I offer phone support for a niche accounting app (https://quailhq.com), and everything in this article rings 112% true to me -- but especially this:
> ...all sorts of people call you, and I’ve really learned a lot by talking with users directly on the phone.
Sometimes users call me because they want to report a bug, or they've forgotten their email address. Sometimes they want business advice (!), or they have a niche feature they want to request.
> This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone who calls is civil and polite.
Hahahaha. Haha. Hah. Ahem. The biggest surprise to me when I started offering support (first email, and then later by phone) is how _aggressive_ people can be. My app has two classes of users -- one free, one paid -- and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request, etc.
All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together.
It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...
> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...
My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have fairly useless scripts they have to run through. You're dealing with a human (sometimes), but it's about the equivalent of dealing with a robot. It's hard to remember to have empathy when whatever you say is met with a standard, often nonsensical readout of the next thing in their script. So I think we've trained people to expect a horrible first tier experience.
That said, I've done a lot of B2B enterprise software support and have found exactly the same thing as you. Initial emails or calls will come in and the tone is aggressive and impatient. I think this stems from the assumption that the response will be useless (until maybe it gets escalated 3 times to someone actually useful). But when you respond as a capable human who legitimately is trying to help them out (and not just pass them on to someone else), suddenly the tone totally changes and you have wonderful interactions. People are incredibly appreciative. Nobody is used to a support person actually solving their problem. Hell, they're not even used to someone replying to them at all most of the time. The bar is on the floor. So when you exceed that bar and actually help someone quickly and efficiently, they turn into super fans.
> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America
Everyone can fill in their pet theory here, but mine is that so much of being American these days is disempowering. Corporations have so much power that not only do they not care about us, but we can't even avoid using them.
Get sick? Good luck fighting your giant health insurance provider or hospital conglomeration.
Looking for an entry-level job? Navigate a Kafka-esque application system only to (if you're lucky) work for a miserable low-level manager who also has no power and transfers that anger onto you.
Want to spend time with friends? Their preferred communication medium is now one of a couple of huge social media companies with horrific privacy policies and a history of emotionally damaging its users.
Want to go to a show? Have fun buying overpriced tickets from one of the two or three ticket monopolies and then pay an exhorbitant, insulting "convenience" fee.
So everyday, in many of our basic daily rituals, we are reminded of how little agency we have in our own lives and how much we both depend on and are subject to the whims of billionaires (who, meanwhile, are busy destroying the Earth).
> and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help
I've found the same thing from people. But not in support, just in dealing with them.
I move a lot, and inevitably end up giving a lot of things away. What I've found is that when I post offers for things for free, it attracted the absolute worst of people. People who would claim it and never show up, or claim it and tell me they could come get it in two weeks. And -tons- of people who say they'll take it and ask when I can deliver it. Then get offended when I tell them I'm not delivering it.
I still remember vividly a dresser I was offering for free. A person said they'll take it, and asked when I could bring it over. When I told them no, they replied in all caps something along the lines of 'I HAVE A COROLLA HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO FIT IT IN THERE', like I was the dumb one.
So now I just list everything for a pretty low price, then just tell them it's free when they arrive. It cut down on the amount of riffraff by about 90%.
"It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know..."
The US is a low trust society. You can feel it in all aspects of life. Companies are very controlling and feel the need to constantly monitor their employees, people assume the worst from strangers and are afraid to go to places they don't know.
I myself am getting more and more worried when I talk to a doctor because I have seen it now several times how people got screwed over by doctors, hospitals and health insurance.
Here's an unfortunate lesson learned from a company that was in the untenable position of providing phone/tech support for debt collection software: the only way to get the people calling in to be less hostile was to include a clause in the contract that stipulated their license could be revoked if they repeatedly abused the support engineers.
While working as L2/L3 support for a enterprise product, i notice that people were not that mean/angry as they sound in the email (Maybe it was a wrong interpretation of mine) when you actually call them. Even though calling customer sounds like lot of time waste but many issues were resolved quickly over the phone rather than email/ticketing system. I really enjoyed talking with various customers and understand their use case and usually used to go beyond and above to help them.
> "the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request"
I wonder if part of the issue is that paid users feel more confident in getting their concerns taken seriously, while free users feel (perhaps unconsciously) like they have to exaggerate the problem and shout to be heard? I can see that as a very natural learned behavior for modern users.
