Hacker News Reader

Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

Huge competitive opportunity here.

All you have to do is hire customer support who is empowered, knowledgeable and actually cares.

Source: support is a competitive differentiator for $CURJOB.

When support needs are infrequent enough on the customer end, this effectively becomes a market for lemons--a customer can't know how good your support is until they've bought your product, and by then it's too late for them. People can advertise world-class customer support for one-time purchases because the few customers that encounter the awful support won't move the needle that much compared to shifting money from long term support teams to sales teams.

That being said, I realize this dynamic is likely much different for frequent/long-term buyers such as B2B solutions where quality support does translate to better retention and word-of-mouth advertising.

> All you have to do is hire customer support who is empowered, knowledgeable and actually cares

Those people you have to pay, because they can do well in other positions. But paying them contradicts the goal of minimizing cost.

I'm not saying there isn't an opportunity to invest in top notch customer service as a product differentiator, but it's probably a safer bet to have barely-existing support and lower the sticker price.

> it's probably a safer bet to have barely-existing support and lower the sticker price.

Depends on the product and the size of the company selling. Sure, in certain circumstances it makes sense to skimp on customer support. In others, it absolutely does not.

For instance, one of the reasons Amazon was so successful when introduced in Europe was its great customer support. Years earlier, IBM had similar success stories.

And one of the biggest complaints around Google.

However Google still seems to be able to sell services with barely any support.

This absolutely works, and was the key selling point for Rackspace when I worked there, "Fanatical Support". Unfortunately it got purchased by private equity and subsequently ruined, eliminated almost all US staff, and offshored everything to India, and this included a rebrand to remove Fanatiguy from the logo and the "Fanatical Support" promise.

While you /can/ make a premium offering with competent support as a competitive advantage, the most short-term profit to be made is then to buy that company after it's established a brand reputation and burn that brand reputation as fuel to produce extra profit until it becomes worthless and anyone who held your stock previously is left holding the bag.

That's a real shame to hear. Many years ago I took over the running of a website that was hosted on Rackspace, and their support really was great. We rarely had problems, but when things did go wrong they always resolved it really quickly.

Private equity asset stripping is a cancer.

I've been at two different companies who also had support as a competitive differentiator. Both of them were bought, both had support stripped and outsourced and both are more profitable than they were.

Sadly, as much as we want to believe it, support does not seem to make enough market difference to justify the outlay.

It's not that support doesn't make a market difference, it's that customer loyalty is a liquidatable asset, and almost everyone wants to retire someday, so good companies almost inevitably will eventually become bad companies and cash out all the good will they've accrued over years and decades.

The only possible solution is some sort of regulation of transparency in ownership structured similarly to banking regulations (routinely moving amounts of money just under reporting limits or in any other way seeming to attempt to dodge scrutiny is considered malfeasance), so customers are promptly and continuously informed when Mom and Pop Shop is bought out by Established PE Vultures™ or Scrappy Small Business gets acquired by S&P #342, Enshitiffication Incorporated or a majority of Public Infrastructure Corporation is owned by Slacktivist Investors Group.

I want it to be obvious, and I want ownership to necessarily be as prominent as branding. "A Unilever Brand since 2003" needs to be just as big as "Natural Small Local Foods Coop Inc, since 1913," so that we can start to associate the corrosion of service and product quality with ownership and acquisition and corporate mandates, and any attempts to overly convolute the source of a clear business direction with scattered minority ownership just happening to band together needs to be treated as fraud.

This only works when there's actual competition.

And most of industry today—but especially the tech industry—is laser-focused on making sure they never actually have to compete on a level playing field with anyone.

that can work out in large scale b2b or expensive consumer goods... but in mass market goods? forget it. people vote with their wallet and only their wallet, as evidenced by the shiploads of (sometimes life-threateningly defective) crap Temu and Alibaba have flooded most Western countries with.

Zappos got a huge exit by having exceptional customer service. Enough people notice.

Yeah. You can win both ways, by racing to the top with service or racing to the bottom with price. I know which strategy I'd rather be part of.

I suspect it depends on the industry and type of product.

In the PLC market, I've worked with Schneider-Electric, Wago, and Emerson support. All three were excellent. They're excellent because they know we're going to choose which vendor to use for our next project based on our experience with the current project.

For protocol bridges, I've dealt with Digi and Real Time Automation. Digi's support was halfhearted at best. RTA spent hours talking on the phone and even dug through a closet to find documentation for an ancient version of one of their products in order to help me figure out how to interface with it. Guess who we used for the next project?

Price is important but my time is expensive. Good support for a more expensive product wins over poor support for a cheap one.

But all this only works because of the nature of our industry. For consumer goods, good support will lose to price nearly every time.

Honestly, I'd rather have a product that works so I don't have to call support when it breaks ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com