support just to make my day better. :) I’ve worked with a lot of people who don’t understand technical offerings and analytics well (both coworkers and customers) and have learned some similar lessons. Making oneself available for these kinds of calls seems like a distraction, but it prevents so much more unnecessary and/or misunderstood work than a more structured queue as long as it isn’t abused. (To do this, hiring needs to factor emotional intelligence, too; our talent pool defaults to slightly less polite than the older Japanese professional customers the author describes.) I try to maintain small enough connections between teams that an informal approach to balancing this kind of support can be used and most of the conversations can be directly between the person with the direct need and the person who owns the relevant service or worked on the project. Trying to scale it and introduce PMs and middlemen to save time is counterproductive because they often can’t explain the heart of the problem, so the interruption doesn’t pay for itself, and instead of bringing emotions that communicate valuable context to the developer, the middleman brings emotions related to their job, desire to please their boss, frustration at being assigned a low-context task, etc. So when that “scaling” is unavoidable it’s always better to force work into a structured process because you might as well minimize time and communication if you can’t get the right two people to connect.
- Doches 5y ago
  > ...to force work into a structured process because you might as well minimize time and communication... This works for me, but for different reasons: my "structured process" for email support starts with an autoreply that mentions that we're a two-person company doing our best, and we'll get back to you as soon as we actually can (including out of hours if we get the chance), etc. Usually, folks get their emotional baggage and "ugh I have to email support" frustration out of their system and, by the time I respond with a follow-up they've already moved on to the "oh, this fellow human is going to help me out" phase of things.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    That’s a very good point—-design and writing of these systems makes a big difference and lets prevents the need for further walling off.
Doches 5y ago
I offer phone support for a niche accounting app (https://quailhq.com https://quailhq.com), and everything in this article rings 112% true to me -- but especially this: > ...all sorts of people call you, and I’ve really learned a lot by talking with users directly on the phone. Sometimes users call me because they want to report a bug, or they've forgotten their email address. Sometimes they want business advice (!), or they have a niche feature they want to request. > This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone who calls is civil and polite. Hahahaha. Haha. Hah. Ahem. The biggest surprise to me when I started offering support (first email, and then later by phone) is how _aggressive_ people can be. My app has two classes of users -- one free, one paid -- and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request, etc. All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together. It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. I worked in a call centre for a summer in southern England dealing with deliveries for a high-end retailer, and I can say with 100% conviction the stereotype foreigners have of the reserved, mild upper-middle class English person has no basis in reality when you're a mere peasant on the phone to them! Some of the rudest, pettiest, most completely unnecessary conversations I've ever had happened that summer, their complete lack of perspective really made me rethink how I saw the world.
- vmception 5y ago
  There are basically no consequences when you are in a position to pay for something. You are either subsidized by a benefactor, have something else figured out (employment, recurring revenue), or are on a corporate account. Whereas the people that need things for free are overleveraged to the hilt where everything is indeed consequential.
bckygldstn 5y ago
This is an intriguing idea. I have heard before the recommendation to add a support phone number to your website, but always wrote it off as either out of date or something that only applies to large companies. The feedback from talking to customers is really valuable to solo developers. Part of why I run my own business is for the flexibility, and guaranteed 9-5 phone support would really threaten that. I wonder if there is a way to offer this on a best-effort basis without coming across as flaky? Perhaps putting the number only on the support page (like OP), but also only having the number there when you're online?
- Loughla 5y ago
  >but also only having the number there when you're online? If you make that clear, and explain why, I think it would be a good idea. If nothing else, it might even encourage me to call with ideas if I knew you were physically going to answer the phone.
- reidjs 5y ago