My theory for that is that companies in the US have a culture of prioritizing support tickets by a product of “outrageousness” and reach.
If you sound like your next step is to sue the company, they solve your issue before the ones that sounded understanding and forgiving. Same with reach, if your complaint reach HN front over or get traction on Twitter, it is solved first than those that just sent an email.
> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...
I would probably compare it moreso to just the abysmal state of quality of support, even for expensive or important services. Call your health insurance provider and try to get something changed/fixed in a reasonable fashion and you'll be met with red tape/nonsense/phone tag. I am a person that usually starts out angry on any customer support line, only because of the shenanigans it takes to get someone on the phone in the first place.
> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...
I think part of the direct issue with support is that people are very used to dealing with extremely poor support from a wide range of large companies and are primed for having their issues dismissed or being forced through largely irrelevant support scripts.
That's why as soon as they realize that isn't what is happening, their attitude suddenly gets a lot better.
Part of the problem is that many American companies deliberately give you the run around to stop you from cancelling service. Spaces, a Regus company, is the worst. You have to submit your issues to accounting in TX but they won't talk to you. You talk to Support which can't actually help you. They threatened to call the Police when I complained in person. It took months but I caught them in a lie and threatened charges. A full refund immediately.
>and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help.
I've seen that whilst contracting and with software sales. I've come to the conclusion the bottom 10% of any market is a cesspit and I don't want any part of that either as a buyer or seller.
I have a suspicion the top end is the same although I've had little experience of that.
It's definitely not limited to the U.S. though. I recently got this email from a new irate user of my side project, trying to use an international card that Square wouldn't accept:
> HELP URGENT
> TRYING TO ADD A CREDIT CARD BUT YOUR STUPID WEBSITE ARENT ACCEPTING MY CREDIT CARD.
They still had 13 days to enter a credit card, so this wasn't exactly "urgent". I think it's that people want to convey how frustrated they are so that you'll prioritize the issue, and it comes across as aggression. What I've learned from being on the other end is that this approach sometimes backfires. I feel a strong urge to put off responding to such rants because it's draining to deal with these customers, while customers who respond positively to help or advice make a sole proprietor want to help them more.
> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...
It's the same in Germany.
> Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together.
Yep, indeed. Especially once they realize it's the developer they are writing with, not a support agent. I always have mixed feeling about it, because I don't deserve to be better treated than the frontline workers of our company.
I would abstract this topic to: talking to your users is important, and phone is a high-bandwidth medium.
In particular, it seems like this developer recognized that phone connects them to their less technically savvy users, who - by being most different from the dev himself - can give him the most valuable outside perspective. Depending on your market, if you're trying to sell into non-techies this could provide hugely valuable insights.
In general, the closer you are to the development side of things, the more you have a very specific (and I guess "correct") model of how your system works. By default, all of your documentation/support forms/etc implicitly reflect this model. But if your users model the thing in their brain differently, then your help/form aren't the most helpful in educating them or eliciting their true feedback/problem.
One final thing - I have seen 'magic' where developers who chafed at tickets coming in from support staff (withdrawn, user error) would all of a sudden get excited about rebuilding something when the user themselves or even the support person, just explained in a higher-bandwidth way why the problem is real. It's easy to read a ticket and go "oh that's dumb, they should just do X" but on the phone/in person you go more into like "oh, this is a really reasonable/nice/smart person who's trying to use my system to do something important, and it's not letting them."
When I ran my own business I had a product in the thousands of dollars price range. Phone support for this product would almost always be an interesting conversation where I learned a lot about customer needs.
I also had a $25 PDF tool with a trial version. For that product a lot of the callers had no clue what the product actually did or tried to get a $5 discount or some other nonsense. I quickly stopped taking calls for that product because it was so unpleasant.
My lesson was to offer phone support only for high price, low volume items. Phone support for cheap things attracts a lot of unpleasant people.
Some years ago I got a librarian (MLIS) degree, and one of the things I remember from the training was that when a patron comes to you with a "reference" question (you know, the kind of thing that doesn't happen anymore, before there was google when they'd ask a librarian what they now ask google)... what they initially tell you they are looking for (or at least what you initially hear/think they are telling you), is usually not actually what they want.
