I started off reading this article thinking "well, anyone who has ever maintained an open source project has almost certainly experienced the unending entitlement of users even when working for free". But after reading the article, I'm not surprised your users dislike you more after communicating with them...
> I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email.
> User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized.
> We know about this, but fixing it is a decent amount of work or low-priority because it’s not a big deal or few users see it.
> a human response detailing why I am unable to solve your problem today and am not even going to try is about the worst thing a user can receive!
> Good in theory, sometimes useful, but often the same small, unrepresentative segment with strong thoughts.
> Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request.
Your support policy seems to be more along the lines of "you may e-mail me for an explanation of why I'm not interested in your thoughts" than an actual commitment to support for paid customers. You aren't interested in comments on the payment model, bugs, or feature requests.
> why software lends itself to subscription so well [...] no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email
Especially when you're using it to justify scummy practices, it's no wonder that no matter how kindly and carefully you piss on your users, they know it's not raining.
You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. But does your user experience with other products tell you that you want to subscribe and be nickle-and-dimed for the rest of your life for every last thing? Especially when you're promising to users that while you're still working on the software and that's why they need to pay every month forever, you won't work on the bugs nor features they want? Subscription works "so well" for software because it makes you a lot of money, but it doesn't work well for the users its being forced upon who don't actually want the updates you're working on.
As far as I can tell, your software is not significantly based on ongoing maintenance costs, ergo it does not inherently justify ongoing payments to use. If you let greed stop clouding your eyes, you could adopt the approach that many ethical independent developers use: an option to pay once per major version and keep it for life, with optional subscriptions to try the waters and keep up with the latest and greatest version.
It’s for these reasons LLMs are going to chip away at silly subscriptions. When many projects get 70% of what the user needs and the maintainers aren’t willing or able to address what paying customers want…why bother paying anymore when you’ll soon be able to have just those bespoke features/fixes/integrations built yourself?
It seems to often boil down to the fact that paying customers are paying to solve a problem so they don’t need to deal with it. Whereas developers are more interested in writing code than solving said problems for customers.
One suggestion — when you have an unsatisfying answer for a customer like “I can’t reproduce that”, or “I won’t build that feature”, the customer may not appreciate the amount of effort you have invested in that decision. A 30 minute phone call/video call may communicate more effectively the depth of care you have. Even if you convey the same information, people _love_ talking to the owner/founder, it is a very strong indication that you care about their thoughts.
Making a phone call might be effective at times. However, I don’t think simply making a call will solve the problem.
Once a customer makes a phone call, they’ll feel compelled to call every time. That will be burden on the support staff.
Even with email, simply striving to provide prompt and reliable responses shows that you’re putting the customer first.
Indeed a helpful article for it's detailed insights. Once you think about alternatives, it's clear why everyone else is on the well-known path (such as unhelpful support.)
I've often heard stuff like "telecom provider support sucks" or "IKEA furniture breaks easily."
When you ask people whether they researched support quality before deciding on a provider or whether they considered a $3,000 heavy-wood furniture the boomers had, they immediately sense the accusation in the question: It was their decision to suffer these fates. They then tend to get mad fast.
People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill and to disassemble their furniture in 5 minutes. It's exactly why everyone is optimizing for it.
> People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill
It's rarely 0.03 though in my experience. More like 10 a month or even more between the cheap options with bad support and the better ones. Even if you have one issue every year (sounds high to me), that's over a hundred per support phone call. Makes you think twice about the trade-offs.
Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...
> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
And for some subscription situations, you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you.
There's a 'PhotoSync' app that offers a premium option for either $1/month or $24 for life. Presumably because they looked at the average subscription duration and found it was in the region of 2 years. Modulo the time value of money and per-transaction processing costs.
Personally I much preferred the one-off purchase, even though it's not clear I'll be using the app in 24 months, because it fits a lot better with my (somewhat chaotic) way of managing my money.
> The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
Yes and no.
You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%.
On the other hand, you probably don't want enough telemetry to detect that customer Jim Smith has trouble with WebRTC when joining calls without a microphone while using Firefox and Cloudflare Warp with split tunnels enabled.
None of these categories seem to build any meaningful rapport. Any honest answer I give is deeply unsatisfying to both parties, and we typically have better data from telemetry or crash logs than the emails provide. It’s certainly useful for us to receive them, but there’s not a helpful response I can give.
I don't know how you read the blog post but it seems your interpretation is uncharitable to say the least.