  I've never seen a company try this, but I wonder if an SMS/text support number could work. This would help with the 'flakiness', i.e., you don't have to respond immediately and you can help multiple people at once. No more waiting on hold at least.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    Many companies will have a similar structure but a different implementation, using a website-widget where the customer asks for a call-back.
- michaelt 5y ago
  I know some people with small businesses who use quality 'virtual assistant' services to answer calls when they can't. Obviously, they're not "first line support" solving people's problems - instead, they are "the CEO's personal assistant" scheduling a call back. After all, if you're an accountant or an architect or a lawyer or a dentist, there's no embarrassment in running a business that's just you and a secretary.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stickfigure 5y ago
We (two developers) offer chat support via Intercom. When an issue gets sufficiently complicated, we fire up a video call and screenshare. We find this works great. Maybe there's a cultural difference in Japan, but I think this is much better than phone support. There's a much lower barrier to sending a chat message than making a phone call, plus the communication is semi-asynchronous.
- Aachen 5y ago
  For those not already familiar, what is intercom? Is it like Jitsi?
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Intercom.io. They were a darling of HN for a while, combining chat and email (not video) into a single support stream. They've upped their prices quite a bit, but also expanded the product offering quite a bit. I've used them for many years at multiple companies and I'm still pretty happy. Dunno if there is something better in the market.
    - Aachen 5y ago
      > combining chat and email Oh it's one of those contact forms disguised as chat systems? Those are such a pain, website offering oh to talk to someone and then "responds in 49 minutes on average, you will be notified via email". But then GGP mentioned a screen share, does that work via a third party then?
      - stickfigure 5y ago
        Yes, that's probably it. The customer experience depends on whether you (support) are in front of the computer. If you're not available, phone support means leaving a voicemail and playing callback phone tag across worldwide time zones. I'll take the chat window please. A nice thing about chat is that it's easy to send and receive screenshots and links. Our customers seem to be pretty happy, but that probably has most to do with the quality of support. I'm the GGP, and yeah video is a different app. I use whereby.com (formerly appear.in) out of habit, but probably will move to Jitsi soon. It would be nice if this was integrated into intercom.
asimjalis 5y ago
How much do you charge? What kind of revenue is this producing? I realize you are getting many non-monetary rewards from this.
melenaos 5y ago
I offer mail and skype support, the bad thing about skype messages and skype voice is that after the call is ended I don't have a mail with the user's requests. because of this, i have forgotten many requests and they have to call back to ask me again. On the other side when somebody sends me an email I put a task flag on it and I work through these flags during my working hours.
gnicholas 5y ago
There have been a few times that I've offered phone support for my solo startup. When people email demanding it, I often do not offer it as an option because I can sense they are belligerent and it would be unpleasant and possibly unproductive. There are other times where I will suggest it to a user who I can tell is struggling with emailed instructions, or who cannot explain what he/she is seeing on screen. One thing to remember: you can block caller ID if you dial *67 before the number. Don't want to have users calling your cell inbound!
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  This varies by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Disabling_caller_ID_delivery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Disabling_caller_ID_...
wenbin 5y ago
Great customer service is the best marketing :) Oftentimes, I would prefer using a product from a responsible sole developer, rather than from a faceless big corp.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
When I ran my own business I had a product in the thousands of dollars price range. Phone support for this product would almost always be an interesting conversation where I learned a lot about customer needs. I also had a $25 PDF tool with a trial version. For that product a lot of the callers had no clue what the product actually did or tried to get a $5 discount or some other nonsense. I quickly stopped taking calls for that product because it was so unpleasant. My lesson was to offer phone support only for high price, low volume items. Phone support for cheap things attracts a lot of unpleasant people.
kindle-dev 5y ago
Talking to users is so, so important if you want to build a product people actually want. Discord gets a lot of hate in here, but I haven't found a better product for easily engaging your users. It's lower friction than a phone call, and it's fun to see a small community build up around your product. Eventually, people start brainstorming on ways to improve things and even help each other out from time to time.
