Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

I run an app with 16,000 users and receive 2–5 support tickets per week. I read every one of them.

Around 20% of my app has been built based on user suggestions.

People are generally kind and promote my app across multiple platforms for free. I don't have any budget for marketing.

Users don't always show their appreciation with words. Instead, they show it by eagerly helping resolve issues providing clear steps to reproduce bugs, sending screenshots or videos, and responding quickly to follow up questions. I also regularly come across people recommending my app on Reddit or in YouTube comment sections, which often surprises me. :)

If you're supporting your users well, they're probably giving back in their own way too. :)

It’s interesting that you did the experiment, and I appreciate you sharing your results. It all seems reasonable, even if a bit depressing.

Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.

It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.

I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.

When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freebie) and they do not care about anything else. It’s the digital version of the “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.

Some times you’d get a little satisfaction from someone who realized there was a person who cared on the receiving end of that email address. Made it feel worthwhile.

Most of them are just doing some transactional game where they think that they can exercise some power over the company if they complain loudly enough.

This also has a lot of cultural differences. Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean. There were casual threats of violence from time to time and 90% of them came from one country, which I’m not going to name but I’ve added it to my mental list of places not to visit. It was weird that it was so consistent.

> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.

Every inexperienced entrepreneur starts with a promise that their support will not be terrible like Google, Comcast, or other big companies. And that will be their path to success.

But in the end, you learn that you need to offer the same level of support that other companies in your market offer. And if your support is really better, nobody will really notice. It does not matter.

And inexperienced entrepreneurs are stubborn (a good trait). So they usually have to learn that lesson on their own.

I’m sorry all the airchair geniuses in this thread feel compelled to express how they’re so much smarter than you and would never fail… or at least, never admit it.

I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.

You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.

By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.

Technical knowledge and people skills are different things.

If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you. If your response is focused on "educating the customer" or is too conscious of what's fair for the business itself, it will probably not impress.

Great customer support is the kind that might result in a customer sharing their interaction with friends or social media. The support the author mentions in this post isn't likely to do that.

Building rapport is not the reason for doing this. Being liked by everyone is an impossible goal. And yes, there is a class of customers who are power users who think their input should dictate the development roadmap. And yes, there are users who become psychologically reliant on you as their personal Geek Squad. And yes, there are non-technical people who encounter hard to reproduce bugs, who it's worth taking the time to work with if they can help you isolate the problem.

But doing it for "likes" is a terrible idea. I was once put out as a coder to be a public face of a big AAA game, on their dev forum, to interact with fan requests, and I think that was catastrophic both for my own sanity and for the company that chose to field fan mail that way.

With your big fans, you see what you can do about their feature requests. Never promise anything. With people who encounter real bugs or otherwise provide signal, try to turn them into sleuths and get them to beta test your next release. Draw boundaries. Letting your users be your testers is enormously valuable, so respect them and don't stop listening to their feedback. But the overarching goal here is to get value out of the process. Explicitly not to waste your time on being "liked". Because the kind of people who become obsessive over your CS responses are actually the worst customers who don't want to pay for anything anyway, and expect everything to be free.

What I'm saying does not mean to pull back on customer service, at all! It means that the goal is to improve your product, not to suck up to all those categories of customers in the hopes they'll like you more. They will or they won't like your product, and in the end, whether they personally feel that affinity for it is based on their enjoyment of it. If it's based on their sense of importance at being able to order you around, they're not your real customers anyway.

As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.

Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".

> We have heard this before, but we cannot see it or replicate it. The user gets to do work for us and/or get no resolution

Well, if you're not willing to resolve individual customer's problem then don't expect to build goodwill with just prompt reply on support!

- we don’t care about your pricing feedback. We’ve thought a lot and won’t change our minds

- we don’t care about your vaguely described bug unless it’s been reported multiple times (go use something else, I guess?)

- we don’t care about your easily reproducible bug either, unless it affects a significant % of users

- we don’t care about feature requests, we already know what’s best

This would be a standard approach for an enterprise product, but for a small independent app it’s not surprising it would fail to build rapport with their user base.

(note: I am not a user of this or any other podcast app)

US Mobile, TJ's, Amazon, Apple, Mullvad, HN come to mind when I think of companies with great support and I recommend them because of it.

All of these are closer to essential services with competition and frequent problems so I appreciate and interact with the support frequently.

