Make a great product, gain a user. Have great support, earn a fan
sachin.posterous.com
sachin.posterous.com
I'd like to see startups have a full-time technically-literate support person in the team by default. Have them sit in on meetings and such, but no time on code, only customers.
The return policy for Costco costs them next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. The loyalty they engender because of it, and the two or three extra customers they generate from each of those fans, is worth so much more. It's a great lesson for business large and small.
+1 for that. Although I think having a full time support person might not be feasible for small startups, overall, I feel that customer support is grossly undervalued. Developers see tech support as beneath them. while management teams tend to view support as a cost overhead. Not only can great customer service lead to a extremely satisfied customer, it also helps close the feedback loop from actual customers back to development / product features.
and i say this based on my brief experience working in tech support.
As a 'support manager' / back-end coder myself now, I try to follow their example. Got to agree with you that having a dedicated support person might be nice, but I can't imagine it becoming common ... first for the reason you mention, but also the types of people attracted to the instability of start-ups usually wouldn't respond well to 'oh no, John, don't muck about with the code/schematics, we want you to be customer focused'.
The collective mentality at many companies (web or not) relays things such as "oh, they're just users" or "well, that's too bad it didn't work out".
It's easy to default into the general presumption that great support will solve problems like these. However, the underlying issue isn't support, it's respect.
It comes from the top and is echoed throughout the company right down to the customer. Sometimes support issues can't be solved and when they can't, respect defines the interaction. Even when problems can be solved, if a user / customer / co-worker is treated with respect, they typically feel valued and satisfied when they are treated with true respect.
We're always at the computer and reading someone's email doesn't take that long, or break your concentration very much. I know it's different for large companies, but they have the kind of money to hire good support staff.
At those scales, though, you lose something that's even more impressive: The ability to fix small bugs by the time you've replied to a user. If someone reports a bug to us, we usually have it fixed and pushed in one or two minutes, so when the user gets a response saying "thank you for the feedback, we've fixed the bug, you can try again" within a minute of reporting, they become really loyal to the service...
Live in South Korea, die of fan death?
But on topic: I think the thing that infuriates me the most is when a support person clearly doesn't read what I write to them. I can't count the number of times I've had to reply and say, "Listen, I know you have canned text to make your job go quicker, because most people haven't researched their own problem before coming to you, but if you'd read what I actually wrote, you'd realize why your response was completely unhelpful."
That's usually followed up by another batch of canned text. ARGH.
For example, take credit card processors: if a $50mil/year company has a choice between a payment gateway that charges 1.9% and one that charges 2.1%, they'll put up with a LOT of poor documentation, bad API design, and bad support to use the 1.9% company instead--that price savings is $100k a year, enough to hire a great engineer to deal with the bullshit.
Similarly, if you have a choice between an infrastructure company that charges you $300k a year vs. one that's $100k a year, a $200k different buys you a lot of "in house support".
When things scale big, pricing really matters.