Ask HN: how quickly do you answer support emails?
How quickly do you respond to support requests? And when disaster strikes (server down/hacked/etc) is there always somebody ready to deal with it?
How quickly do you respond to support requests? And when disaster strikes (server down/hacked/etc) is there always somebody ready to deal with it?
How can you make people don't email you every time when they have problems? Like building a good knowledge database .... give them the solution of the problem before they asked for it and so on.
How can you prevent the disaster strikes to be less then a minimum and hopefully never to happen?
For does question the right answers depends on you and what you can find on the net ....I think.
It's quite expensive to reduce the risks of disaster, and funds are tight. Mirrored servers + high level SLA costs thousands of dollars. We can't spend that to soften the blow of a disaster, which has only a 5% chance/yr per server or so of occurring.
There are cases when may not have the time to reply immediately to all questions (e.g. small team). In that situation common sense will tell you which ones are more pressing, I guess.
Going a little off topic, one thing I've been noticing that works pretty well (especially in agile environments), if you can afford it time-wise of course, is to have one person exclusively dedicated to support for a week. Then rotate to another person next week. That will both keep the requesters happy to get answers on time, but also the repliers, who can fully focus on other things when they are not "support person of the week".
I'm a big fan of a distributed/threaded system like this. I don't like direct emails for support.
BTW, if anyone is interested in using our ticket system, let me know–I could open source it on GitHub or something.
There's nothing there yet except a wiki page and an empty Rails app. Give me a day or two to the code organized and commit some updates.
Contributors more than welcome.
I'm mostly curious how other people deal with it. Do people carry a laptop everywhere so they can plug in whenever something happens? Or do people just hope for the best and deal with problems only during "office hours"?
Side note to parent comment -- we do offer the same support to free and paid plans right now.
Every company is different and for most of these we were just a bunch of hackers running free communities (with the exception of the web host provider - which was free with premium memberships). However, the importance of answering support quickly was still the same. In terms of the free service, when things didn't work right or we wern't able to instantly respond we were able to write it off as "we're not paid to be here." That didn't always stick though. You might also consider making sure people know what times you guys are generally available. Letting people know that you're not available from midnight to 6am in your local time is a good thing for your users to know.
Depending on what it is you're offering, looking at a message board / forum as a means of technical support might not be such a bad idea. It allows not only you and your team to answer questions (and quickly from almost anywhere you have net access) but it also gives your other users ways to contribute as well. Most importantly, it's an active way to build a knowledgebase, if done correctly. It also saves you from having to necessarily answer the same e-mail's over and over. Even with an e-mail contact available, you could easily put in an auto-responder that lets them know you got it and gives them a link to your support forum for them to browse for a solution in the mean time.
Note: If you use forums, make sure you find some method of making your support posts easy to manage and your official team members easy to spot.
It's amazing how many potential customers use e-mails as a sort of "test" to see whether they'll go with you or not. Striking these while the iron's hot can almost guarantee dollars in the pocket a month later.
I do all sales and support once per day, first thing in the morning, getting the mailboxes to completely empty. I then glance at the mailboxes a few more times during the day, but don't send any more replies till the next morning. The only exception is if there's an urgent issue or serious bug.
This works for me because:
* I can concentrate on productive work (building new features) most of the day without serious distraction. If I were to reply to emails all day long, I'd get far less done.
* In my experience, users put that little bit more effort into solving problems themselves, if they're given the motivation to do so. They read documentation and FAQs. If you reply to emails within half an hour, you'll often find yourself in a lengthy back-and-forth that takes up a lot of time.
This second point might sound like heresy in a world where the customer is always right. But it's not so bad to lose customers whose opportunity cost in time is greater than their revenue is ever going to be worth.
While a small minority of users are unhappy to wait more than an hour or two for a reply, a guaranteed 24 hour turnaround is still pretty good compared to large companies.
Give your timezone/part-time issues, I'd provide a cell phone or something for people to use in case of dire emergency. If people abuse it, you cut off their support service.
I'd also instrument as much as possible so that in the event of a disaster you are first to know, not last. I use a heavily customized nagios setup that sends SMSes to my cell phone. Works out well.
Response time: it varies, but it's definitely good to send a "hey we're looking into it" canned response so their issue is acknowledged. It would almost be worth it to have a few of those prepared and auto-reply within 10-20 minutes with one...