Ask HN: How is your startup handling customer support? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How is your startup handling customer support?

3 pointscloudking4 comments

I am curious to hear how your startups are handling the customer support experience? From UX, software and resource perspectives. What is working well and what could be improved?

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We have a shared support inbox through Zendesk which has been manned by one part time employee, just scaled that to two part time as we hit $1.5M ARR. We have a FAQ, also via zendesk, to answer common questions. Otherwise we steer most requests to the common mailbox. We have built some apps in Retool to allow customer support to handle common issues like refunds, cancelling subscriptions, updating users, enrolling users to courses, etc. Then there is a slack channel where we can discuss special issues that come up.

We do not fix reported bugs unless they are deemed to be critical, and rather focus on shipping features as we think that brings the most value for us and customers in the long run.

Things are running well!

I used to work for a start up. We did not have support engineers. All tickets went through IT which was one person and then made their ways to dev team. Management wanted to save a few dollars so they didn’t hire any support engineers. Devs were expected to handle escalations on top of their daily tasks. This lead to burn out because deadlines did not move when there were multiple escalations in the same week, which lead to many of the bright engineers leaving the company. If you value your engineer’s time, have a small team to have customer issues.

On top of extensive documentation that we have on our web we use Discord as one of communication points. Since our code is available on github users can also open issues on it.

We have a customer only Discourse forum where you can ask your support question. You can also search for the solution, since reply is within 3 business days. This encourages a culture of looking for the answer before asking the question.

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