Skip the extra tools - my customers already hang out in my inbox and buddy list | Hacker News Reader

Skip the extra tools - my customers already hang out in my inbox and buddy list

blog.olark.com

34 pointssteiza9 comments

Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't feel like an improvement over customers having my personal phone number. I understand providing good support is important, but being able to step away from unnecessary contacts and work in your personal space when you are up against deadlines / emergencies is something I value more than being available for a customer.

This rant really only applies to the suggestion of using a chat client - the interface to see their customers' pertinent information (logged in, pages browsed, location, unique visits) does look very helpful.

I see what you mean, but...there are a few things that make it different than a phone number. For one, you can just set an away status (when busy), which you can't do with a phone. And customers never get your IM screen name, they just chat from a chatbox on the page itself :)

Also, sorry if it came off as a rant - I actually agree with thafman that extra tools can help large organizations with big customers. For us, we deal with many SMBs and other small organizations, so email is more than adequate for communicating with those customers.

Email for issue tracking hasn't scaled for me past the 200 customer mark, after that it was Highrise then FatFree CRM all the way. Way too useful to be considered an "extra".

yea, I figured it probably doesn't work out for all. Though, most "inbox CRM" people I've talked to have scaled well past 200 customers (including us). What is the biggest pain that a specialized CRM solves for you?

Looking at Olark's pricing model it would seem that it would have to scale to 1000 customers + prospects (estimated breakeven for a team of 4 at 20K/month divide by $30 as most popular plan yield 670 customers, assume 330 prospects in pipleline needed to counteract turnover and enable grown) just to get a reasonable breakeven point for a small team. What is the limit of this approach in your plan for growth?

we haven't felt any limit to the Gmail inbox approach - even moving beyond breakeven - and chat actually tends to reduce our overall support traffic by making our conversations quick, and avoiding drawn-out support threads.

In general, I'd say support bandwidth is dedicated more to a "moving window" of how many new customers you have, rather than total customer base. Most customers tend to be pretty low-touch after the first month, where they get most of their questions answered.

(btw, just posted a more detailed reply to your comment on the article itself)

It would be interesting to know the size of the customer set being served to understand how far this method has scaled. Of course in the early days Excel can replace SalesForce and GMail can substitute for a CRM, how would you tell that the current GMail/IM paradigm is breaking before you start to lose prospects and/or customer issues?

I am in no way against IM as a component of customer support: I think it should be used in conjunction with (or even in leiu of depending upon your customer base) a phone call wherever possible. But I don't see how you keep score on your pipeline or your customer base purely from an inbox or buddy list. One thing that CRM and bug tracking systems offer is statistics and an aggregated view so that as you scale you don't have rely purely on your intuition or escalations (e.g. customers angry with your deteriorating service levels). My fear with an ad hoc approach is not that it's not appropriate for the early days but that it won't scale with your success, and may fail unpredictability if you get distracted by other issues.

"Specialized CRM software? Issue tracking software? It just did not work for us - our customers are small and really want simple, personal communication."

This doesn't mean that you should go back to using plain email. It means that the CRM and issue tracking software sucks.

If you want to run a business with more than a few customers and keep your sanity, you have to have segregation.

Gmail / any mail client does not offer the tools you need to do really good customer service beyond a few customers, either.

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