He wrote he already has good enough telemetry, there is just not much he can write in an e-mail to customer, besides generic "we know the issue thank you for the report" that would be useful for the customer and for themselves.
> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
I think the article was very clear that they had already accepted that, and had already decided it was worth never getting their money.
This was also my thought! OP is going to get a lot of arrows for this article, but it's a genuinely great write up that matches a lot of my experience with mass-market products.
It's a great account for people to reflect on. I've immediately sent this article to several early-stage founders who are burning astounding amounts of time on undesirable customers.
A lot of people in the comments are saying he did it for "likes" - that's a pretty harsh reading of the article.
What I think a lot of people are missing is that the difference between supporting corporates who spend up to millions per year on your product and supporting end-users who are literlly counting every cent they spend is a huge gulf in terms of expectations, technical ability, professionalism.... the list goes on. It's a completely different game.
I thought the article was a brilliant summary of why you simply can't help all the users all the time. It's a hard lesson to learn in the world of Tech Support. We all want to be the knight is shining armour solving customer problems, but the skill to be able to say "no" in the right way is not universal.
To those ragging on the author - there are huge numbers of people who, even if you paid them to use your software, they would still complain and swear at you. It's just life. And dealing with the competing interests of customers, time pressures, personal sanity and many more is almost exactly the job description of Tech Support.
Everybody on HN knows better than OP how to run their own business and could absolutely please 100% of customers or potential customers 100% of the time. Apparently.
> When emails overwhelmed me, I asked a thoughtful user who emailed frequently and seemed to know as much about the product as I did if he’d help answer the emails, so I paid him to do that. And he did a great job, especially in terms of directly solving user problems.
Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!
Let's review some common areas.
- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.
- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.
- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.
- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.
- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.
Thank you, @dabluck, for sharing what failed. I think stories of failure are incredibly valuable, and more useful than stories of success, which are often post-hoc rationalizations.
I’m sorry all the airchair geniuses in this thread feel compelled to express how they’re so much smarter than you and would never fail… or at least, never admit it.
When I was in college, I worked at a bakery and actually made some long-term friends by talking to customers that came into the store. I later used this job experience to get an email support job, answering questions that users had about our software plugin. Never made any long-term friends with customers there, even if they emailed us once a month.
The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.
I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.
Porkbun is an interesting case study for this support model. They reply to everything personally, and for me the important thing is not that I'm talking to a human, but that I'm not hearing corporatespeak.
I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.
Sure, people want a personal human answer. But not as much as they want the correct answer.
Also, I think that we want to communicate with a company (Human or AI), and not a person, quite often. As you’re supporting a business transaction, not making friends. There’s a certain anonymity that comes with the business transaction. I wouldn’t ask for a refund from a friend.
Lots of worthwhile observations in the article, but I think the framing is a bit off. It sounds transactional and by the numbers.
I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.
By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.
To the writer of the article: you missed a big opportunity with this article by not having an obvious link straight to your product, Castro, and by not telling us in a few words what it does.
It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:
> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…
> 99% of the time, no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email.
When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freebie) and they do not care about anything else. It’s the digital version of the “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Some times you’d get a little satisfaction from someone who realized there was a person who cared on the receiving end of that email address. Made it feel worthwhile.
Most of them are just doing some transactional game where they think that they can exercise some power over the company if they complain loudly enough.
This also has a lot of cultural differences. Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean. There were casual threats of violence from time to time and 90% of them came from one country, which I’m not going to name but I’ve added it to my mental list of places not to visit. It was weird that it was so consistent.
I built and ran a couple of large games and sites for which I was the sole coder, the daily show runner, and the buck-stops-here responder to support requests for everything from bugs to feature requests to fan mail to "my computer crashed and I got kicked out of the game".
Building rapport is not the reason for doing this. Being liked by everyone is an impossible goal. And yes, there is a class of customers who are power users who think their input should dictate the development roadmap. And yes, there are users who become psychologically reliant on you as their personal Geek Squad. And yes, there are non-technical people who encounter hard to reproduce bugs, who it's worth taking the time to work with if they can help you isolate the problem.
But doing it for "likes" is a terrible idea. I was once put out as a coder to be a public face of a big AAA game, on their dev forum, to interact with fan requests, and I think that was catastrophic both for my own sanity and for the company that chose to field fan mail that way.
With your big fans, you see what you can do about their feature requests. Never promise anything. With people who encounter real bugs or otherwise provide signal, try to turn them into sleuths and get them to beta test your next release. Draw boundaries. Letting your users be your testers is enormously valuable, so respect them and don't stop listening to their feedback. But the overarching goal here is to get value out of the process. Explicitly not to waste your time on being "liked". Because the kind of people who become obsessive over your CS responses are actually the worst customers who don't want to pay for anything anyway, and expect everything to be free.
