5 ms·

Support forums for free tiers are the absolute worst. With some exceptions, the general pattern seems to be power users hanging out and answering questions on t

Support forums for free tiers are the absolute worst. With some exceptions, the general pattern seems to be power users hanging out and answering questions on the company's behalf. Who are these people? Another support anti-pattern is an untrained offshore support team whose entire mission seems to be to close the case and move on. There is little in life more enraging than a support rep who refuses to engage logical brain and escalate based on clear evidence of a technology issue. At my most successful startup, we had an extremely smart guy in the support seat; he was eager to learn from the dev team how to triage, and so we'd get bug reports complete with network tab screenshots, api paths which had caused an error, etc. He could easily have been a skilled programmer had he chosen to pursue it. When we were acquired, he was merged into a larger team that had much less autonomy, and his morale tanked over time. The zendesk ("here are articles that might be appropriate") approach sucks too, as do chatbots. Perhaps fear of hallucinations is holding people back, but it seems like an LLM based product could take over the "keep it cheap" support vertical. 1) Have people file a report in their own words; 2) synthesize an answer for them, but only if the LLM identifies with high confidence their report as being a known problem that has an answer; 3) cluster reports from users based on salient features and escalate new clusters to the tech team; 4) and if the company can afford it, route everything else to a human team who can categorize, click a few buttons, and send the LLM back with an answer, or escalate.

