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Ask HN: How does your startup handle customer support?

3 points by phpwn ↗ HN
The startup I'm part of has seen significant user growth over the past year. As we get more and more users on the platform, though, our time spent doing customer support increases.

Our current system is to have everyone, from the CEO to developers, do some customer support tickets. We're reaching a point where doing customer support is taking away too much time from our "normal" jobs.

How did you handle customer support in the early stages? Was outsourcing necessary, or was hiring a dedicated customer support employee or employees the way to go?

2 comments

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cauterized
How many total hours per week is your team spending on customer support? Is it 20 or more? Hire a dedicated support person or agency, even if they're part time.

Do you still want everyone else to have skin in the support game? Figure out how much time per week it's reasonable for each other member of the team to spend. Have them plan to spend 15 min per day on followup emails. Then schedule dedicated hours for each person to be on call for support so that they don't have to worry about being interrupted all the time but you still have coverage.

[dead] uwed
Really depends how many hours a week you spend on customer support. If it's enough (20+ hours/week) then a part-time dedicated customer support rep makes sense. Also depends on the kind of queries you receive. In a previous very tech-heavy startup 95% of customer service had to be run through the dev team as the queries were way too techy for the sales guys.