antoniuschan99 5y ago
I would like to offer this service too but don't want to use my personal as it's already full of recruiter spam. What services do you suggest to use? I see Grasshopper and Dialpad as 2 options.
toss1 5y ago
>>You can detect critical parts of your product THIS!!! Not necessarily phone-only, but the help line/desk is an incredible goldmine of information on the actual in-field use of your product. More valuable than 100 design sessions, focus groups, Product Manager opinions, etc. Yet it is frequently ignored as a cost sink. This is in no small part a reason for the declining reputation of 'big tech'. Too many product managers just don't want to be pushed off of their 'vision' for the product by the actual in-field reality (Win-11 seems to be the latest victim of this myopia).
xyzelement 5y ago
I would abstract this topic to: talking to your users is important, and phone is a high-bandwidth medium. In particular, it seems like this developer recognized that phone connects them to their less technically savvy users, who - by being most different from the dev himself - can give him the most valuable outside perspective. Depending on your market, if you're trying to sell into non-techies this could provide hugely valuable insights. In general, the closer you are to the development side of things, the more you have a very specific (and I guess "correct") model of how your system works. By default, all of your documentation/support forms/etc implicitly reflect this model. But if your users model the thing in their brain differently, then your help/form aren't the most helpful in educating them or eliciting their true feedback/problem. One final thing - I have seen 'magic' where developers who chafed at tickets coming in from support staff (withdrawn, user error) would all of a sudden get excited about rebuilding something when the user themselves or even the support person, just explained in a higher-bandwidth way why the problem is real. It's easy to read a ticket and go "oh that's dumb, they should just do X" but on the phone/in person you go more into like "oh, this is a really reasonable/nice/smart person who's trying to use my system to do something important, and it's not letting them." Gets a totally different type of results.
duxup 5y ago
I find talking to end users incredibly critical. First app I made for my first job: The app was made for our customer's partners. Lots of time was spent on layout and how this app would be used (they assumed everyone was a power user). I finally get it out in the field and talk to the first end users of the app. They just open the app, immediately hit search, find the thing they wanted, do thing and left. That's it, almost every single one of them did that. The whole main page and dashboard type experience our direct customer wanted because they imagined their partners were power users, nobody was using it...
- xemdetia 5y ago
  Yeah I feel like as UI has modernized the "search box" UI approach is still not as celebrated as it probably could. I quickly don't care if it's some quirky incantation of a pigeon language as long as it gets me precisely to the destination without messing around. In the few enterprise apps I've seen evolve that was the most successful change was to make either a UI search or a content search.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Some years ago I got a librarian (MLIS) degree, and one of the things I remember from the training was that when a patron comes to you with a "reference" question (you know, the kind of thing that doesn't happen anymore, before there was google when they'd ask a librarian what they now ask google)... what they initially tell you they are looking for (or at least what you initially hear/think they are telling you), is usually not actually what they want. The process is a give-and-take "reference interview" where you collaboratively get to the bottom of what they are actually looking for, not just a simple process where they explain what they need and you find it. This has been very useful and applicable to any kind of tech support, and this account reminded me of it. (Also, btw, applicable to any kind of stakeholder expressing requirements/specs too...)
- dongping 5y ago
  A related article about the XY problem: https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/
- Aachen 5y ago
  I find it hard to correctly state what I'm looking for when asking for help. Stackoverflow is the main example that comes to mind but it can be any place. How were you taught to get to the bottom? When saying what it's for, I often feel like I give way too much irrelevant backstory that nobody cares about. Or without it, I risk missing out on a better solution. Also, if one mentions the goal, people will often go "why don't you [redesign the whole thing and] use X" instead of answering the question, but perhaps that's out of the scope of what the asker can do for a better answer and this is more something answerers should avoid doing.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Honestly I remember the general principal more than any particular techniques! We could try googling the "reference interview". But basically, just inquire about context: Not just what do you want, but what do you want to use it for, what do you want to do with it. And an iterative back-and-forth process of teasing it out. And basic respect for the person, meeting them on their terms not yours, even if you wouldn't want what they want. Be careful of your assumptions. Ask open-ended questions. When I googled, here's the thing I found that I liked the best: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1012&context=libr_pubs https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&h...
