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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

The last time I looked for quickbooks documentation, I just found some YouTube videos.

Support has been useless too.

As much as I don’t use discord at all, having a 50% chance of getting someone that understands internet banking to help troubleshoot internet banking would be compelling.

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If the company is serious enough about competing with Quickbooks and solving a real customer problem, Discord is not going to cut it.

I'm curious. Is this a criticism of their support. Real time chat in general or just specifically discord?

Real time chat in general and discord in particular. Discord cannot be self-hosted, so any support message history will be completely reliant on the goodwill of discord. Another problem with using a chat channel for support (slack has the same problem) is searching for things you know are there but are impossible to find again.

so you want them to roll-out a discord like platform themselves?

And an ISP to host it on. As we know, if you don't self-host your ISP then you're beholden to the goodwill of a large corporation who could shut you down at any time.

what about the deep sea cables that run the internet, those can still be blocked by governments right?

No, I want knowledge-base style documentation and faqs. Something slightly better than this single question:

https://docs.bigcapital.ly/docs/faq

I see these as complimentary, knowledge base for search and self support. Email for well documented transactions or low priority questions. Slack/Discord to avoid making phone calls when looking for real people responses quickly. Phone for emergencies.

Presumably this would follow the pattern other big open source projects take, where other companies (who are experts on the software) host and/or support the software for a cost.

Seems like a brilliant way to choose your customers, actually. A great way to avoid Pareto rule type problems that suck away too much time. I could easily imagine that e.g. 200 "smart customers who need very little help" could be more profitable than 1000 who do, after a time v. money calculation.

Makes me think who's the customer here. Is this the engg team that's going to host it or the finance team who's the primary user of the product.

If the final user is finance, should the support be targeted towards them?

I support QuickBooks for smaller companies by calling tech support for them, YMMV.

Wait, you simply are a middleman? What percentage of the support can you provide without having to call Intuit yourself? Is this lucrative?

It can be a decent side business for an IT support contractor. Quickly you learn the biggest issues, and only really need to spend time on special scenarios.

This is like 90% of Enterprise IT work. Install some box, follow their directions, make sure the port is open on your firewall... call the vendor when it breaks. IT is so often just being the middle man.

Yet this is the middle man that brings in the business aspects, the context etc. Installing a product in a bank and at a soft ware vendor's can be dramatically different.

That's pretty standard for a lot of companies. IT log the calls with the supplier.

I think just having someone who acts as a gatherer of info, so Intuit aren't being sent junk tickets, means service is resumed much quicker. And that's worth paying for.

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