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If you're a small enough startup to have all of your support handled by one person part-time, I would hardly call it at scale. They made ticketing systems for

by manacit 13y ago

If you're a small enough startup to have all of your support handled by one person part-time, I would hardly call it at scale. They made ticketing systems for this purpose, so you don't need to remember to switch drip e-mails and juggle things, just log in and start helping. Ultimately, it's how well the user is helped that matters.

davidw 13y ago
Yes, I would consider "at scale" to be when you are hiring people who don't do much else other than respond to support requests.
ianstormtaylor 13y ago
Very true, I should leave the round-robin'ing out of the "at scale" pitch. But honestly, I think a single person being the load balancer for support scales pretty darn far into the future. Seeing as it takes about one hour of my day right now, it can easily scale to 8x our current growth. (And that's not counting fixing all of the obvious support issues, so we can grow past 8x.) If you have a dedicated support load balancer, you don't need to switch up drip emails. Heck, I bet Customer.io and friends even get the switch emails part down to a single button at some point anyways. The problem with ticketing systems is, well, they suck. Your customers don't want to get "tickets", they just want someone to solve their problem. And when you're doing it in a really personal way they'll give you tons more feedback, and they'll share your product with more people. Ticketing systems are especially despised when you're building developer-focused products.
- manacit 13y ago
  Ticketing systems don't need to suck - you could set one up to work nearly identically (maybe even better!) to the system they have here. The workflow is pretty simple * Customer e-mails the support@ e-mail (or even your personal support e-mail), it's thrown in the ticketing system. * You read the ticket * You reply to the ticket, it's sent from support@ or your support e-mail There's no reason you need to have an obnoxious ticket generation e-mail, especially if you can get to it in time with a personal reply (generally because, at this stage, you don't have too many tickets to process individually).

by manacit 13y ago

davidw 13y ago

Yes, I would consider "at scale" to be when you are hiring people who don't do much else other than respond to support requests.

ianstormtaylor 13y ago

Very true, I should leave the round-robin'ing out of the "at scale" pitch. But honestly, I think a single person being the load balancer for support scales pretty darn far into the future. Seeing as it takes about one hour of my day right now, it can easily scale to 8x our current growth. (And that's not counting fixing all of the obvious support issues, so we can grow past 8x.) If you have a dedicated support load balancer, you don't need to switch up drip emails. Heck, I bet Customer.io and friends even get the switch emails part down to a single button at some point anyways. The problem with ticketing systems is, well, they suck. Your customers don't want to get "tickets", they just want someone to solve their problem. And when you're doing it in a really personal way they'll give you tons more feedback, and they'll share your product with more people. Ticketing systems are especially despised when you're building developer-focused products.

manacit 13y ago
Ticketing systems don't need to suck - you could set one up to work nearly identically (maybe even better!) to the system they have here. The workflow is pretty simple * Customer e-mails the support@ e-mail (or even your personal support e-mail), it's thrown in the ticketing system. * You read the ticket * You reply to the ticket, it's sent from support@ or your support e-mail There's no reason you need to have an obnoxious ticket generation e-mail, especially if you can get to it in time with a personal reply (generally because, at this stage, you don't have too many tickets to process individually).