ram_rar 5y ago
I wonder, are there startups/apps that can build voice menu for phone calls for SMBs/indie developers? I guess, it ll be lot easier to derive insights from support related calls to improve product.
justinlink 5y ago
For the first few years of my product, I was in the same situation of being the solo-developer offering phone support. There were a few huge benefits, some mentioned in the article and a few downsides. Some highlights: When talking a user through a set of actions, hearing them stumble or fail to understand the UI is quite the humbling experience. You literally pay for it with your time as you listen to them struggle. Feature requests over the phone allowed the user to fully explain the need and helped me understand why that feature was important. The majority of the time a compromise could be struck between us where I could fulfill the feature request meeting my technical and time requirements while solving the problem for them. You can’t do that with emailed forms. A major downside is I would often get sidetracked to solve trivial problems for frequent callers who I had developed a working relationship with from frequent calls. The squeaky wheel gets the oil problem. While some of these enhancements probably added great value to the product, it was more difficult to pull off the big projects. Maintenance in particular suffered. In the times of a major problem like an outage or error, I did feel some frustration in those rare times. It was critical to answer the barrage of phone calls, to let them know we were aware and working on the situation. But as the only one who could fix a situation, being stuck on the phone in a repetitive loop delayed things. I just wanted to fix the issue, where each caller wanted to explain it. It was a valuable experience for me, but I am generally happier to no longer have a phone on my desk.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
I've practically never disagreed with a user when they've had difficulty with software, or the workflow, or error messages or whatever. As someone with a very low tolerance for hard to use software myself - I totally git it.
taf2 5y ago
This is how I started CallTrackingMetrics… I answered as many customers calls as possible- talked to and listened to as many as I could and then tried to put it all together building a solution for marketing attribution and contact centers along the way - the we use internally with over 60 employees….
GnarfGnarf 5y ago
I will take phone calls, and like others here I find talking to customers enormously useful and instructive. I also use Zendesk, which I find more efficient because I can send screen shots that clarify my instructions and responses. I can also search my customer support history for frequently asked questions and their answers.
bla3 5y ago
(2017)
- dang 5y ago
  Added above. Thanks!
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813107 - Nov 2017 (137 comments)
AussieWog93 5y ago
I'm honestly somewhat surprised to hear this. My experience providing email support for my main business (to be fair, second-hand video games in Australia) has basically taught me both how scummy and underhanded people can be, and also how many desperate and lonely people there are who contact tech support just to have someone to speak to. We very, very rarely provide our phone number, and even then only when it's strictly necessary. It would just drain us to be contactable at the drop of a hat by the public.
nicbou 5y ago
In Germany, you must put your phone number on commercial websites. A few people called me before I put a note not to call me next to the number. In my case, I write TFM, so phone calls came from people who didn't RTFM. Emails require more time to write, so people do their research before asking. I do learn a lot from those emails. They help me write better documentation, because they're direct feedback. You get to know what confuses people, and what situations they find themselves in.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I used to have a phone number on my web site. Over time the majority of my customers migrated to email and the few that didn't seemed to mostly be time wasters. I guess it didn't help that I'm in the UK and the majority of my customers are in the US so there were time differences to deal with. I will still phone customers if they ask although I always push back on that until I have some details on their issue. Conference calls are nearly always a complete waste of time when it comes to support but can be helpful when closing sales.