What I'm saying does not mean to pull back on customer service, at all! It means that the goal is to improve your product, not to suck up to all those categories of customers in the hopes they'll like you more. They will or they won't like your product, and in the end, whether they personally feel that affinity for it is based on their enjoyment of it. If it's based on their sense of importance at being able to order you around, they're not your real customers anyway.
While working for a telecom operator, I tested the idea of having people paying more for dedicated support. We did a market study.
I turned out that customers are not ready to pay for support. Cognitively, paying for a service and paying on top for this service to work well is not consistent.
As a result, people have minimal support and complain. But they don't value good support either.
NB: companies do pay for (insurance) support, especially for swift resolution. But consumers or small businesses don't want it.
The CEO/founder as the L1 support is not the flex it may appear to be.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".
From my experience building rapport only makes sense with your most valuable users in terms of revene. Everything else is noise. Non-paying users are most demanding. Its great to talk to lots of people in mvp or ppmf stage, after that once you nail your icp and start charging, you should make the human support a paid feature.
I’ll tell you even more, in enterprise b2b saas, usually the company paying few thousand per month would have less questions and requests than the one paying few hundreds.
Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems (all too often).
The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.
This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.
Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.
Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 62.8 ms ] thread> I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email.
> User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized.
> We know about this, but fixing it is a decent amount of work or low-priority because it’s not a big deal or few users see it.
> a human response detailing why I am unable to solve your problem today and am not even going to try is about the worst thing a user can receive!
> Good in theory, sometimes useful, but often the same small, unrepresentative segment with strong thoughts.
> Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request.
Your support policy seems to be more along the lines of "you may e-mail me for an explanation of why I'm not interested in your thoughts" than an actual commitment to support for paid customers. You aren't interested in comments on the payment model, bugs, or feature requests.
> why software lends itself to subscription so well [...] no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email
Especially when you're using it to justify scummy practices, it's no wonder that no matter how kindly and carefully you piss on your users, they know it's not raining.
You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. But does your user experience with other products tell you that you want to subscribe and be nickle-and-dimed for the rest of your life for every last thing? Especially when you're promising to users that while you're still working on the software and that's why they need to pay every month forever, you won't work on the bugs nor features they want? Subscription works "so well" for software because it makes you a lot of money, but it doesn't work well for the users its being forced upon who don't actually want the updates you're working on.
As far as I can tell, your software is not significantly based on ongoing maintenance costs, ergo it does not inherently justify ongoing payments to use. If you let greed stop clouding your eyes, you could adopt the approach that many ethical independent developers use: an option to pay once per major version and keep it for life, with optional subscriptions to try the waters and keep up with the latest and greatest version.
It seems to often boil down to the fact that paying customers are paying to solve a problem so they don’t need to deal with it. Whereas developers are more interested in writing code than solving said problems for customers.
I've often heard stuff like "telecom provider support sucks" or "IKEA furniture breaks easily."
When you ask people whether they researched support quality before deciding on a provider or whether they considered a $3,000 heavy-wood furniture the boomers had, they immediately sense the accusation in the question: It was their decision to suffer these fates. They then tend to get mad fast.
People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill and to disassemble their furniture in 5 minutes. It's exactly why everyone is optimizing for it.
It's rarely 0.03 though in my experience. More like 10 a month or even more between the cheap options with bad support and the better ones. Even if you have one issue every year (sounds high to me), that's over a hundred per support phone call. Makes you think twice about the trade-offs.
Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...
Which is exactly why HN's anti-telemetry stance is so unjustified.
And for some subscription situations, you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you.
There's a 'PhotoSync' app that offers a premium option for either $1/month or $24 for life. Presumably because they looked at the average subscription duration and found it was in the region of 2 years. Modulo the time value of money and per-transaction processing costs.
Personally I much preferred the one-off purchase, even though it's not clear I'll be using the app in 24 months, because it fits a lot better with my (somewhat chaotic) way of managing my money.
Yes and no.
You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%.
On the other hand, you probably don't want enough telemetry to detect that customer Jim Smith has trouble with WebRTC when joining calls without a microphone while using Firefox and Cloudflare Warp with split tunnels enabled.
I don't know how you read the blog post but it seems your interpretation is uncharitable to say the least.
