How much free support is to much?

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Permalink Reply by Corey Reid on October 7, 2008 at 4:09pm

FreshBooks offers tons of free support -- both to paying and trialing customers. Email, forums and phone (we don't have online chat just yet). To be honest, I think it's a huge part of our sales cycle -- trialing users will often call just to see who's on the other end of the phone. We publish our phone number in big numbers on every page of our website, and folks who are considering paying often call and establish that personal relationship. As well, we make sure people are jumping on the forum posts and making sure voices get heard.

We manage the load by rotating support roles amongst us -- not everyone is asked to leap on the phone every day but we make sure there's a number of folks available. That lets people block off days just for getting their other work done without having to worry about interruptions.

As we've grown we've begun establishing a dedicated support team but we still rotate support responsibility around the company.

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Permalink Reply by PCSpectra on October 7, 2008 at 10:08pm

The last company I worked did it right.

They offered phone support for sales calls only. Technical support was made available through a private forum/ticket tracker and/or email.

Support is a PITA and in small companies those resources quickly become strained. Offering phone support would only negatively affect everyone else.

With ticketed support systems I can tackle the easy problems first and then focus on the more difficult, instead of having a difficult question hold me up for however long it takes for the client to explain the issue and me to eventually resovle it.

Not only that but with ticket systems, you have build a knowledgabse. Unless you record the problem as you speak to your client, this isn't as effective as a troubleshooting tool.

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Permalink Reply by Ken Hughes on October 8, 2008 at 8:22am

IMO - you MUST have EFFECTIVE support to get anywhere.

If effective support for you is an online knowledgebase that holds ALL the answers then fine, if it phone / email support direct to the guy writing the software then that what you gotta do.

As soon as you demonstrate that you don't care (which is what your saying when you offer no support for customers - "you're my customer but I don't care if you cannot get it working, I'm not going to spend my precious time helping you") people will start to walk away....
You have to live "my customers time is more important (to them) than mine is (to them)", of course this can be a killer (time wise) if you have a lot of support - but this is GOOD, it is the best encouragement to get the product RIGHT (working in all environments, intuitive and easy to install, configure and use) - this aspect is always time well spent - if you cannot get it working for a guy in NYC who just installed it on his new WinXP laptop then how are you going to fare when you sell it to the IT department of GM who are trying to roll it out to 150K machines globally...

I would always advise people to make their support REMARKABLE (so good that customers remark on it - "Seth Godin"). Go the extra mile for them, don't make it painful, never ever ask for logs files, then try this, then try that, then send me some more log files... and ALWAYS always give a full and detailed explaination when you've resolved it (preferably publically so that it is captured in that big knowledgebase that is Google)


Of course all this depends on what your product is...

.. KJ

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Permalink Reply by Keith Maurino on October 8, 2008 at 1:11pm

PCSpectra, thank you for the response. Just a question for you...You said, "They offered phone support for sales calls only." How was this accomplished? How did you deal with customers who called that number looking for technical support? Were they turned away and how was this explained to the caller? Thanks.

PCSpectra said:

The last company I worked did it right.

They offered phone support for sales calls only. Technical support was made available through a private forum/ticket tracker and/or email.

Support is a PITA and in small companies those resources quickly become strained. Offering phone support would only negatively affect everyone else.

With ticketed support systems I can tackle the easy problems first and then focus on the more difficult, instead of having a difficult question hold me up for however long it takes for the client to explain the issue and me to eventually resovle it.

Not only that but with ticket systems, you have build a knowledgabse. Unless you record the problem as you speak to your client, this isn't as effective as a troubleshooting tool.

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Permalink Reply by Corey Reid on October 8, 2008 at 1:31pm

Ken Hughes said:

I would always advise people to make their support REMARKABLE (so good that customers remark on it - "Seth Godin").

Spot. On. Every time a customer (or a potential customer) calls you, that's the best chance you'll ever have to turn them into a dedicated fan. You'll never be closer to them, you'll never have a better opportunity to blow them away.

Scaling that up is a challenge, for sure, but if your startup's problem is that you've got customers calling you night and day, well, there are worse problems to have.

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Permalink Reply by Anna-Jayne Metcalfe on October 8, 2008 at 4:44pm

We took a decision at the outset to make our support free, and unlimited by artificial time constraints. We've had no reason to regret that decision, and our product is all the better for the extra feedback we've gathered as a result.

Although it can be a bit of a pain when the same person contacts you several times a day, in our experience you can get a very good insight into where your users pain points and product aspirations lie this way. In our case the users who have been the most demanding initially have gone on to become our biggest advocates.

We tend to do support by email (it's more practical when you're dealing with international customers) but we're not averse to phone or IM if appropriate.

One final thing I'd suggest is that although ticketted systems are convenient from the vendor perspective, they can appear quite impersonal to the user. Personally (putting my user hat on), I'd rather have a direct email address as an alternative when I'm dealing with a vendor - preferably accessible via a link within the software itself.

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Permalink Reply by Andrew on October 15, 2008 at 3:05am

At http://comfypage.com we offer free email support. We don't officially do phone support but most of our users have phone numbers they can call to directly reach their favourite person when they need help. Although it can be a drain on your time we've found that the more personal contact someone has the more likely they are to stick around longterm.

You'd think having thousands of people in possession of my personal mobile phone number would be a problem but its really not. At least no so far. We always look at support requests and try to change the product to prevent that request coming up again. That means repeat support requests for the same issue are rare. When people do need help we've built sending a message to support right into the software itself. That means accessing email support is trivially easy. For those who do pick up the phone and call someone's personal phone they're generally careful to take into account any timezone difference.

I doubt this informal system will scale from our current thousands of users to millions of users but for now it works rather well. Our user's know we're accessible and we get invaluable information on how theyre actually using our software.

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Permalink Reply by Grant Maw on October 15, 2008 at 7:57am

We write bespoke asp.net applications for customers and do not have a specific product, so maybe we are in a slightly different boat to most, but here's what we do.

We unit test as much of our code as possible and have an automated build process as a means by which to help with quality control. During development, the customer is involved from day one in terms of beta testing and the customer always has sign off prior to a new deployment being released. All this means that by the time we are ready for go-live, the code should be of reasonably high quality and should satisfy requirements very well.

Once we have completed work and done the "go live" release, we offer free support for 90 days, after which we charge an hourly rate for all support. We have an online "customer portal" for our customers to log jobs and feature requests for us and which keeps a history of all activity on a particular job, plus also offer phone, IM and email support for urgent cases. We have found that this works well for our customers - they get the security of knowing that we are there 24/7 during the early stages of their application's life and we haven't committed ourselves forever to doing free support.

We are fairly small (5 developers) and thus everybody, including myself as the business owner, has to help out for support. This is not a bad thing - it keeps developers in front of the customers and makes sure that they are thinking about the customer's needs rather than becoming cocooned into a development-only mindset.

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