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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

    If you were never allowed to provide tech support, in any form, what would
    have to change?

Am I the only one who thinks that the answer to that question, for quite a few companies, is, "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, that's pretty much what we do right now."

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What if we switched the question around: you have to provide individualized tech support for each customer? Essentially, they would get hand-holding. What would need to change?

With high enough margins, you get customers who are willing to provide an engineer or two specifically to travel to you and learn how your product works.

I'm trying to think of how that would change the product.

I would have to hire a team of folks to actually provide tech support, for sure.

But the product? Would need less attention to detail because we'd always be a phone call away.

Edit: Maybe I can train a ChatGPT embedding on how to use my product and force customers to use that...

The support team will provide you with a set of suggestions as to how to change the product, unless you slap them down constantly.

That's true. That kind of does happen actually. I let my business partner take all the calls and he sometimes asks me to change stuff based on recurring confusion.

The bigger they get, the more true it is.

In B2C, yes; in Enterprise B2B, it's the opposite -- you get dedicated account managers, quarterly business reviews, sometimes even weekly product reviews (we have those with our largest vendor).

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