grues-dinner 2y ago
> power users hanging out and answering questions on the company's behalf. Who are these people? It's genuinely strange. People will even do it for banks and phone network companies. As a company, all you need to do is have XP tiers for posting and someone will be willing to dedicate their life to becoming a Finco Bank Guru and running the forum for free. Usually they have a rather "Boomer" energy, so I get the feeling it's retired people who think the parish council/HOA doesn't meet often enough.
- thih9 2y ago
  On one hand it’s unfortunate that people don’t get paid for this kind of help and perhaps act in a short sighted way (giving away too much control to the provider). On the other, a lot of these are people willing to help someone else for free and make their knowledge practically public in the process. Seems aligned with a hacker/wikipedia/oss ethos in many ways.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Yeah, until you realize that they get all that XP posting some variation of "turn it off and on again" ten thousand times
    - thih9 2y ago
      As long as their comments are useful, I don’t mind. Many open source projects are low quality or trivial to others - but still provide big help to some.
    - beardedwizard 2y ago
      A long time ago I supported hp scanners on windows. I exclusively told people to uninstall and reinstall the drivers, or windows. My success rate was 100% and I outperformed all my peers who did actual troubleshooting in time to resolution and number of resolutions. Sometimes the right answer is just the right answer.
- robocat 2y ago
  Is there some reason Boomer isn't yet seen as offensive as a racist word? Your comment isn't the worst, but the word is usually used as a placeholder for some bigoted stereotype against someone retired. Disclosure: I'm not a boomer and the word is not used much in New Zealand.
  - bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
    I mean, one reason is that no one has ever shouted “boomer” in a hateful voice while lynching someone for looking their way wrong. We could also talk about how it’s usually not just used as an ageist slur but to describe a state of mind - if you ask the kids there’s plenty of old people who aren’t boomers - but saying it’s as offensive as being racist is completely inappropriate. To sort of quote the comedian John Mulaney about the n-word, if one of the words is one you can’t say and have to use “the n-word” to describe it, that’s the bad word.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > no one has ever shouted “boomer” in a hateful voice while lynching someone for looking their way wrong. That "while lynching" part is doing all the work here.
      - flappyeagle 2y ago
        As it should? Mexican or Chinese or Old or Gay are not bad word but they have been and continue to be shouted in hateful ways
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    ...really? https://i.redd.it/kb6r6ajwk3pc1.jpeg https://i.redd.it/kb6r6ajwk3pc1.jpeg
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    It's definitely a lazy slur, in the same way that "problematic" is a lazy complaint. Why reach for a vague zeitgeist term that everyone knows, but no one has a precise definition for, instead of taking the time to use a specific word?
- bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
  I’m sure I’m an outlier, but I did this once for a particular network equipment vendor. It’s a smaller vendor that aims at a low price point and skimps on things like support, but their software had a particular feature that was going to be very important for my employer. To get good at troubleshooting their gear fast - we were going to deploy the equipment for scenarios where mean-time-to-resolution was going to matter a lot - I camped on their forums and helped everyone I came across as practice matters a lot for that. After about year I’d achieved that and stopped, but I maxed out their karma rankings in the process. They didn’t have training material or certification programs and the equipment didn’t break much for us in production so this was the only way I could think of for getting the hours in.
- generic92034 2y ago
  > It's genuinely strange. People will even do it for banks and phone network companies. Helping other people can be deeply satisfying, even without payment or karma points. Maybe you are already doing it yourself? Otherwise I can only recommend you to try it some time. ;)
- autoexec 2y ago
  > someone will be willing to dedicate their life to becoming a Finco Bank Guru and running the forum for free. Usually they have a rather "Boomer" energy, so I get the feeling it's retired people who think the parish council/HOA doesn't meet often enough. I started a support forum for a video game once. I wasn't a boomer or retired. I just liked the game, had the ability to help, and the time. I guess some people just like being helpful. Certainly the company who made the game profited off of my free labor but I wasn't looking for money (to their credit they did offer to send me to E3 one year at a time when tickets weren't being offered to the public).
yonatan8070 2y ago
I think it could be possible to feed the LLM with lots of data about your product, potentially even give it source code with instructions not to share it. Then have it act as a highly knowledgeable support rep for customers, and also be able to file detailed issues for the dev team when it identifies that a customer finds a bug. The risk of hallucinations is still there, but it could probably be mitigated by feeding the LLM's output into a fact-checker model. I think the bigger risk is leaking internal data through prompt injections
- mooreds 2y ago
