Extraordinary support? You’d better blow my mind.

"There are real skills - mainly people skills,"

This. If only more companies understood that.

> Things that require builder and makers of your product to be fully accessible to your CSRs. So you need to staff for that as well.

From the perspective of said builder/maker I can say this can grow into a huge problem if not handled well. Once your product/service gets deployed in multiple timezones, your support turns into 24/7, even if not advertised as such.

Suddenly the developers whose jobs used to be nice cosy nine to five start getting called at ungodly hours to offer some insight into customer problems. Nobody likes that, especially not without getting paid.

> Personally I’d never claim to offer extraordinary support - the expense is insane. There are cheaper ways to brand - with much smaller downsides.

Depends on what you do and how much you charge for your services. If your product is twitter, yes support is expensive. If your product is a CRM with $1K annual price tag support is cheap (providing your application has a decent UX and you fix identified, repeating bugs).

Thanks to all big enterprises; banks, telecoms, paypal etc. people's expectation from "extraordinary support" is a decent answer within 24 hours, "24 HOURS". That's it. That's nothing, easy to provide and people will praise your name for doing it.

So actually for any kind of B2B business with good margin "Support" is cheap and ROI is insanely good.

The reason I'd still be tempted to offer it is to use that painful expense to force the company to be better in other ways.

Bad support doesn't save money overall; it just shifts the costs from the vendor to the customer. So if the vendor is facing the true costs of awkward, confusing products, I think they'd be more likely to keep those costs as low as possible by continuously improving things.

Not all support folks with people skills are technically lacking. Likewise, not all people with technical skills are bad with people. You're probably used to seeing folks who are one way or the other, but there is a middle ground.

These are the people who can keep your globally distributed sharded multi-master database at 100% availability for clients. They can also sit down with one of the project managers from one of those client teams to help that person better understand exactly how queries are routed and what sort of load balancing is going on. That project manager will then be more effective in requesting resources for their side of things.

I won't claim these people are common. But they do exist.

True, but it does act as a word of warning against using their services I guess.

This is valuable advice that I appreciate. I want to know who I can trust to do business with. Where else can I find this stuff out?

Rant: "blabla sucks repeat"

Much more than a rant: "here's what not to do if you are a business; why not to do it; how it makes your customers feel and here's a perfect example"

This one is squarely the latter.

It is, but it contains some truth... many people lately go around thinking the can do amazing things(see: almost any startups). Amazing support, amazing API, amazing whatever. Same for the job specs, "The best position in the world! With nerf gun fights every day!". When this was not an extremaly common thing it was cool but now many of this things can be seen a negative thing. I immediately believe that 90% of these people are liars because it's easy to make big claims but really hard to maintain the them. And the more you claim the harder it will be. In the end the first impression I get of you is that you are not reliable, which is not very good.

Not fair. The essence of the rant is that PayLane overpromised and underdelivered. That's a very key takeaway and there's a lesson there that applies EVERYWHERE.

[EDIT fixed typo]

Just talking semantics. But we all know what it was supposed to mean

That's what I was thinking. 'Extraordinary' swings both ways.

"where each client expects "

The lone developer should ensure that client expectations are correctly set. Honestly, it is their responsibility and not the customers. Customers always want everything unde the sun. How you handle their expectations is the key.

Having been a lone developer, it's difficult balancing dozens of clients, let alone hundreds.