Ask HN: How do you professionalize/outsource customer service?
I am at a point where I can't go on holiday without checking my email daily for customer support requests. That's great, but also I think I need to put in a system here that's better than my current one-man-show thing.
It's mainly people having trouble with a puzzle, with a voucher code they received as a gift, or other 'FAQ' things. Right now, this is a great driver for positive App Store reviews, as people like the responsive and prompt customer service, even if it's them forgetting to put the dashes into the voucher code. (I could even automate most of the things people inquire about, but I'd lose the source for positive App Store reviews!)
So I'm totally fine with giving them a human person to talk to, and I'll happily pay that person – but I'd like to hear your opinion on how to do that.
I'm thinking about
- hosting a ticket system on my servers
- renting a hosted ticket system
and forwarding my support@ email to that system, and then
- hiring a freelance customer service person on UpWork or Fiverr to work on those tickets
– and, of course, giving that person all the material they need.
I'd be very interested in your experiences with
- ticket systems (self-hosted or hosted, but these can easily get expensive?)
- customer service outsourcing (which feels very very awkward, I'm having trouble letting go here).
Any thoughts are welcome! Do you outsource customer service on your projects? Or do you check your mail daily even while on holiday? As you might guess from the time of the year I'm posting this and from the nature of a 'family activity' like Escape Team – it's especially acute over Christmas and New Year's...
Thank you! —Fabian