The process is a give-and-take "reference interview" where you collaboratively get to the bottom of what they are actually looking for, not just a simple process where they explain what they need and you find it.
This has been very useful and applicable to any kind of tech support, and this account reminded me of it.
(Also, btw, applicable to any kind of stakeholder expressing requirements/specs too...)
I find it hard to correctly state what I'm looking for when asking for help. Stackoverflow is the main example that comes to mind but it can be any place.
How were you taught to get to the bottom? When saying what it's for, I often feel like I give way too much irrelevant backstory that nobody cares about. Or without it, I risk missing out on a better solution. Also, if one mentions the goal, people will often go "why don't you [redesign the whole thing and] use X" instead of answering the question, but perhaps that's out of the scope of what the asker can do for a better answer and this is more something answerers should avoid doing.
In undergrad and even in HS I learned from teachers or advisors that using librarians like this is how its done, well into the google era. Walk in and utter little more than "Ancient Greece" and walk out with four relevant books for your report and a fifth on the way from another branch.
Under different circumstances I noticed something quite similar, but there was a quirk... if they had to make a title of a few words for the request, the title often reflected the true underlying request better than the dissembling longer freeform underneath.
For the first few years of my product, I was in the same situation of being the solo-developer offering phone support. There were a few huge benefits, some mentioned in the article and a few downsides. Some highlights:
When talking a user through a set of actions, hearing them stumble or fail to understand the UI is quite the humbling experience. You literally pay for it with your time as you listen to them struggle.
Feature requests over the phone allowed the user to fully explain the need and helped me understand why that feature was important. The majority of the time a compromise could be struck between us where I could fulfill the feature request meeting my technical and time requirements while solving the problem for them. You can’t do that with emailed forms.
A major downside is I would often get sidetracked to solve trivial problems for frequent callers who I had developed a working relationship with from frequent calls. The squeaky wheel gets the oil problem. While some of these enhancements probably added great value to the product, it was more difficult to pull off the big projects. Maintenance in particular suffered.
In the times of a major problem like an outage or error, I did feel some frustration in those rare times. It was critical to answer the barrage of phone calls, to let them know we were aware and working on the situation. But as the only one who could fix a situation, being stuck on the phone in a repetitive loop delayed things. I just wanted to fix the issue, where each caller wanted to explain it.
It was a valuable experience for me, but I am generally happier to no longer have a phone on my desk.
This is an intriguing idea. I have heard before the recommendation to add a support phone number to your website, but always wrote it off as either out of date or something that only applies to large companies. The feedback from talking to customers is really valuable to solo developers.
Part of why I run my own business is for the flexibility, and guaranteed 9-5 phone support would really threaten that. I wonder if there is a way to offer this on a best-effort basis without coming across as flaky? Perhaps putting the number only on the support page (like OP), but also only having the number there when you're online?
I ran as a mostly solo developer for several years. I steered customers to make initial support requests via email, then scheduled calls wherever it was warranted (or sometimes just called them back if I had time and it would be more efficient). My business phone number was on my website and it went to an answering machine when I was unavailable or didn't want to take the call.
Generally my customers didn't care what time of day I responded, so much as they appreciated how sincere I was about solving their problem in short order. Being so intimately knowledgeable about the product and able to effect relatively quick codechanges where warranted empowered that, and frankly the quality of support I provided ran circles around most of their other vendors where it took multiple tickets / interactions and navigating endless bureaucracy to reach someone actually able to help.
I know some people with small businesses who use quality 'virtual assistant' services to answer calls when they can't.
Obviously, they're not "first line support" solving people's problems - instead, they are "the CEO's personal assistant" scheduling a call back.
After all, if you're an accountant or an architect or a lawyer or a dentist, there's no embarrassment in running a business that's just you and a secretary.
If you have a fine outgoing voicemail message which explains this, and call them back during your "support hours", I think they're still going to love you.
I've never seen a company try this, but I wonder if an SMS/text support number could work. This would help with the 'flakiness', i.e., you don't have to respond immediately and you can help multiple people at once. No more waiting on hold at least.
We use Calendly to let users book appointments for calls. They submit their number and we call them at whatever time they choose within our availability hours.
If you know when you'll be available in advance maybe a similar setup could work for you.
