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> 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

> 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.
- stefanfisk 2y ago
  I love the screensaver idea!

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.

stefanfisk 2y ago
I love the screensaver idea!