Was sole customer support person for a 2-person startup for a few years with ~50k users. Here are a few things that helped me. - Remember that getting honest f

Was sole customer support person for a 2-person startup for a few years with ~50k users. Here are a few things that helped me. - Remember that getting honest feedback about your software is one of the hardest things to do. People complaining is feedback. Use that and seek it out! - Put yourself in their shoes, realize they’re just trying to get something done and they’re frustrated with some feature they expect to have or expect to work a certain way. Sometimes a feature I felt was a differentiator compared to my competition turned out to actually just confuse people and wasn’t the great innovation I thought it was, for the simple reason that I did something differently than how everyone else did it. User complaints can help me understand why my assumptions are wrong. User complaints also help my understand where my documentation is missing or sub-par. Always listen to complaints through the lens of ‘Somehow I led this person here, but they’re upset, so what could I do better for the next person?’ - Always ask them questions! Get as much information as you can out of a user that is engaging with you. Keep the conversation going and get them to tell you their feelings on the rest of your software, not just the broken part. Get them to explain their workflow to you. I was frequently surprised and learned a lot from learning what people were trying to do and how. Ask them about other software they used before they found yours, and why they switched. - When people are being a little bit mean about the software, respond quickly and kill them with kindness. A huge number of new users to my software seemed to assume they were talking to a bot or emailing the great void. They would be surprised and a little embarrassed when a human responded with de-escalating language to an angry rant. Let them know you’re interested in hearing what they have to say, and you’re interested in fixing the issue they’re having. Give them a reasonable and realistic time frame for when you can fix the problem. (But resist the urge to promise too soon; be diligent about prioritizing accurately and protecting your own time & sanity.) - Delete and ignore comment by non-paying users who send nasty comments. Ignore most of what free users say anyway. For some reason people who don’t pay have higher and less realistic expectations than paying users. They aren’t invested and they generally seem to be less nice. By all means engage people if they’ll give you useful information, but set the bar high for engaging if they aren’t giving you either money or helpful feedback. Remember that their behavior reflects on them and not you.