Hacker News Reader

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little sorry to rain on your parade, but this seems like you're turning a personal contact back into a normal support system. "Hey, here's my direct contact info" works because it's not "our team can also see the messages and incoming calls. We can discuss how best to handle the issue in Slack and then anyone can respond via text". You've just reinvented a support phone number, and as soon as customers actually try to interact with it the whole charade will collapse.

View on HN

For larger teams that aren't startups, we don't intend for this to be used for everyone. We think it should be reserved for your most important customers. In a lot of B2B businesses, a handful of customers account for the lion's share of your revenue. You want to build a personal relationship with them and make sure they are taken care of and happy. We think it's best to stratify support and give your most valuable customers direct access to your core team vs general support where they can get lost. It's worked well for us (we have 10s of customers) and we think it can work for just "VIP" customers at larger companies

So like an account manager, but a group of people rather than a single person? I suppose that could have value.

I use home depot SMS customer service, the response time is typically 1-15 minutes. Works perfect for me to do things async instead of fielding “Are you there?” questions when I get busy on live chat.

I’ll rain on your parade a bit; the only thing that’s going to matter is whether people will pay for it.

The “charade” and the “reinvention” is irrelevant.

If it’s a good product and people use it, then they’re in the clear.

My point was that it's not a good product, at least from a customer's perspective. It's the latest in a long line of corporate attempts to convince you that they're totally human and totally care about you individually. In any number of forms; "Dear $NAME" form letters, "your call is very important to us", Twitter accounts, the ... charming little chatboxes asking if you have any questions, etc. It's just another attempt to pretend that you're interacting with a human who will pay attention to you individually, and I'd be very surprised if it works out any better, because customers have seen all this before.

These systems are only as good as your ability to hide them.

Recently I did a trial of https://www.diffchecker.com/, and when I didn't buy, got an email from "Nick from Diffchecker [admin@diffchecker.com]" saying, "If you're still undecided and have questions or concerns, please do let us know at: admin@diffchecker.com" and it was signed by this Nick person.

So I emailed back briefly, politely explaining why I didn't buy.

A week later, I got an email from the same email address saying "If you decided that Diffchecker Desktop wasn’t a good fit, we’d love to hear why. We’d appreciate if you’d answer these questions below to help us learn why didn’t you upgrade your subscription" asking me to fill out a survey.

Outta here with that shit. Either you're being personal or you're not. You can't have it both ways.

Our thesis is that it should be authentic.. i.e., the company should know who you are. It's terrible to contact support and have them have no idea about all your past interactions with a company. We want to prevent situations like the above from happening down the road

Reply on news.ycombinator.com