If you can cultivate your customer base to only sell this service to folks who want to pay for it. On a timed basis, generally. All the upside without the headache of dealing with angry people you don't have a business relationship with.
Folks who want to purchase a service are generally grateful of getting whatever they're paying for. They realize that's not always the case.
>but also only having the number there when you're online?
If you make that clear, and explain why, I think it would be a good idea. If nothing else, it might even encourage me to call with ideas if I knew you were physically going to answer the phone.
The app was made for our customer's partners. Lots of time was spent on layout and how this app would be used (they assumed everyone was a power user).
I finally get it out in the field and talk to the first end users of the app.
They just open the app, immediately hit search, find the thing they wanted, do thing and left. That's it, almost every single one of them did that.
The whole main page and dashboard type experience our direct customer wanted because they imagined their partners were power users, nobody was using it...
Yeah I feel like as UI has modernized the "search box" UI approach is still not as celebrated as it probably could. I quickly don't care if it's some quirky incantation of a pigeon language as long as it gets me precisely to the destination without messing around. In the few enterprise apps I've seen evolve that was the most successful change was to make either a UI search or a content search.
We (two developers) offer chat support via Intercom. When an issue gets sufficiently complicated, we fire up a video call and screenshare. We find this works great.
Maybe there's a cultural difference in Japan, but I think this is much better than phone support. There's a much lower barrier to sending a chat message than making a phone call, plus the communication is semi-asynchronous.
I really enjoyed reading this. It makes me want to call the developer for support just to make my day better. :)
I’ve worked with a lot of people who don’t understand technical offerings and analytics well (both coworkers and customers) and have learned some similar lessons. Making oneself available for these kinds of calls seems like a distraction, but it prevents so much more unnecessary and/or misunderstood work than a more structured queue as long as it isn’t abused. (To do this, hiring needs to factor emotional intelligence, too; our talent pool defaults to slightly less polite than the older Japanese professional customers the author describes.)
I try to maintain small enough connections between teams that an informal approach to balancing this kind of support can be used and most of the conversations can be directly between the person with the direct need and the person who owns the relevant service or worked on the project. Trying to scale it and introduce PMs and middlemen to save time is counterproductive because they often can’t explain the heart of the problem, so the interruption doesn’t pay for itself, and instead of bringing emotions that communicate valuable context to the developer, the middleman brings emotions related to their job, desire to please their boss, frustration at being assigned a low-context task, etc.
So when that “scaling” is unavoidable it’s always better to force work into a structured process because you might as well minimize time and communication if you can’t get the right two people to connect.
I've practically never disagreed with a user when they've had difficulty with software, or the workflow, or error messages or whatever. As someone with a very low tolerance for hard to use software myself - I totally git it.
Not necessarily phone-only, but the help line/desk is an incredible goldmine of information on the actual in-field use of your product. More valuable than 100 design sessions, focus groups, Product Manager opinions, etc.
Yet it is frequently ignored as a cost sink. This is in no small part a reason for the declining reputation of 'big tech'. Too many product managers just don't want to be pushed off of their 'vision' for the product by the actual in-field reality (Win-11 seems to be the latest victim of this myopia).
I'm honestly somewhat surprised to hear this. My experience providing email support for my main business (to be fair, second-hand video games in Australia) has basically taught me both how scummy and underhanded people can be, and also how many desperate and lonely people there are who contact tech support just to have someone to speak to.
We very, very rarely provide our phone number, and even then only when it's strictly necessary. It would just drain us to be contactable at the drop of a hat by the public.
This is a great and admirable move, maybe later you will need to hire staff, but you will know the users concern etc and you can train the next people, this is extremely valuab.
Many companies go with live chat, horrible faq pages, email or phone support for the high value segment.
Anyone would like to have some algorithm do as much work as possible, which is fine, especially for giant companies. However, the ones with the run off the mill Salesforce back office but no phone support(too expensive)are commiting a grave mistake in my opinion.
Most companies SOP/procedures get very complicated, unmaintainable, lots of link rot and high turn over rates for support staff makes sure that support quality will take a large hit sooner than later.
Email cases often go between departments , always sitting in a waiting queue, and maybe the customer needs to reply as well, IE , resolution time is very long.
The customers think it's automated bot emails, at best compounded template emails.
It's not personal, people do not read or understand emails.
Often, a call can resolve a case or at least make ensure that the customers concern is well understood and the customer understood what it takes from his side.