395 points by artkulak 5y ago

danpalmer 5y ago

I can't seem to access this with Firefox, the certificate is valid for *.sixcore.ne.jp, not plumshell.com.

shaicoleman 5y ago
Works for me. The site doesn't support HTTPS. Your browser is probably automatically redirecting HTTP to HTTPS. Do you have the HTTPS Everywhere extension installed?
- danpalmer 5y ago
  Ah yes! It's HTTPS Everywhere. Thanks.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Does HTTPS Everywhere just blindly redirect you to an HTTPS equivalent? That's crazy! (As you're finding out) there's absolutely no requirement that a site that responds to HTTP will also respond to HTTPS, or will respond with the same page even! Could be completely unrelated content. Could be controlled by a different party!
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      By default HTTPS Everywhere falls quite far short of "everywhere". It just has a list of things to try, where there's a popular site often linked to by HTTP for which HTTPS exists. It even handles cases where the sites have different server names e.g. https://secure.example.com https://secure.example.com versus http://www.example.com http://www.example.com which was a big trend at maybe the turn of the century. So, if you want more you ask it to instead try to upgrade everything, by simply replacing http-> https. I don't use HTTPS Everywhere, but, I do run Firefox. Firefox includes a feature called "HTTPS Only Mode" which is default off for now. In HTTPS Only Mode (which you can enable for Private Browsing, if you just want to ensure your porn doesn't get swapped for Rick Astley; or for all tabs if you like me would prefer unencrypted HTTP to go away now please) Firefox behaves as follows for all URLs whether you typed them in, clicked a link on a page, or in an email, or whatever: * If rewriting http as https "just works", that's what it does. Yes, in theory https://pig.example/ https://pig.example/ could be a site about pork farming while http://pig.example/ http://pig.example/ is a site about how awful the police are, but nobody actually does that on purpose unless they're being deliberately contrary - so there's no reason to care about it. * If the HTTPS site does not exist, Firefox tells you there is no secure site available, it says the most likely reason is mundane - there is no secure site, but it's possible something nefarious is happening. One click takes you to the HTTP site you originally were linked to. * If the HTTPS site "exists" only in the sense that if you typed that HTTPS URL in manually it would give an error on another browser (or indeed Firefox) that counts as not existing for this purpose. e.g. bad certificate, terrible SSL configuration, somebody doesn't understand how ports work.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> the certificate But it's an HTTP link. Where are you getting a certificate from?
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Phone them up, their number is on the web site.
- Aachen 5y ago
  Related: I tried calling [insert virtualization company] support because I had issues with the website, and of course the issues only started after paying for the product. When I press 1 for technical questions, it refers me to the website's ticketing system and hangs up. (The sales line had me queueing for 3 hours 11 minutes then went to voicemail.) You're doing it too! The person is having issues reaching the site and you're referring them to the site :D

1123581321 5y ago

I really enjoyed reading this. It makes me want to call the developer for support just to make my day better. :) I’ve worked with a lot of people who don’t understand technical offerings and analytics well (both coworkers and customers) and have learned some similar lessons. Making oneself available for these kinds of calls seems like a distraction, but it prevents so much more unnecessary and/or misunderstood work than a more structured queue as long as it isn’t abused. (To do this, hiring needs to factor emotional intelligence, too; our talent pool defaults to slightly less polite than the older Japanese professional customers the author describes.) I try to maintain small enough connections between teams that an informal approach to balancing this kind of support can be used and most of the conversations can be directly between the person with the direct need and the person who owns the relevant service or worked on the project. Trying to scale it and introduce PMs and middlemen to save time is counterproductive because they often can’t explain the heart of the problem, so the interruption doesn’t pay for itself, and instead of bringing emotions that communicate valuable context to the developer, the middleman brings emotions related to their job, desire to please their boss, frustration at being assigned a low-context task, etc. So when that “scaling” is unavoidable it’s always better to force work into a structured process because you might as well minimize time and communication if you can’t get the right two people to connect.

Doches 5y ago
> ...to force work into a structured process because you might as well minimize time and communication... This works for me, but for different reasons: my "structured process" for email support starts with an autoreply that mentions that we're a two-person company doing our best, and we'll get back to you as soon as we actually can (including out of hours if we get the chance), etc. Usually, folks get their emotional baggage and "ugh I have to email support" frustration out of their system and, by the time I respond with a follow-up they've already moved on to the "oh, this fellow human is going to help me out" phase of things.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  That’s a very good point—-design and writing of these systems makes a big difference and lets prevents the need for further walling off.

Doches 5y ago

I offer phone support for a niche accounting app (https://quailhq.com https://quailhq.com), and everything in this article rings 112% true to me -- but especially this: > ...all sorts of people call you, and I’ve really learned a lot by talking with users directly on the phone. Sometimes users call me because they want to report a bug, or they've forgotten their email address. Sometimes they want business advice (!), or they have a niche feature they want to request. > This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone who calls is civil and polite. Hahahaha. Haha. Hah. Ahem. The biggest surprise to me when I started offering support (first email, and then later by phone) is how _aggressive_ people can be. My app has two classes of users -- one free, one paid -- and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request, etc. All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together. It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...