  We engaged a startup (kapa.ai; they're great) to train an LLM on: * our public facing docs * our public repos * our youtube channel * our forum and spit out answers. It's not right all the time, but it is most of the time and, crucially, it shares not just an answer but a link to the docs that led it to that answer. That makes it easier to fact check the LLM. We've found it very useful for scaling support and making that corpus of knowledge available to folks both outside and inside the company.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > I think it could be possible to feed the LLM with lots of data about your product, potentially even give it source code with instructions not to share it. I wouldn't trust the LLM to keep your secrets. There are countless examples of people convincing LLMs to say things they shouldn't. On the other hand, I wouldn't trust an LLM to spit out your source code without hallucinating a bunch of fake functions either, so maybe it balances out.
resonious 2y ago
I also know a "support guy" who absolutely kicks ass. Probably a better dev than most of us regular product engineers. Makes me think support is actually way harder than the actual app dev. I also wonder if the incentives are a little bad with this setup. Product devs' crappy code turn into tricky puzzles for our support team. Legend has it, RAD Game Tools used to have just 1-2 devs on each tool, and you'd do the support for your tool. Feels like this would pretty strongly encourage you to make your stuff good. And you'd have everything in your head too. I wish I knew of more similar setups in the web world.
- FiatLuxDave 2y ago
  I agree about how aligning the incentives can make a huge difference. The first product I was ever a product manager (and SME) for, I assisted the support team with escalations. This meant that every weird new bug or strange situation would hit me the same day. This really shortened the feedback loop on getting stuff fixed. It also made it so that I became aware of quirks or things that weren't working quite right from the customer's perspective, which is gold for a PM. That information I learned doing support escalations helped in the design of version 2 of the product, which is still in production 22 years later. I strongly recommend having the PM be the highest point of escalation in the support chain. It really incentives them to make a quality product.
knodi123 2y ago
> Support forums for free tiers are the absolute worst. With some exceptions, the general pattern seems to be power users hanging out and answering questions on the company's behalf. Who are these people? In my company, we have free support forums, email support for the customers who jump through some hoops (to make it slightly harder than searching the forums), and phone support for select clients. But the "power users" in the forum are just our internal customer support staff operating a handful of sock puppet accounts, and it's the same people who answer phones and email. The forums are a great searchable historical record. The email support is versatile and scalable. And the phone support is a non-scalable value-add that makes our top tier clients feel very special.
- mooreds 2y ago
  >The forums are a great searchable historical record. Wrote a whole blog post about this: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 Many people have a drive to solve their problems themselves, and if you make content available to google, they'll find it. It's a fantastic way to self-empower your users and customers. We even have an internal slack channel where I'll post questions and answers from the other support channels (email, slack) with a view to making them generic and turning them into forum posts. I don't get to that task often enough, but it is sure fun to do when I have time.
- safety1st 2y ago
  Very early in my career I interned at a company that rotated all of its developers ONTO THE SUPPORT TEAM for a few days every now and then (if memory serves, for 3 days per year). Yep, if you wrote the product, it meant that sooner or later, you were going to be on the phone with a customer who was having problems with that product. Even the interns were included and I got to be a support tech for two days. The support team was absolutely amazing with excellent documentation on what to say and do and how to close out a case. We were 10x slower than the real support techs at resolving cases so this didn't improve support by all the typical pinhead boss metrics. Customers tended to think it was pretty awesome they were talking to a dev regardless of whether we solved their issue. The real benefit of the experience though was FOR US, and was transformative. I credit a lot of my better instincts regarding product development to having that experience so early in my career. For example nothing makes you more sensitive to performance issues than sitting on the phone just waiting and talking to some random person for two minutes every time anyone tries to load a particular screen - you get back to your "real" job and the first thing you do is go into the bug database and start asking where the hell is that bug and when are we going to fix it. I own my own business now and I have never left, and will never leave, the email support alias, I will read every one of those emails I can until I die (and respond to the best of my ability as well). Later I worked on the team for a web-based product which had feedback fields all over the product. It took everything anybody wrote in those fields and piped them, unfiltered, into a screensaver that was installed on every computer used by the development team. When I was new to the team my manager told me "You just have to accept that you're going to see a lot of profanity on people's screens, that's how it works here." LOL! He wasn't lying. But you'd get exposed to dozens of random bits of feedback about the product over the course of each workweek. Tons of bugs and user pain points were discovered this way. You'd be in the middle of a 1:1 and some expletive-laden complaint about the feature you designed that went live three weeks ago would pop up, well OK, guess we're going to have to deal with that before the meeting is finished! It was wild. I remain of the view that relentlessly and aggressively exposing your entire product team to tons of customer feedback through any avenue you can is the right choice. Got a popular "water cooler" or #random/#general type of Slack channel? Start piping a bit of customer feedback into it. You can email Slack channels! Do it today.