And guess what, they will feel like privileged, speaking to a human, this builds trust.
And nobody is saying you need a massive inbound call center or a third party provider.
Just at least try some outbound calls for difficult cases at least.
I offer mail and skype support, the bad thing about skype messages and skype voice is that after the call is ended I don't have a mail with the user's requests.
because of this, i have forgotten many requests and they have to call back to ask me again.
On the other side when somebody sends me an email I put a task flag on it and I work through these flags during my working hours.
I would like to offer this service too but don't want to use my personal as it's already full of recruiter spam. What services do you suggest to use? I see Grasshopper and Dialpad as 2 options.
I used to have a phone number on my web site. Over time the majority of my customers migrated to email and the few that didn't seemed to mostly be time wasters.
I guess it didn't help that I'm in the UK and the majority of my customers are in the US so there were time differences to deal with.
I will still phone customers if they ask although I always push back on that until I have some details on their issue.
Conference calls are nearly always a complete waste of time when it comes to support but can be helpful when closing sales.
There have been a few times that I've offered phone support for my solo startup. When people email demanding it, I often do not offer it as an option because I can sense they are belligerent and it would be unpleasant and possibly unproductive.
There are other times where I will suggest it to a user who I can tell is struggling with emailed instructions, or who cannot explain what he/she is seeing on screen.
One thing to remember: you can block caller ID if you dial *67 before the number. Don't want to have users calling your cell inbound!
In Germany, you must put your phone number on commercial websites. A few people called me before I put a note not to call me next to the number.
In my case, I write TFM, so phone calls came from people who didn't RTFM. Emails require more time to write, so people do their research before asking.
I do learn a lot from those emails. They help me write better documentation, because they're direct feedback. You get to know what confuses people, and what situations they find themselves in.
[+] [-] Doches|4 years ago|reply
> ...all sorts of people call you, and I’ve really learned a lot by talking with users directly on the phone.
Sometimes users call me because they want to report a bug, or they've forgotten their email address. Sometimes they want business advice (!), or they have a niche feature they want to request.
> This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone who calls is civil and polite.
Hahahaha. Haha. Hah. Ahem. The biggest surprise to me when I started offering support (first email, and then later by phone) is how _aggressive_ people can be. My app has two classes of users -- one free, one paid -- and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request, etc.
All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together.
It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...
[+] [-] dougmccune|4 years ago|reply
My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have fairly useless scripts they have to run through. You're dealing with a human (sometimes), but it's about the equivalent of dealing with a robot. It's hard to remember to have empathy when whatever you say is met with a standard, often nonsensical readout of the next thing in their script. So I think we've trained people to expect a horrible first tier experience.
That said, I've done a lot of B2B enterprise software support and have found exactly the same thing as you. Initial emails or calls will come in and the tone is aggressive and impatient. I think this stems from the assumption that the response will be useless (until maybe it gets escalated 3 times to someone actually useful). But when you respond as a capable human who legitimately is trying to help them out (and not just pass them on to someone else), suddenly the tone totally changes and you have wonderful interactions. People are incredibly appreciative. Nobody is used to a support person actually solving their problem. Hell, they're not even used to someone replying to them at all most of the time. The bar is on the floor. So when you exceed that bar and actually help someone quickly and efficiently, they turn into super fans.
[+] [-] munificent|4 years ago|reply
Everyone can fill in their pet theory here, but mine is that so much of being American these days is disempowering. Corporations have so much power that not only do they not care about us, but we can't even avoid using them.
Get sick? Good luck fighting your giant health insurance provider or hospital conglomeration.
Looking for an entry-level job? Navigate a Kafka-esque application system only to (if you're lucky) work for a miserable low-level manager who also has no power and transfers that anger onto you.
Want to spend time with friends? Their preferred communication medium is now one of a couple of huge social media companies with horrific privacy policies and a history of emotionally damaging its users.
Want to go to a show? Have fun buying overpriced tickets from one of the two or three ticket monopolies and then pay an exhorbitant, insulting "convenience" fee.
So everyday, in many of our basic daily rituals, we are reminded of how little agency we have in our own lives and how much we both depend on and are subject to the whims of billionaires (who, meanwhile, are busy destroying the Earth).