He wrote he already has good enough telemetry, there is just not much he can write in an e-mail to customer, besides generic "we know the issue thank you for the report" that would be useful for the customer and for themselves.
tell me you've never run anything without telling me you've never run anything...
I think the article was very clear that they had already accepted that, and had already decided it was worth never getting their money.
It’s interesting that you did the experiment, and I appreciate you sharing your results. It all seems reasonable, even if a bit depressing.
It's a great account for people to reflect on. I've immediately sent this article to several early-stage founders who are burning astounding amounts of time on undesirable customers.
What I think a lot of people are missing is that the difference between supporting corporates who spend up to millions per year on your product and supporting end-users who are literlly counting every cent they spend is a huge gulf in terms of expectations, technical ability, professionalism.... the list goes on. It's a completely different game.
I thought the article was a brilliant summary of why you simply can't help all the users all the time. It's a hard lesson to learn in the world of Tech Support. We all want to be the knight is shining armour solving customer problems, but the skill to be able to say "no" in the right way is not universal.
To those ragging on the author - there are huge numbers of people who, even if you paid them to use your software, they would still complain and swear at you. It's just life. And dealing with the competing interests of customers, time pressures, personal sanity and many more is almost exactly the job description of Tech Support.
Idealism doesn't survive contact with reality.
Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!
Let's review some common areas.
- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.
- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.
- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.
- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.
- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.
I’m sorry all the airchair geniuses in this thread feel compelled to express how they’re so much smarter than you and would never fail… or at least, never admit it.
The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.
I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.
I think you meant "I can think of exactly one customer in two years who was NOT surprised that software costs money"?
I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.
Also, I think that we want to communicate with a company (Human or AI), and not a person, quite often. As you’re supporting a business transaction, not making friends. There’s a certain anonymity that comes with the business transaction. I wouldn’t ask for a refund from a friend.
> We have heard this before, but we cannot see it or replicate it. The user gets to do work for us and/or get no resolution
Well, if you're not willing to resolve individual customer's problem then don't expect to build goodwill with just prompt reply on support!
I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.
By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.
It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:
> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…
This is a podcast app. It's in no way essential, how did you use to explain this to your customers ?
When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freebie) and they do not care about anything else. It’s the digital version of the “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Some times you’d get a little satisfaction from someone who realized there was a person who cared on the receiving end of that email address. Made it feel worthwhile.
Most of them are just doing some transactional game where they think that they can exercise some power over the company if they complain loudly enough.
This also has a lot of cultural differences. Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean. There were casual threats of violence from time to time and 90% of them came from one country, which I’m not going to name but I’ve added it to my mental list of places not to visit. It was weird that it was so consistent.
Every line item there has a solution. Even if it is just 4 different email addresses.
Building rapport is not the reason for doing this. Being liked by everyone is an impossible goal. And yes, there is a class of customers who are power users who think their input should dictate the development roadmap. And yes, there are users who become psychologically reliant on you as their personal Geek Squad. And yes, there are non-technical people who encounter hard to reproduce bugs, who it's worth taking the time to work with if they can help you isolate the problem.
But doing it for "likes" is a terrible idea. I was once put out as a coder to be a public face of a big AAA game, on their dev forum, to interact with fan requests, and I think that was catastrophic both for my own sanity and for the company that chose to field fan mail that way.
With your big fans, you see what you can do about their feature requests. Never promise anything. With people who encounter real bugs or otherwise provide signal, try to turn them into sleuths and get them to beta test your next release. Draw boundaries. Letting your users be your testers is enormously valuable, so respect them and don't stop listening to their feedback. But the overarching goal here is to get value out of the process. Explicitly not to waste your time on being "liked". Because the kind of people who become obsessive over your CS responses are actually the worst customers who don't want to pay for anything anyway, and expect everything to be free.
What I'm saying does not mean to pull back on customer service, at all! It means that the goal is to improve your product, not to suck up to all those categories of customers in the hopes they'll like you more. They will or they won't like your product, and in the end, whether they personally feel that affinity for it is based on their enjoyment of it. If it's based on their sense of importance at being able to order you around, they're not your real customers anyway.
I turned out that customers are not ready to pay for support. Cognitively, paying for a service and paying on top for this service to work well is not consistent.
As a result, people have minimal support and complain. But they don't value good support either.
NB: companies do pay for (insurance) support, especially for swift resolution. But consumers or small businesses don't want it.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".
I’ll tell you even more, in enterprise b2b saas, usually the company paying few thousand per month would have less questions and requests than the one paying few hundreds.
The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.
This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.
Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.
Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.