BoxOfRain 5y ago
>All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. I worked in a call centre for a summer in southern England dealing with deliveries for a high-end retailer, and I can say with 100% conviction the stereotype foreigners have of the reserved, mild upper-middle class English person has no basis in reality when you're a mere peasant on the phone to them! Some of the rudest, pettiest, most completely unnecessary conversations I've ever had happened that summer, their complete lack of perspective really made me rethink how I saw the world.
vmception 5y ago
There are basically no consequences when you are in a position to pay for something. You are either subsidized by a benefactor, have something else figured out (employment, recurring revenue), or are on a corporate account. Whereas the people that need things for free are overleveraged to the hilt where everything is indeed consequential.

bckygldstn 5y ago

This is an intriguing idea. I have heard before the recommendation to add a support phone number to your website, but always wrote it off as either out of date or something that only applies to large companies. The feedback from talking to customers is really valuable to solo developers. Part of why I run my own business is for the flexibility, and guaranteed 9-5 phone support would really threaten that. I wonder if there is a way to offer this on a best-effort basis without coming across as flaky? Perhaps putting the number only on the support page (like OP), but also only having the number there when you're online?

Loughla 5y ago
>but also only having the number there when you're online? If you make that clear, and explain why, I think it would be a good idea. If nothing else, it might even encourage me to call with ideas if I knew you were physically going to answer the phone.
reidjs 5y ago
I've never seen a company try this, but I wonder if an SMS/text support number could work. This would help with the 'flakiness', i.e., you don't have to respond immediately and you can help multiple people at once. No more waiting on hold at least.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  Many companies will have a similar structure but a different implementation, using a website-widget where the customer asks for a call-back.
michaelt 5y ago
I know some people with small businesses who use quality 'virtual assistant' services to answer calls when they can't. Obviously, they're not "first line support" solving people's problems - instead, they are "the CEO's personal assistant" scheduling a call back. After all, if you're an accountant or an architect or a lawyer or a dentist, there's no embarrassment in running a business that's just you and a secretary.
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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stickfigure 5y ago

We (two developers) offer chat support via Intercom. When an issue gets sufficiently complicated, we fire up a video call and screenshare. We find this works great. Maybe there's a cultural difference in Japan, but I think this is much better than phone support. There's a much lower barrier to sending a chat message than making a phone call, plus the communication is semi-asynchronous.

Aachen 5y ago
For those not already familiar, what is intercom? Is it like Jitsi?
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Intercom.io. They were a darling of HN for a while, combining chat and email (not video) into a single support stream. They've upped their prices quite a bit, but also expanded the product offering quite a bit. I've used them for many years at multiple companies and I'm still pretty happy. Dunno if there is something better in the market.
  - Aachen 5y ago
    > combining chat and email Oh it's one of those contact forms disguised as chat systems? Those are such a pain, website offering oh to talk to someone and then "responds in 49 minutes on average, you will be notified via email". But then GGP mentioned a screen share, does that work via a third party then?
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      Yes, that's probably it. The customer experience depends on whether you (support) are in front of the computer. If you're not available, phone support means leaving a voicemail and playing callback phone tag across worldwide time zones. I'll take the chat window please. A nice thing about chat is that it's easy to send and receive screenshots and links. Our customers seem to be pretty happy, but that probably has most to do with the quality of support. I'm the GGP, and yeah video is a different app. I use whereby.com (formerly appear.in) out of habit, but probably will move to Jitsi soon. It would be nice if this was integrated into intercom.

asimjalis 5y ago

How much do you charge? What kind of revenue is this producing? I realize you are getting many non-monetary rewards from this.

melenaos 5y ago

I offer mail and skype support, the bad thing about skype messages and skype voice is that after the call is ended I don't have a mail with the user's requests. because of this, i have forgotten many requests and they have to call back to ask me again. On the other side when somebody sends me an email I put a task flag on it and I work through these flags during my working hours.

gnicholas 5y ago

There have been a few times that I've offered phone support for my solo startup. When people email demanding it, I often do not offer it as an option because I can sense they are belligerent and it would be unpleasant and possibly unproductive. There are other times where I will suggest it to a user who I can tell is struggling with emailed instructions, or who cannot explain what he/she is seeing on screen. One thing to remember: you can block caller ID if you dial *67 before the number. Don't want to have users calling your cell inbound!

wizzwizz4 5y ago
This varies by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Disabling_caller_ID_delivery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Disabling_caller_ID_...

wenbin 5y ago

Great customer service is the best marketing :) Oftentimes, I would prefer using a product from a responsible sole developer, rather than from a faceless big corp.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