[+] [-] silisili|4 years ago|reply
I've found the same thing from people. But not in support, just in dealing with them.
I move a lot, and inevitably end up giving a lot of things away. What I've found is that when I post offers for things for free, it attracted the absolute worst of people. People who would claim it and never show up, or claim it and tell me they could come get it in two weeks. And -tons- of people who say they'll take it and ask when I can deliver it. Then get offended when I tell them I'm not delivering it.
I still remember vividly a dresser I was offering for free. A person said they'll take it, and asked when I could bring it over. When I told them no, they replied in all caps something along the lines of 'I HAVE A COROLLA HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO FIT IT IN THERE', like I was the dumb one.
So now I just list everything for a pretty low price, then just tell them it's free when they arrive. It cut down on the amount of riffraff by about 90%.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|4 years ago|reply
The US is a low trust society. You can feel it in all aspects of life. Companies are very controlling and feel the need to constantly monitor their employees, people assume the worst from strangers and are afraid to go to places they don't know.
I myself am getting more and more worried when I talk to a doctor because I have seen it now several times how people got screwed over by doctors, hospitals and health insurance.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzy21|4 years ago|reply
• Give away for free and you WILL be treated like shit
• Charge for the same (even a nominal fee) and people will value it
This is known by many names: "Tragedy of the Commons", "Economics of Scarcity vs. Plenty", "Reciprocal Value", etc.
But it's a UNIVERSAL result so certain you can plan for it to happen and plan to avoid it with complete certainty.
[+] [-] technological|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nightpool|4 years ago|reply
I wonder if part of the issue is that paid users feel more confident in getting their concerns taken seriously, while free users feel (perhaps unconsciously) like they have to exaggerate the problem and shout to be heard? I can see that as a very natural learned behavior for modern users.
[+] [-] soneca|4 years ago|reply
If you sound like your next step is to sue the company, they solve your issue before the ones that sounded understanding and forgiving. Same with reach, if your complaint reach HN front over or get traction on Twitter, it is solved first than those that just sent an email.
[+] [-] void_mint|4 years ago|reply
I would probably compare it moreso to just the abysmal state of quality of support, even for expensive or important services. Call your health insurance provider and try to get something changed/fixed in a reasonable fashion and you'll be met with red tape/nonsense/phone tag. I am a person that usually starts out angry on any customer support line, only because of the shenanigans it takes to get someone on the phone in the first place.
[+] [-] shkkmo|4 years ago|reply
I think part of the direct issue with support is that people are very used to dealing with extremely poor support from a wide range of large companies and are primed for having their issues dismissed or being forced through largely irrelevant support scripts.
That's why as soon as they realize that isn't what is happening, their attitude suddenly gets a lot better.
[+] [-] cloudwizard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|4 years ago|reply
I've seen that whilst contracting and with software sales. I've come to the conclusion the bottom 10% of any market is a cesspit and I don't want any part of that either as a buyer or seller.
I have a suspicion the top end is the same although I've had little experience of that.
[+] [-] tdeck|4 years ago|reply
> HELP URGENT
> TRYING TO ADD A CREDIT CARD BUT YOUR STUPID WEBSITE ARENT ACCEPTING MY CREDIT CARD.
They still had 13 days to enter a credit card, so this wasn't exactly "urgent". I think it's that people want to convey how frustrated they are so that you'll prioritize the issue, and it comes across as aggression. What I've learned from being on the other end is that this approach sometimes backfires. I feel a strong urge to put off responding to such rants because it's draining to deal with these customers, while customers who respond positively to help or advice make a sole proprietor want to help them more.
[+] [-] MrGilbert|4 years ago|reply
It's the same in Germany.
> Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together.
Yep, indeed. Especially once they realize it's the developer they are writing with, not a support agent. I always have mixed feeling about it, because I don't deserve to be better treated than the frontline workers of our company.
So maybe it's a western thing after all?
[+] [-] xyzelement|4 years ago|reply
In particular, it seems like this developer recognized that phone connects them to their less technically savvy users, who - by being most different from the dev himself - can give him the most valuable outside perspective. Depending on your market, if you're trying to sell into non-techies this could provide hugely valuable insights.
In general, the closer you are to the development side of things, the more you have a very specific (and I guess "correct") model of how your system works. By default, all of your documentation/support forms/etc implicitly reflect this model. But if your users model the thing in their brain differently, then your help/form aren't the most helpful in educating them or eliciting their true feedback/problem.