grues-dinner 2y ago

> power users hanging out and answering questions on the company's behalf. Who are these people? It's genuinely strange. People will even do it for banks and phone network companies. As a company, all you need to do is have XP tiers for posting and someone will be willing to dedicate their life to becoming a Finco Bank Guru and running the forum for free. Usually they have a rather "Boomer" energy, so I get the feeling it's retired people who think the parish council/HOA doesn't meet often enough.

thih9 2y ago
On one hand it’s unfortunate that people don’t get paid for this kind of help and perhaps act in a short sighted way (giving away too much control to the provider). On the other, a lot of these are people willing to help someone else for free and make their knowledge practically public in the process. Seems aligned with a hacker/wikipedia/oss ethos in many ways.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Yeah, until you realize that they get all that XP posting some variation of "turn it off and on again" ten thousand times
  - thih9 2y ago
    As long as their comments are useful, I don’t mind. Many open source projects are low quality or trivial to others - but still provide big help to some.
  - beardedwizard 2y ago
    A long time ago I supported hp scanners on windows. I exclusively told people to uninstall and reinstall the drivers, or windows. My success rate was 100% and I outperformed all my peers who did actual troubleshooting in time to resolution and number of resolutions. Sometimes the right answer is just the right answer.
robocat 2y ago
Is there some reason Boomer isn't yet seen as offensive as a racist word? Your comment isn't the worst, but the word is usually used as a placeholder for some bigoted stereotype against someone retired. Disclosure: I'm not a boomer and the word is not used much in New Zealand.
- bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
  I mean, one reason is that no one has ever shouted “boomer” in a hateful voice while lynching someone for looking their way wrong. We could also talk about how it’s usually not just used as an ageist slur but to describe a state of mind - if you ask the kids there’s plenty of old people who aren’t boomers - but saying it’s as offensive as being racist is completely inappropriate. To sort of quote the comedian John Mulaney about the n-word, if one of the words is one you can’t say and have to use “the n-word” to describe it, that’s the bad word.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > no one has ever shouted “boomer” in a hateful voice while lynching someone for looking their way wrong. That "while lynching" part is doing all the work here.
    - flappyeagle 2y ago
      As it should? Mexican or Chinese or Old or Gay are not bad word but they have been and continue to be shouted in hateful ways
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  ...really? https://i.redd.it/kb6r6ajwk3pc1.jpeg https://i.redd.it/kb6r6ajwk3pc1.jpeg
- ethbr1 2y ago
  It's definitely a lazy slur, in the same way that "problematic" is a lazy complaint. Why reach for a vague zeitgeist term that everyone knows, but no one has a precise definition for, instead of taking the time to use a specific word?
bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
I’m sure I’m an outlier, but I did this once for a particular network equipment vendor. It’s a smaller vendor that aims at a low price point and skimps on things like support, but their software had a particular feature that was going to be very important for my employer. To get good at troubleshooting their gear fast - we were going to deploy the equipment for scenarios where mean-time-to-resolution was going to matter a lot - I camped on their forums and helped everyone I came across as practice matters a lot for that. After about year I’d achieved that and stopped, but I maxed out their karma rankings in the process. They didn’t have training material or certification programs and the equipment didn’t break much for us in production so this was the only way I could think of for getting the hours in.
generic92034 2y ago
> It's genuinely strange. People will even do it for banks and phone network companies. Helping other people can be deeply satisfying, even without payment or karma points. Maybe you are already doing it yourself? Otherwise I can only recommend you to try it some time. ;)
autoexec 2y ago
> someone will be willing to dedicate their life to becoming a Finco Bank Guru and running the forum for free. Usually they have a rather "Boomer" energy, so I get the feeling it's retired people who think the parish council/HOA doesn't meet often enough. I started a support forum for a video game once. I wasn't a boomer or retired. I just liked the game, had the ability to help, and the time. I guess some people just like being helpful. Certainly the company who made the game profited off of my free labor but I wasn't looking for money (to their credit they did offer to send me to E3 one year at a time when tickets weren't being offered to the public).

yonatan8070 2y ago

I think it could be possible to feed the LLM with lots of data about your product, potentially even give it source code with instructions not to share it. Then have it act as a highly knowledgeable support rep for customers, and also be able to file detailed issues for the dev team when it identifies that a customer finds a bug. The risk of hallucinations is still there, but it could probably be mitigated by feeding the LLM's output into a fact-checker model. I think the bigger risk is leaking internal data through prompt injections

mooreds 2y ago
We engaged a startup (kapa.ai; they're great) to train an LLM on: * our public facing docs * our public repos * our youtube channel * our forum and spit out answers. It's not right all the time, but it is most of the time and, crucially, it shares not just an answer but a link to the docs that led it to that answer. That makes it easier to fact check the LLM. We've found it very useful for scaling support and making that corpus of knowledge available to folks both outside and inside the company.
autoexec 2y ago
> I think it could be possible to feed the LLM with lots of data about your product, potentially even give it source code with instructions not to share it. I wouldn't trust the LLM to keep your secrets. There are countless examples of people convincing LLMs to say things they shouldn't. On the other hand, I wouldn't trust an LLM to spit out your source code without hallucinating a bunch of fake functions either, so maybe it balances out.

resonious 2y ago

I also know a "support guy" who absolutely kicks ass. Probably a better dev than most of us regular product engineers. Makes me think support is actually way harder than the actual app dev. I also wonder if the incentives are a little bad with this setup. Product devs' crappy code turn into tricky puzzles for our support team. Legend has it, RAD Game Tools used to have just 1-2 devs on each tool, and you'd do the support for your tool. Feels like this would pretty strongly encourage you to make your stuff good. And you'd have everything in your head too. I wish I knew of more similar setups in the web world.