When I ran my own business I had a product in the thousands of dollars price range. Phone support for this product would almost always be an interesting conversation where I learned a lot about customer needs. I also had a $25 PDF tool with a trial version. For that product a lot of the callers had no clue what the product actually did or tried to get a $5 discount or some other nonsense. I quickly stopped taking calls for that product because it was so unpleasant. My lesson was to offer phone support only for high price, low volume items. Phone support for cheap things attracts a lot of unpleasant people.

kindle-dev 5y ago

Talking to users is so, so important if you want to build a product people actually want. Discord gets a lot of hate in here, but I haven't found a better product for easily engaging your users. It's lower friction than a phone call, and it's fun to see a small community build up around your product. Eventually, people start brainstorming on ways to improve things and even help each other out from time to time.

antoniuschan99 5y ago

I would like to offer this service too but don't want to use my personal as it's already full of recruiter spam. What services do you suggest to use? I see Grasshopper and Dialpad as 2 options.

toss1 5y ago

>>You can detect critical parts of your product THIS!!! Not necessarily phone-only, but the help line/desk is an incredible goldmine of information on the actual in-field use of your product. More valuable than 100 design sessions, focus groups, Product Manager opinions, etc. Yet it is frequently ignored as a cost sink. This is in no small part a reason for the declining reputation of 'big tech'. Too many product managers just don't want to be pushed off of their 'vision' for the product by the actual in-field reality (Win-11 seems to be the latest victim of this myopia).

xyzelement 5y ago

I would abstract this topic to: talking to your users is important, and phone is a high-bandwidth medium. In particular, it seems like this developer recognized that phone connects them to their less technically savvy users, who - by being most different from the dev himself - can give him the most valuable outside perspective. Depending on your market, if you're trying to sell into non-techies this could provide hugely valuable insights. In general, the closer you are to the development side of things, the more you have a very specific (and I guess "correct") model of how your system works. By default, all of your documentation/support forms/etc implicitly reflect this model. But if your users model the thing in their brain differently, then your help/form aren't the most helpful in educating them or eliciting their true feedback/problem. One final thing - I have seen 'magic' where developers who chafed at tickets coming in from support staff (withdrawn, user error) would all of a sudden get excited about rebuilding something when the user themselves or even the support person, just explained in a higher-bandwidth way why the problem is real. It's easy to read a ticket and go "oh that's dumb, they should just do X" but on the phone/in person you go more into like "oh, this is a really reasonable/nice/smart person who's trying to use my system to do something important, and it's not letting them." Gets a totally different type of results.

duxup 5y ago

I find talking to end users incredibly critical. First app I made for my first job: The app was made for our customer's partners. Lots of time was spent on layout and how this app would be used (they assumed everyone was a power user). I finally get it out in the field and talk to the first end users of the app. They just open the app, immediately hit search, find the thing they wanted, do thing and left. That's it, almost every single one of them did that. The whole main page and dashboard type experience our direct customer wanted because they imagined their partners were power users, nobody was using it...

xemdetia 5y ago
Yeah I feel like as UI has modernized the "search box" UI approach is still not as celebrated as it probably could. I quickly don't care if it's some quirky incantation of a pigeon language as long as it gets me precisely to the destination without messing around. In the few enterprise apps I've seen evolve that was the most successful change was to make either a UI search or a content search.

jrochkind1 5y ago

Some years ago I got a librarian (MLIS) degree, and one of the things I remember from the training was that when a patron comes to you with a "reference" question (you know, the kind of thing that doesn't happen anymore, before there was google when they'd ask a librarian what they now ask google)... what they initially tell you they are looking for (or at least what you initially hear/think they are telling you), is usually not actually what they want. The process is a give-and-take "reference interview" where you collaboratively get to the bottom of what they are actually looking for, not just a simple process where they explain what they need and you find it. This has been very useful and applicable to any kind of tech support, and this account reminded me of it. (Also, btw, applicable to any kind of stakeholder expressing requirements/specs too...)