One final thing - I have seen 'magic' where developers who chafed at tickets coming in from support staff (withdrawn, user error) would all of a sudden get excited about rebuilding something when the user themselves or even the support person, just explained in a higher-bandwidth way why the problem is real. It's easy to read a ticket and go "oh that's dumb, they should just do X" but on the phone/in person you go more into like "oh, this is a really reasonable/nice/smart person who's trying to use my system to do something important, and it's not letting them."
Gets a totally different type of results.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|4 years ago|reply
I also had a $25 PDF tool with a trial version. For that product a lot of the callers had no clue what the product actually did or tried to get a $5 discount or some other nonsense. I quickly stopped taking calls for that product because it was so unpleasant.
My lesson was to offer phone support only for high price, low volume items. Phone support for cheap things attracts a lot of unpleasant people.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|4 years ago|reply
The process is a give-and-take "reference interview" where you collaboratively get to the bottom of what they are actually looking for, not just a simple process where they explain what they need and you find it.
This has been very useful and applicable to any kind of tech support, and this account reminded me of it.
(Also, btw, applicable to any kind of stakeholder expressing requirements/specs too...)
[+] [-] dongping|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aachen|4 years ago|reply
How were you taught to get to the bottom? When saying what it's for, I often feel like I give way too much irrelevant backstory that nobody cares about. Or without it, I risk missing out on a better solution. Also, if one mentions the goal, people will often go "why don't you [redesign the whole thing and] use X" instead of answering the question, but perhaps that's out of the scope of what the asker can do for a better answer and this is more something answerers should avoid doing.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outsomnia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinlink|4 years ago|reply
When talking a user through a set of actions, hearing them stumble or fail to understand the UI is quite the humbling experience. You literally pay for it with your time as you listen to them struggle.
Feature requests over the phone allowed the user to fully explain the need and helped me understand why that feature was important. The majority of the time a compromise could be struck between us where I could fulfill the feature request meeting my technical and time requirements while solving the problem for them. You can’t do that with emailed forms.
A major downside is I would often get sidetracked to solve trivial problems for frequent callers who I had developed a working relationship with from frequent calls. The squeaky wheel gets the oil problem. While some of these enhancements probably added great value to the product, it was more difficult to pull off the big projects. Maintenance in particular suffered.
In the times of a major problem like an outage or error, I did feel some frustration in those rare times. It was critical to answer the barrage of phone calls, to let them know we were aware and working on the situation. But as the only one who could fix a situation, being stuck on the phone in a repetitive loop delayed things. I just wanted to fix the issue, where each caller wanted to explain it.
It was a valuable experience for me, but I am generally happier to no longer have a phone on my desk.
[+] [-] bckygldstn|4 years ago|reply
Part of why I run my own business is for the flexibility, and guaranteed 9-5 phone support would really threaten that. I wonder if there is a way to offer this on a best-effort basis without coming across as flaky? Perhaps putting the number only on the support page (like OP), but also only having the number there when you're online?
[+] [-] rkagerer|4 years ago|reply
Generally my customers didn't care what time of day I responded, so much as they appreciated how sincere I was about solving their problem in short order. Being so intimately knowledgeable about the product and able to effect relatively quick codechanges where warranted empowered that, and frankly the quality of support I provided ran circles around most of their other vendors where it took multiple tickets / interactions and navigating endless bureaucracy to reach someone actually able to help.
[+] [-] michaelt|4 years ago|reply
Obviously, they're not "first line support" solving people's problems - instead, they are "the CEO's personal assistant" scheduling a call back.
After all, if you're an accountant or an architect or a lawyer or a dentist, there's no embarrassment in running a business that's just you and a secretary.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reidjs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galvin|4 years ago|reply
If you know when you'll be available in advance maybe a similar setup could work for you.
[+] [-] Inhibit|4 years ago|reply
Folks who want to purchase a service are generally grateful of getting whatever they're paying for. They realize that's not always the case.
[+] [-] Loughla|4 years ago|reply
If you make that clear, and explain why, I think it would be a good idea. If nothing else, it might even encourage me to call with ideas if I knew you were physically going to answer the phone.
