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Personally I’d never claim to offer extraordinary support - the expense is insane. There are cheaper ways to brand - with much smaller downsides. My experienc

by nmcfarl 14y ago

Personally I’d never claim to offer extraordinary support - the expense is insane. There are cheaper ways to brand - with much smaller downsides. My experience is that people who are building things and doing things in a company are actually not competent to offer support. There are real skills - mainly people skills, that CSRs have that you didn’t hire the builders for. Additional a giant percent of good support is speedy responses, and long conversations. Both things that require lots of man hours. So you need a ton of CSRs. Which is expensive in itself. But then - customers have an insane way of finding critical bugs, and making completely reasonable requests that had never occurred to you. Things that require builder and makers of your product to be fully accessible to your CSRs. So you need to staff for that as well. And that gets you to good. How you move from that to extraordinary is some thing I don’t know how to do (And I’ve read a lot of what Tony Hsieh has to say), but I do know it’s going to be extraordinarily expensive.

codegeek 14y ago
"There are real skills - mainly people skills," This. If only more companies understood that.
praptak 14y ago
> Things that require builder and makers of your product to be fully accessible to your CSRs. So you need to staff for that as well. From the perspective of said builder/maker I can say this can grow into a huge problem if not handled well. Once your product/service gets deployed in multiple timezones, your support turns into 24/7, even if not advertised as such. Suddenly the developers whose jobs used to be nice cosy nine to five start getting called at ungodly hours to offer some insight into customer problems. Nobody likes that, especially not without getting paid.
- nmcfarl 14y ago
  I know - I’ve been there. The obvious starting place is to hire people who know this isn’t 9-5 gig, (so nothing is sudden). But of course that drives up wages a bit :) Boy is this an expensive problem to solve.
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    24/7 support of complex infrastructure? That's always going to be expensive :)
fmavituna 14y ago
> Personally I’d never claim to offer extraordinary support - the expense is insane. There are cheaper ways to brand - with much smaller downsides. Depends on what you do and how much you charge for your services. If your product is twitter, yes support is expensive. If your product is a CRM with $1K annual price tag support is cheap (providing your application has a decent UX and you fix identified, repeating bugs). Thanks to all big enterprises; banks, telecoms, paypal etc. people's expectation from "extraordinary support" is a decent answer within 24 hours, "24 HOURS". That's it. That's nothing, easy to provide and people will praise your name for doing it. So actually for any kind of B2B business with good margin "Support" is cheap and ROI is insanely good.
wpietri 14y ago
The reason I'd still be tempted to offer it is to use that painful expense to force the company to be better in other ways. Bad support doesn't save money overall; it just shifts the costs from the vendor to the customer. So if the vendor is facing the true costs of awkward, confusing products, I think they'd be more likely to keep those costs as low as possible by continuously improving things.
rachelbythebay 14y ago
Not all support folks with people skills are technically lacking. Likewise, not all people with technical skills are bad with people. You're probably used to seeing folks who are one way or the other, but there is a middle ground. These are the people who can keep your globally distributed sharded multi-master database at 100% availability for clients. They can also sit down with one of the project managers from one of those client teams to help that person better understand exactly how queries are routed and what sort of load balancing is going on. That project manager will then be more effective in requesting resources for their side of things. I won't claim these people are common. But they do exist.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  Ok, please for god sakes don't think I'm here to toot my own horn, but I'm this person you described. I just want to contribute to the discussion. It's hard sometimes; sometimes its killing you inside that the other person "just doesn't get it". But that's ok! That is why you're employed; to not only develop and operate this complex system, but also to teach it to not only others in your org but also the customers/clients who use it. "Why can't both databases work together across the country? Can't they be a team?" begin 30 minute conversation about data consistency, master/master configurations, etc Skills required: Technical ability, patience, adaptability to how others learn and process information.

by nmcfarl 14y ago

codegeek 14y ago

"There are real skills - mainly people skills," This. If only more companies understood that.

praptak 14y ago

> Things that require builder and makers of your product to be fully accessible to your CSRs. So you need to staff for that as well. From the perspective of said builder/maker I can say this can grow into a huge problem if not handled well. Once your product/service gets deployed in multiple timezones, your support turns into 24/7, even if not advertised as such. Suddenly the developers whose jobs used to be nice cosy nine to five start getting called at ungodly hours to offer some insight into customer problems. Nobody likes that, especially not without getting paid.

nmcfarl 14y ago
I know - I’ve been there. The obvious starting place is to hire people who know this isn’t 9-5 gig, (so nothing is sudden). But of course that drives up wages a bit :) Boy is this an expensive problem to solve.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  24/7 support of complex infrastructure? That's always going to be expensive :)

fmavituna 14y ago

> Personally I’d never claim to offer extraordinary support - the expense is insane. There are cheaper ways to brand - with much smaller downsides. Depends on what you do and how much you charge for your services. If your product is twitter, yes support is expensive. If your product is a CRM with $1K annual price tag support is cheap (providing your application has a decent UX and you fix identified, repeating bugs). Thanks to all big enterprises; banks, telecoms, paypal etc. people's expectation from "extraordinary support" is a decent answer within 24 hours, "24 HOURS". That's it. That's nothing, easy to provide and people will praise your name for doing it. So actually for any kind of B2B business with good margin "Support" is cheap and ROI is insanely good.

wpietri 14y ago

The reason I'd still be tempted to offer it is to use that painful expense to force the company to be better in other ways. Bad support doesn't save money overall; it just shifts the costs from the vendor to the customer. So if the vendor is facing the true costs of awkward, confusing products, I think they'd be more likely to keep those costs as low as possible by continuously improving things.

rachelbythebay 14y ago

Not all support folks with people skills are technically lacking. Likewise, not all people with technical skills are bad with people. You're probably used to seeing folks who are one way or the other, but there is a middle ground. These are the people who can keep your globally distributed sharded multi-master database at 100% availability for clients. They can also sit down with one of the project managers from one of those client teams to help that person better understand exactly how queries are routed and what sort of load balancing is going on. That project manager will then be more effective in requesting resources for their side of things. I won't claim these people are common. But they do exist.

toomuchtodo 14y ago
Ok, please for god sakes don't think I'm here to toot my own horn, but I'm this person you described. I just want to contribute to the discussion. It's hard sometimes; sometimes its killing you inside that the other person "just doesn't get it". But that's ok! That is why you're employed; to not only develop and operate this complex system, but also to teach it to not only others in your org but also the customers/clients who use it. "Why can't both databases work together across the country? Can't they be a team?" begin 30 minute conversation about data consistency, master/master configurations, etc Skills required: Technical ability, patience, adaptability to how others learn and process information.