I don’t have a direct answer, but from the perspective of someone who does sometimes reach out to support, the most frustrating thing is when a company has low

I don’t have a direct answer, but from the perspective of someone who does sometimes reach out to support, the most frustrating thing is when a company has low hanging fruit of things it could have done to prevent my support call: - Fix phone menus so they actually cover my normal, everyday case. Like if I want to report that your service is being used to conduct phishing, don’t make me have an account to do so (looking at you, Microsoft). - Fix broken links so I can find information. - Add entries to an FAQ. Have an FAQ. Make it easy to find. - Fix chatbots so they can cover my question. If you can’t, then have them escalate to a human who is empowered to file tickets that get acted on. - Don’t lie on your website. “Our chatbot can help you solve the most common problems.” No it fucking can’t. - Don’t have circular “contact us” flows that ask the user to categorize their issue into an incomplete list of categories which do not cover the user’s case, while never actually allowing the user to “contact us.” - Try your own services. If you have a phone number on your website, call the number and verify that it actually works. Same with every link on every page of your website. Sign up for email and see if you actually receive email. Don’t assume you will. Do a password reset and see if it works. If there’s a shopping flow, try to buy something. Try to cancel service. - Don’t overlook the power of clear, crisp writing to help people help themselves. And don’t underestimate the extent to which unclear, ambiguous, confusing writing, or even just imprecise terminology, will be a drag on everyone, both external and internal. - Make shit work. I suspect doing these things will have huge bang for the buck toward addressing the issue. If even big companies (Microsoft, Google) can’t get this right, a small company doing better at it will be appreciated.