Lessons from answering 800 customer support queries in last 2 yrs as a founder | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from answering 800 customer support queries in last 2 yrs as a founder

21 pointsdeeptichopra8 comments

Customer support can be unintuitive to first time startup founders. That was definitely the case for me.

I've distilled my learnings from answering 800+ customer support queries in the last 2 years as a startup founder into 11 actionable tips.

TLDR: 1. Make it easy for your customers to reach you. Use live chat. 2. Respond immediately. Even if the actual resolution will take time. 3. Get context. 4. Hear them out. 5. Ask questions. 6. If you have to say no, explain why. 7. Apologize for your mistakes. 8. Apologize for their mistakes. 9. Don't respond when you're angry. 10. Make it easy for customers to help themselves. 11. Focus on solving their problem, not just answering the question. Go the extra mile if you can.

Full post here: https://www.btw.so/blog/customer-service-tips/

Underlying theme to all this – invest serious money in customer support for your product. It cannot remain an afterthought, and you cannot do it yourself on the side as a founder. Getting a new customer is hard, but keeping them long term is even harder.

I formulated "Bruce's First Law" on my first day of doing support, and I quote it back to myself every week 30 years later.

Bruce's First Law : "never believe a word they say"

Customers lie. By omission, on purpose, by mistake, or whyever. Trust nothing, verify _everything_.

Remote Access so you can see what they see, is the single biggest improvement to support in decades. I have had customers _literally_ "read" an error message to me, when some completely different error is on their screen.

Thanks for sharing. I guess it makes sense to spend the extra money for a good customer service tool.

> 8. Apologize for their mistakes.

I haven't read the post, and I think it it's fine if you decide to do that yourself in exchange for higher sales (assuming that there is a correlation).

But please don't expect someone you hire to do that. It's just not okay.

While I'm sure you learned this, you forgot to mention: manage their expectations.

i love, "apologize for you mistakes; apologize for their mistakes." so great lol

It took you 2 years and 800 support tickets to learn basic communication skills.

Shameless plug here if anyone is interested in an open source live chat tool check out https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups I m one of the maintainers :)

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