dongping 5y ago
A related article about the XY problem: https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/
Aachen 5y ago
I find it hard to correctly state what I'm looking for when asking for help. Stackoverflow is the main example that comes to mind but it can be any place. How were you taught to get to the bottom? When saying what it's for, I often feel like I give way too much irrelevant backstory that nobody cares about. Or without it, I risk missing out on a better solution. Also, if one mentions the goal, people will often go "why don't you [redesign the whole thing and] use X" instead of answering the question, but perhaps that's out of the scope of what the asker can do for a better answer and this is more something answerers should avoid doing.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Honestly I remember the general principal more than any particular techniques! We could try googling the "reference interview". But basically, just inquire about context: Not just what do you want, but what do you want to use it for, what do you want to do with it. And an iterative back-and-forth process of teasing it out. And basic respect for the person, meeting them on their terms not yours, even if you wouldn't want what they want. Be careful of your assumptions. Ask open-ended questions. When I googled, here's the thing I found that I liked the best: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1012&context=libr_pubs https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&h...

ram_rar 5y ago

I wonder, are there startups/apps that can build voice menu for phone calls for SMBs/indie developers? I guess, it ll be lot easier to derive insights from support related calls to improve product.

justinlink 5y ago

For the first few years of my product, I was in the same situation of being the solo-developer offering phone support. There were a few huge benefits, some mentioned in the article and a few downsides. Some highlights: When talking a user through a set of actions, hearing them stumble or fail to understand the UI is quite the humbling experience. You literally pay for it with your time as you listen to them struggle. Feature requests over the phone allowed the user to fully explain the need and helped me understand why that feature was important. The majority of the time a compromise could be struck between us where I could fulfill the feature request meeting my technical and time requirements while solving the problem for them. You can’t do that with emailed forms. A major downside is I would often get sidetracked to solve trivial problems for frequent callers who I had developed a working relationship with from frequent calls. The squeaky wheel gets the oil problem. While some of these enhancements probably added great value to the product, it was more difficult to pull off the big projects. Maintenance in particular suffered. In the times of a major problem like an outage or error, I did feel some frustration in those rare times. It was critical to answer the barrage of phone calls, to let them know we were aware and working on the situation. But as the only one who could fix a situation, being stuck on the phone in a repetitive loop delayed things. I just wanted to fix the issue, where each caller wanted to explain it. It was a valuable experience for me, but I am generally happier to no longer have a phone on my desk.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

I've practically never disagreed with a user when they've had difficulty with software, or the workflow, or error messages or whatever. As someone with a very low tolerance for hard to use software myself - I totally git it.

taf2 5y ago

This is how I started CallTrackingMetrics… I answered as many customers calls as possible- talked to and listened to as many as I could and then tried to put it all together building a solution for marketing attribution and contact centers along the way - the we use internally with over 60 employees….

GnarfGnarf 5y ago

I will take phone calls, and like others here I find talking to customers enormously useful and instructive. I also use Zendesk, which I find more efficient because I can send screen shots that clarify my instructions and responses. I can also search my customer support history for frequently asked questions and their answers.

bla3 5y ago

(2017)

dang 5y ago
Added above. Thanks!

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813107 - Nov 2017 (137 comments)

AussieWog93 5y ago

I'm honestly somewhat surprised to hear this. My experience providing email support for my main business (to be fair, second-hand video games in Australia) has basically taught me both how scummy and underhanded people can be, and also how many desperate and lonely people there are who contact tech support just to have someone to speak to. We very, very rarely provide our phone number, and even then only when it's strictly necessary. It would just drain us to be contactable at the drop of a hat by the public.

nicbou 5y ago

In Germany, you must put your phone number on commercial websites. A few people called me before I put a note not to call me next to the number. In my case, I write TFM, so phone calls came from people who didn't RTFM. Emails require more time to write, so people do their research before asking. I do learn a lot from those emails. They help me write better documentation, because they're direct feedback. You get to know what confuses people, and what situations they find themselves in.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

I used to have a phone number on my web site. Over time the majority of my customers migrated to email and the few that didn't seemed to mostly be time wasters. I guess it didn't help that I'm in the UK and the majority of my customers are in the US so there were time differences to deal with. I will still phone customers if they ask although I always push back on that until I have some details on their issue. Conference calls are nearly always a complete waste of time when it comes to support but can be helpful when closing sales.