That's a common mistake. Since the support is of the level you've experienced yourself

> I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use.

You should realize that many people don't contact support with their issues, so the fact that you haven't heard about it before doesn't mean much

> putting too much time into support isn’t a differentiator

> It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request. If I did, by catering more to persnickety power users

Sure, why would a user care about how much time you put into declining to improve the app for them? How is that a differentiator, almost every single app doesn't cater much to power users

Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!

Let's review some common areas.

- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.

- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.

- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.

- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.

- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.

I’ll tell you even more, in enterprise b2b saas, usually the company paying few thousand per month would have less questions and requests than the one paying few hundreds.

Also, I think that we want to communicate with a company (Human or AI), and not a person, quite often. As you’re supporting a business transaction, not making friends. There’s a certain anonymity that comes with the business transaction. I wouldn’t ask for a refund from a friend.

I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.

The cases I can remember is bike rental company that didn't want to provide a receipt, airline that didn't want to accept a complaint (by making impossible to understand complaint flows), company that didn't stop stop marketing email after several reports.

So many companies are treating their customers incredibly badly.

This becomes a tax on the companies that does not treat their customers badly.

Bad customer behavior is a cost of doing business - and I honestly understand why customers are coming out hard.

When I started doing technical interviews I wanted to be different than other companies giving canned unfortunately.

I naively thought that explaining candidates what went wrong would be appreciated, because I would've wanted to know if I was in their position.

To the guy that had 20 technologies in their CV but failed to answer on any topics I would suggest:

"Anything you put on a CV increases the risk of you being asked about it. Maybe try to move those you don't want to talk about to previous experiences instead of a "skills" section. If you list C but can't answer basic pointer or compilation questions, or you put Node.js but can't talk about eventemitters or TypeScript but can't describe a union, you are casting a giant doubt in the other 17 technologies you have listed, even though you might be great at them."

Just to be met with a 300+ likes post on LinkedIn about how my company expected the impossible, was _hiring a team instead of an individual_ and how I was the worst interviewer in the world.

I thought it was a one off, but months later I would get occasionally angry candidates emails arguing my feedback and how I didn't understand how good they are.

Then I realized why corporate bs talk it is the way it is. Genuine content and feedback, especially in the social media age is a liability, it has more cons than pros.

I turned out that customers are not ready to pay for support. Cognitively, paying for a service and paying on top for this service to work well is not consistent.

As a result, people have minimal support and complain. But they don't value good support either.

NB: companies do pay for (insurance) support, especially for swift resolution. But consumers or small businesses don't want it.

The answer might often be to understand the users' needs better in order to design for it. But OP seems to have a clear idea of how the app should work already. So...unclear.

IMO this is the problem with the standard App Store business model: free with In-App Purchase. In that situation, the vast majority of people who email you are not customers but rather freeloaders.

My own App Store apps are all upfront paid, which eliminates the freeloaders, so support emails never overwhelm me. Perhaps I'm not maximizing my potential revenue, but I'm doing fine and prefer this business model and relationship with users.

Even with regard to bug reports, paid customers are more invested in doing some "work", responding to my requests for more information about the issue, because they've already invested money into the app and want a return for their investment.

Maybe if your product would get more valuable if you were connecting users together and you were moderator of the community, it would've been different, but it is quite different product to sell.

This seems an incorrect assumption, or at least a conclusion built on incomplete information and consideration of additional factors. The first one that comes to mind is that these customers will on average be the heaviest users. That doesn’t make them less valuable, that makes them the exact ones most like to be willing to refer others to your product and the most able to do so with specifics on their recommendations and, hopefully, a positive endorsement of the service received, not just the product features.

This implies another aspect as well: even if good support weren’t to get you wider positive awareness, poor customer service and even average service that nonetheless has more negative recommendations to other can lose you business, and that too can have a compounding effect.

In general there’s also no getting around the fact that a smaller number of people will (or should) have disproportionate support requests, unless you’ve got a very homogeneous user base with homogenized use patterns. Or your products &/or documentation are of poor quality.

It’s probably not a bad idea also to take most support requests that aren’t inherently specific to a customer and require intervention as an opportunity & need to review your documentation, perhaps auto surface the most relevant bits it when a person submits a request with a an option “if this answered your question click here and we’ll mark your message as resolved, otherwise we have it, and will be in contact with”.