FiatLuxDave 2y ago
I agree about how aligning the incentives can make a huge difference. The first product I was ever a product manager (and SME) for, I assisted the support team with escalations. This meant that every weird new bug or strange situation would hit me the same day. This really shortened the feedback loop on getting stuff fixed. It also made it so that I became aware of quirks or things that weren't working quite right from the customer's perspective, which is gold for a PM. That information I learned doing support escalations helped in the design of version 2 of the product, which is still in production 22 years later. I strongly recommend having the PM be the highest point of escalation in the support chain. It really incentives them to make a quality product.

knodi123 2y ago

> Support forums for free tiers are the absolute worst. With some exceptions, the general pattern seems to be power users hanging out and answering questions on the company's behalf. Who are these people? In my company, we have free support forums, email support for the customers who jump through some hoops (to make it slightly harder than searching the forums), and phone support for select clients. But the "power users" in the forum are just our internal customer support staff operating a handful of sock puppet accounts, and it's the same people who answer phones and email. The forums are a great searchable historical record. The email support is versatile and scalable. And the phone support is a non-scalable value-add that makes our top tier clients feel very special.

mooreds 2y ago
>The forums are a great searchable historical record. Wrote a whole blog post about this: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 Many people have a drive to solve their problems themselves, and if you make content available to google, they'll find it. It's a fantastic way to self-empower your users and customers. We even have an internal slack channel where I'll post questions and answers from the other support channels (email, slack) with a view to making them generic and turning them into forum posts. I don't get to that task often enough, but it is sure fun to do when I have time.
safety1st 2y ago
Very early in my career I interned at a company that rotated all of its developers ONTO THE SUPPORT TEAM for a few days every now and then (if memory serves, for 3 days per year). Yep, if you wrote the product, it meant that sooner or later, you were going to be on the phone with a customer who was having problems with that product. Even the interns were included and I got to be a support tech for two days. The support team was absolutely amazing with excellent documentation on what to say and do and how to close out a case. We were 10x slower than the real support techs at resolving cases so this didn't improve support by all the typical pinhead boss metrics. Customers tended to think it was pretty awesome they were talking to a dev regardless of whether we solved their issue. The real benefit of the experience though was FOR US, and was transformative. I credit a lot of my better instincts regarding product development to having that experience so early in my career. For example nothing makes you more sensitive to performance issues than sitting on the phone just waiting and talking to some random person for two minutes every time anyone tries to load a particular screen - you get back to your "real" job and the first thing you do is go into the bug database and start asking where the hell is that bug and when are we going to fix it. I own my own business now and I have never left, and will never leave, the email support alias, I will read every one of those emails I can until I die (and respond to the best of my ability as well). Later I worked on the team for a web-based product which had feedback fields all over the product. It took everything anybody wrote in those fields and piped them, unfiltered, into a screensaver that was installed on every computer used by the development team. When I was new to the team my manager told me "You just have to accept that you're going to see a lot of profanity on people's screens, that's how it works here." LOL! He wasn't lying. But you'd get exposed to dozens of random bits of feedback about the product over the course of each workweek. Tons of bugs and user pain points were discovered this way. You'd be in the middle of a 1:1 and some expletive-laden complaint about the feature you designed that went live three weeks ago would pop up, well OK, guess we're going to have to deal with that before the meeting is finished! It was wild. I remain of the view that relentlessly and aggressively exposing your entire product team to tons of customer feedback through any avenue you can is the right choice. Got a popular "water cooler" or #random/#general type of Slack channel? Start piping a bit of customer feedback into it. You can email Slack channels! Do it today.