As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support

The main reason - I am a solo developer. And the brain mode for 'developer' is VERY different from the brain mode for 'support agent'.

It was basically impossible for me to get into 'flow' state during a normal working day. Even one phone call during the day took me away from my creative, programming mindset and into an empathetic, listening mindset. And the transition between the two were very different. It's like asking a racing driver to knit a scarf each time he came into the pits, before he could go out on the track to drive at high speed again.

It also made it hard to plan blocks of work. Most times it was OK, but there were days where I would plan to do about 5 or 6 bug fixes, but I would get a slew of phone calls that meant I got 0 programming done that day, and would have to move other plans.

I actually enjoyed support, but in the end I had to decide which of the two parts of the job was moving the business ahead more than the other, and pure development work won out.

When you box yourself into the "But, I'm an engineer" corner and decide it's beneath you to talk to customers, you limit yourself. Don't do that. Become a more well-rounded person. Talk to your users. Understand them. Empathize with them. It will make you a better engineer. And if you're a solo founder or part of a small team, it's even more critical that you do this.

My app is simple and easy to use, and I've made "Training Videos" for just about everything you can do with, and I've had years to work out any bugs that have popped up, so I don't get a lot of calls anymore. But every call is a chance to learn something and improve the app and I pay very close attention to those who call.

My approach is that it's never the user's fault, and I tell them that. I work click by click with them to show them how to do something and I tell them if something doesn't work it's my fault and I will fix it. And I also ask them how they think it should work.

Before I made my first app back in the `90s I read a book Apple put out called something like "Apple Human Interface Guidelines". At first glance I thought it was a waste of money, but since I'd spent it I decided to read it all.

It explained some of the history of the Apple GUI and how and why things were designed the way they were, which was basically on things people were familiar with, like "Radio Buttons" and "Checkboxes", etc.

By the time I was done I realized the genius in the approach. I'm still impressed with it. My goal has been to make web apps that the user doesn't have to learn anything to use. That it all works like they expect it should. After 15+ years I've got pretty close now. I rarely get any calls or emails.

Kind of feel like the "Maytag Man" now.

It was weird to be out and about and suddenly get a tech support call, but people were usually really nice.

Due to a variety of factors, my previous employer provided about 50-50 phone and email support, often with phone as the first point of contact. That worked because phone calls came in with proper context (essentially providing information about who is calling and information about their account status) and I had tools to guide callers when something wasn't extremely basic: most applications are primarily visually- or textually-rich environments, and verbal descriptions require a high degree shared context on both sides (e.g. you are a competent CCNA contacting Cisco TAC, and both parties share a common verbal language to describe non-verbal tools). Absent that, screen-sharing capability is critical, as otherwise phone support is endless dead air of "I'm looking at things you can't see while you describe things I can't see and have no context for, let's both black box everything and pray for telepathy." My current employer doesn't provide that, so phone support devolves into a push button for customers to say, "this issue is urgent!" while support says "probably, but we can't send you screenshots over the phone, so please go away while we write a response that actually provides useful information--you can remain on the phone if you want, but it's going to just be dead air or us talking you down from panic mode while not actually doing anything to address the problem."

90% email 8% skype 2% phone

On my website's contact page I have a few sentences beside the email address saying that you should give as much information as possible about the problem, and that we reply within 1 business day but normally sooner. I think that implies two things: [1] we do actually reply to emails quickly, and [2] email is preferred for support.

Some people just prefer to talk to a human being, at least the first time they contact you. This is either due to them checking to make sure you are responsive and can be contacted, or they are frightened of technology and need a little hand-holding. If I didn't put my phone number of the website I might lose these customers. It doesn't really take much time to deal with, overall.

The only minor issue is that some people (mostly other developers, usually from India) seem to want submit all support requests via skype, and I have to push back at that because [1] it's intrusive and [2] it means I don't have a record of their previous support queries in my email. Unless it's a quick question, I usually email them back. Of course you have to balance the need to provide the support in the way the customer wants to make them happy vs not letting them suck up too much of your time.

A support agent at most tech companies will have to support multiple products in multiple languages and platforms and be ready to provide a useful response to a customer at any time, these responses could be:

Diagnosing code issues, Diagnosing product issues (internal or external) Writing code for the customer, Developing the customer use case, Working with Engineering, Finding some free time to learn new products, Training new agents

etc etc.

This is no easy task and shifting mindsets is sometimes tough.

I strongly echo the comments that documentation is key, if the product docs are written to be consumed by humans it's very helpful support engineers, we're lucky to have great documentation at the company I work so it makes our life easier.

I have a license for on-site deployments, and I think every enterprise inquiry has started with a phone call.

I also send a welcome email to new customers where I say that I'm happy to have a call to talk about their requirements or questions. I also use Drift [2] for live chat, and I've handled a few support cases on there.

My advice: I don't think this is an optional thing. You don't solve the problem by removing the phone number from your site. If you're getting too many calls, you need to improve your self-help support pages, or hire another person to help with the phones.

[1] https://formapi.io

[2] http://drift.com

One thing that wasn’t a big point, but I hope most people appreciate: Founders/developers/key employees doing some phone support is not tactical grunt work, it can be a strategic, powerful weapon.

In essence, it’s white glove, world class customer service. That alone is good, but what makes it so powerful is it’s on a very small list of things that AmaFaceGoogSoft and other large companies can almost never match you at. In fact forget beating you, they often do poorly at it. Every know anyone who left angry after dealing with F500 support?

In a past life I’ve used high six figure “enterprise” support agreements, w/VIP status. Yes, way better than the Windows consumer help line, but hard even then to match your service. 1MM/yr enterprise support doesn’t buy a product dev or exec. Ironically, it’s easy to lunch with them, but they’re not handling your daily tickets.

Your sales person (you I guess :-) should use it as a club against big companies and do your best to beat them to death with it.

Other things you touched on can also be strategic. Gaining valuable insights (admittedly not the only channels for this) that optimizes your roadmap, occasionally is the difference between staying afloat and sinking.

Of course the reality check is, how much time can you allocate when not only is development a life blood role, you probably wear other hats as well? I don’t think there’s a stock answer, depends on team/company/stage/everything else in the balance.

Anecdotally, I can say one customer relationship built this way turned out to be the connection that led to the acquisition of my company. However as usual, it was impossible to foresee when the contact request email came in.

I mean it as a compliment that you’re post seems deceptively ordinary (speaking plainly is good), I hope people will mine the true value of it. Thanks for writing it, best of luck to you going forward.

I wrote about it here: http://www.followsteph.com/2006/10/10/is-technical-phone-sup...

I then followed it up with an article discussing whether or not companies should charge for support based on my findings in the previous article: http://www.followsteph.com/2010/10/19/should-software-compan...

The short version, under the $1000 price point it's very hard to economically offer free phone support as part of your product. If you're product is subscription based then the same metric applies using the total lifetime value of your customer. Under that price it's very hard to do, whether your a solo developer or a company without charging for support.

In startups, this aspect can too quickly get shunted off to a QA or CS personnel, and problems get abstracted into incident tickets (that are often ignored in favor of the Next Big Feature). That seems to me to be giving up one of the classic fundamental advantages of a small business: the personal touch.

Steve Jobs would sometimes answer to customer support calls. This was in order to understand the customer, their frustrations, and how to work through them with a better product.

There is a typo on Voicepaper's description in iTunes. It reads "Voicepaper is a test to speech voice reader..." instead of "Voicepaper is a text to speech voice reader".

I know just posting something on the app store is not the way to go. As an iOS developer I know it's tough to be a solo app store developer successfully.

Has anyone been able to monetize phone support as an upsell?