There’s no getting around the need to provide support and it’s possible for some businesses there could be an ideal global min/max that provides least effort & service cost for then elasticity of price & quality and customer tolerance, but I think if you find yourself in the mindset of “what’s the worst I can get away with” instead of “most I can afford to optimize long term contentment and good will referrals, you could be looking at things wrong. I’m not sure what “relationship” should mean in any case, if not something like what I’ve described.

Well if you want to "build relationship" by ignoring people actually using your product seriously while calling them names behind their backs, there are plenty other podcast apps

I also am old-school and would expect reasonable support / fixes from $200+ software packages back in the day. These days, for apps? I use like 3 on my phone, so I'm not the target consumer..

This is a podcast app. It's in no way essential, how did you use to explain this to your customers ?

It only works when you have a path to not only listen but also improve the situation. If 10% of calls or emails are related to X and you can solve X, then you can reduce 10% of calls or emails. Otherwise is just fixing problems manually but not going to the root cause.

"Your product should be cheaper". That will be your most common feedback no matter what you're selling and at what price. A large percentage of the population dedicate their entire lives to complaining about prices.

Yes, it turns out "fix the bugs" is a real world solution to "what should we be doing to make people like our app"

It's like they're traveling south to go north, and eventually get there by going around the pole.

This is the opening paragraph. I think a lot of the disagreement or criticism here in HN is from people who recognise the author went into this assuming they know better than basically anyone who's ever done anything in customer service before.

They don't say it, but the author seem to start with the assumption that nobody knows or cares about customer support so they do a rubbish job, and all the author needs to do is go in and try and be a decent human and they'll fix customer support.

And the result was what anyone who's ever done any customer support for even half a day would know: it's not that easy, it's generally infuriatingly hard and demoralising to keep all customers happy, and 10% will take 90% of the time/effort until it drains you. This is customer support 101.

I hope this has waved in the author's face the value of having decent conversations with people they trust in the domain first, as they could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort here. I think the article would benefit and get less flack from acknowledging this is the authors learnings, not some new insight into customers.

Also I wonder people tried charging for escalation (that's what enterprise plan is for I suppose)

The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.

This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.

Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.

Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.

I think you meant "I can think of exactly one customer in two years who was NOT surprised that software costs money"?

Personally I don't think hope is a good strategy. What did you hope for? What was the measurable outcome you wanted? It reads like a big investment with unclear goals.

It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:

> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…

I've often heard stuff like "telecom provider support sucks" or "IKEA furniture breaks easily."

When you ask people whether they researched support quality before deciding on a provider or whether they considered a $3,000 heavy-wood furniture the boomers had, they immediately sense the accusation in the question: It was their decision to suffer these fates. They then tend to get mad fast.

People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill and to disassemble their furniture in 5 minutes. It's exactly why everyone is optimizing for it.

It started with agreeable cases, then ended up on a holier than thou attitude.

> I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email.

> User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized.

> We know about this, but fixing it is a decent amount of work or low-priority because it’s not a big deal or few users see it.

> a human response detailing why I am unable to solve your problem today and am not even going to try is about the worst thing a user can receive!

> Good in theory, sometimes useful, but often the same small, unrepresentative segment with strong thoughts.

> Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request.

Your support policy seems to be more along the lines of "you may e-mail me for an explanation of why I'm not interested in your thoughts" than an actual commitment to support for paid customers. You aren't interested in comments on the payment model, bugs, or feature requests.

> why software lends itself to subscription so well [...] no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email

Especially when you're using it to justify scummy practices, it's no wonder that no matter how kindly and carefully you piss on your users, they know it's not raining.

You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. But does your user experience with other products tell you that you want to subscribe and be nickle-and-dimed for the rest of your life for every last thing? Especially when you're promising to users that while you're still working on the software and that's why they need to pay every month forever, you won't work on the bugs nor features they want? Subscription works "so well" for software because it makes you a lot of money, but it doesn't work well for the users its being forced upon who don't actually want the updates you're working on.

As far as I can tell, your software is not significantly based on ongoing maintenance costs, ergo it does not inherently justify ongoing payments to use. If you let greed stop clouding your eyes, you could adopt the approach that many ethical independent developers use: an option to pay once per major version and keep it for life, with optional subscriptions to try the waters and keep up with the latest and greatest version.

Every line item there has a solution. Even if it is just 4 different email addresses.