[+] [-] konschubert|4 years ago|reply
It doesn’t give all the benefits of having the number on the website, but if gives you the agency and choice.
[+] [-] duxup|4 years ago|reply
First app I made for my first job:
The app was made for our customer's partners. Lots of time was spent on layout and how this app would be used (they assumed everyone was a power user).
I finally get it out in the field and talk to the first end users of the app.
They just open the app, immediately hit search, find the thing they wanted, do thing and left. That's it, almost every single one of them did that.
The whole main page and dashboard type experience our direct customer wanted because they imagined their partners were power users, nobody was using it...
[+] [-] xemdetia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stickfigure|4 years ago|reply
Maybe there's a cultural difference in Japan, but I think this is much better than phone support. There's a much lower barrier to sending a chat message than making a phone call, plus the communication is semi-asynchronous.
[+] [-] Aachen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1123581321|4 years ago|reply
I’ve worked with a lot of people who don’t understand technical offerings and analytics well (both coworkers and customers) and have learned some similar lessons. Making oneself available for these kinds of calls seems like a distraction, but it prevents so much more unnecessary and/or misunderstood work than a more structured queue as long as it isn’t abused. (To do this, hiring needs to factor emotional intelligence, too; our talent pool defaults to slightly less polite than the older Japanese professional customers the author describes.)
I try to maintain small enough connections between teams that an informal approach to balancing this kind of support can be used and most of the conversations can be directly between the person with the direct need and the person who owns the relevant service or worked on the project. Trying to scale it and introduce PMs and middlemen to save time is counterproductive because they often can’t explain the heart of the problem, so the interruption doesn’t pay for itself, and instead of bringing emotions that communicate valuable context to the developer, the middleman brings emotions related to their job, desire to please their boss, frustration at being assigned a low-context task, etc.
So when that “scaling” is unavoidable it’s always better to force work into a structured process because you might as well minimize time and communication if you can’t get the right two people to connect.
[+] [-] LAC-Tech|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toss1|4 years ago|reply
THIS!!!
Not necessarily phone-only, but the help line/desk is an incredible goldmine of information on the actual in-field use of your product. More valuable than 100 design sessions, focus groups, Product Manager opinions, etc.
Yet it is frequently ignored as a cost sink. This is in no small part a reason for the declining reputation of 'big tech'. Too many product managers just don't want to be pushed off of their 'vision' for the product by the actual in-field reality (Win-11 seems to be the latest victim of this myopia).
[+] [-] AussieWog93|4 years ago|reply
We very, very rarely provide our phone number, and even then only when it's strictly necessary. It would just drain us to be contactable at the drop of a hat by the public.
[+] [-] yawaworht1978|4 years ago|reply
Most companies SOP/procedures get very complicated, unmaintainable, lots of link rot and high turn over rates for support staff makes sure that support quality will take a large hit sooner than later. Email cases often go between departments , always sitting in a waiting queue, and maybe the customer needs to reply as well, IE , resolution time is very long. The customers think it's automated bot emails, at best compounded template emails. It's not personal, people do not read or understand emails.
Often, a call can resolve a case or at least make ensure that the customers concern is well understood and the customer understood what it takes from his side. And guess what, they will feel like privileged, speaking to a human, this builds trust.
And nobody is saying you need a massive inbound call center or a third party provider.
Just at least try some outbound calls for difficult cases at least.
[+] [-] melenaos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asimjalis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813107 - Nov 2017 (137 comments)
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|4 years ago|reply
I guess it didn't help that I'm in the UK and the majority of my customers are in the US so there were time differences to deal with.
I will still phone customers if they ask although I always push back on that until I have some details on their issue.
Conference calls are nearly always a complete waste of time when it comes to support but can be helpful when closing sales.
[+] [-] gnicholas|4 years ago|reply
There are other times where I will suggest it to a user who I can tell is struggling with emailed instructions, or who cannot explain what he/she is seeing on screen.
One thing to remember: you can block caller ID if you dial *67 before the number. Don't want to have users calling your cell inbound!
[+] [-] wizzwizz4|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|4 years ago|reply
In my case, I write TFM, so phone calls came from people who didn't RTFM. Emails require more time to write, so people do their research before asking.
I do learn a lot from those emails. They help me write better documentation, because they're direct feedback. You get to know what confuses people, and what situations they find themselves in.