Comment by edhallen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edhallen | Hacker News Reader

As the comments show, there's a clear need for this that lots of great folks are going after (Vero, Intercom, etc) - but it all treads the fine line between usefulness and annoying for the end customer. If I look at some of the key examples on the Vero site, some seem to fit the obviously non-annoying bucket (email people if they haven't logged in in two weeks) while others are more dubious (send a user an email when they buy ten widgets).

Two solutions to this: - Doing some meaningful analysis that compares successes/failures within the same cohorts to identify really important inflection points (i.e. a user needs to complete setup within 48 hours or they never will)

- Talking to customers to really understand the onboarding process so that you can use these event triggers to provide even better customer service.

These tools are definitely better than nothing, but I'm left thinking that we (as a community online) might be able to do better. Is the answer to better customer service on the web really more sophisticated automated emails? Or is it actual personalization + meaningful analysis?

The stock answer to this is that "actual personalization" doesn't scale. But I think that's BS. It comes from people who think of web business customers as datapoints—heartless automatons traversing A/B test optimized sign-up funnels.

Today's and tomorrow's high-margin businesses do and will invest in real humans. It's truly mind-blowing that Apple can find and very comfortably pay nice, smart, real people who can understand the problems of any customer who walks in off the street and fix them, one by one. But they do.

I think that the future of support / customer service / customer development / marketing involves more humans and less automation. I'm part of the Intercom team and we've designed the first version of our product to fill the gap between now and that future—we have a great amount of automation and a great amount of one-to-one communication features, integrated tightly together. By design, we don't allow our customers to send automated messages that can't be responded to because we know that the real value happens when real people get involved.

I think you've raised some fine points here. eoghan has made some great points in responding.

In building a platform we're aware that there is a large piece around education and ensuring our customers use the system effectively and respectfully. It's in our interest that they do this as it means they'll see happier customers / better conversions and continue to find value in Vero.

Further to that I think there will always be a need for true customer support and one-to-one customer service depending on the situation. We've got a few features to help with this, one example is being able to see what emails your users have actually received in order to better understand their needs when talking to them one-on-one. We'll be adding more over time!

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