How We Support 1,650 Customers with One Representative | Hacker News Reader

How We Support 1,650 Customers with One Representative

blog.statuspage.io

91 pointsduaneb19 comments

Whether or not this number is notable depends squarely on the nature of the product/service. One-man shareware shops routinely have tens of thousands customers and handle all of the support in addition to doing everything else. And hardly anyone ever brags about this.

I worked for several years as corporate IT support back in the day. Each employee represented around 2K user's nation wide.

It was very busy and we didn't do a good job (understaffed) but we did everything. Supported ALL the applications. All hard ware. PC upgrades. You name it. You handled your 50 calls a day. It sucked, that's why we all left, but 2K+ for one person for one application stack... not that crazy.

And that's true in open-source too. For example the Brackets code editor project (which I work on sometimes) has over 250,000 users, yet there's only about a dozen people who regularly respond to bug reports, IRC, forum questions, etc. -- half of whom are volunteers. That's a much higher ratio than 1,650:1...

This doesn't seem unreasonable. As a data point, we're just shy of 10k customers with one full-time support person (and two part-time). In my experience, it was the process of setting up the KB and process by which you'd answer tickets that was the most arduous. 0-10 users, easy. 10->100 OMFG EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE. 100->n becomes just an optimization problem.

1650:1? What's Microsoft's ratio?

MS claims "1.5 billion people use Windows every day."

1500000000 / 1650 = 909091

Does MS have 900,000 call center people? I'm betting not. It may an apples and oranges comparison (app v. OS) but 1650:1 remains nothing special in the world of customer support. I would much rather then brag about how quickly customer concerns are dealt with or how few are routed to voicemail.

I think you'd have to include a large majority of IT personnel in this figure, as they are the likely first line of support for many windows installs.

That number is probably much higher than 1 million.

Apples to oranges, of course. The interesting part is that MS scaled their support to include people paid by their customers directly because their software was so business critical.

Even high-tier MS support isn't great. You may rely on it and `need` the support, but you don't really need it.

What? I'm guessing you've never actually paid for an MS Support Call?

They will work through your issue no matter what until a resolution is reached.

I'm sure I don't have experience with every tier of their support, but I've dealt with both Microsoft Partner support and paid support contracts for both Windows Server and SQL Server.

They will definitely help you, eventually, and the problem will eventually get fixed. However, eventually (in my experience) has been usually several days.

Microsoft, like Cisco, HP, and many other enterprise vendors, doesn't have much (or anything) in the way of call centers for the peons. End-users are expected to call their VAR or distributor or OEM.

What they do have are private support lines for certified partners that are every computer nerd's dream of what tech support should be like. Partners are expected to absorb the stupid questions, and can escalate interesting cases to the manufacturer, who will treat you like an adult IT specialist.

I worked at various small business networking/telephony firms in high school. We had a number for Cisco where you could get a real engineer on the phone, explain what you had tried, and talk through troubleshooting together as peers. He would ask for log files, give you commands to run, talk through the peculiarities of that customer's installation, etc. You'd get the same engineer sometimes, so you kind of got to know each other. They even keep track of your ticket number in their ticketing system.

I'll never forget my call to HP. I had been given a monitor that was dead and asked to troubleshoot it. I called the HP partner support line, explained what I had tried, and fully expected to be patronizingly walked through the process of repeating those same steps according to the agent's script. Nope. "Okay, we'll go ahead and RMA that for you, can you give me the serial number?" Holy shit. At that point my main support experiences were Road Runner (Time Warner Cable) and Dell. I was absolutely blown away.

Shame I don't pull that kind of access anymore. Then again, I can always walk over to the IT department that does.

I ran a groupware platform that had over 1,000 daily users on it myself with about 30 new organizations signing up to use it every day.

The key thing was to create help videos and help hover icons everywhere possible. Eventually it was self-supporting no one ever had questions because the answers were all right there.

I'd be asking for a raise if I were that rep.

Well, if I'm reading the chart correctly, it's about 15 emails/day. Maybe not raise-worthy?

They rotate support duty, every engineer and even the founders do it for a week each.

This is the most important part of the email! I almost got fired once for very modestly bringing up the idea at a previous role ;)

I think the challenge is not in the numbers but in the quality of support and these guys are doing it well and substantiating how they did it with solid evidence.

Their call to action signup is pretty slick. Full page on page load, then no longer accessible once you scroll down or refresh. First time I've seen something like that in the wild.

Weird, the HTTPS Anywhere chrome extensions seems to be redirecting me to status-page-blog.herokuapp.com

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