4 ms·

There's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. I'm a huge advocate of going the extra mile to help out a customer, but I could easily imagine a story where a

by biot 14y ago

There's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. I'm a huge advocate of going the extra mile to help out a customer, but I could easily imagine a story where a company wasn't able to focus on its profitable customers because it was so inundated with supporting unqualified users that it didn't have the time and resources to close a $10M sale. "We would have chosen to go with ACME Technologies, but when we had challenges with the installation their staff was so tied up offering Windows tutorials that we could never get the help we needed to do a proper implementation. It's a shame as their product did appear to have the edge."

vacri 14y ago
Not to mention that if you're not providing 'free' tech support (as in, free to the company), 2-hour calls at 2am on a Sunday morning gets expensive fast. I used to work for a company that worked in sleep medicine, so we had the wonders of a busy night call schedule. Our CEO boasted of our support record (wilfully ignoring actual data) and would demand to know why we didn't do a 2am drive to a customer having difficulties like he did back when he was operating the business out of his garage. It didn't slow him down much when we pointed out that the lab having problems was literally on the other side of the continent. Support is a bit like healthcare - there is always more demand than there is supply. The trick is how to triage it appropriately.