Why I haven’t been blogging as much
balsamiq.com
balsamiq.com
If you get so many emails you're not taking enough care, it's probably time to hire somebody to do support...
It's a problem I've been thinking about lately (currently #3 on my list of problems to solve).
Knowledge base, issue management, development ticket tracker integration, auto-replies, templated responses, etc. We had/have a lot of the same issues I know other small businesses have, so we built a tool to fix it.
Feedback welcome, of course. We eat our own dog food, so file anything you find/any suggestions on http://help.tenderapp.com/
I get less than 10% of the number of emails per sale that I did two years ago, which lets me keep up with the business despite it expanding over the years. This is mainly because I tracked what was causing the support emails and started to provide solutions which did not require marginal effort from me. Exactly what approach is appropriate depends on the particular problem.
Take my personal bugbear, license key delivery. It sucks but you have to do it, and huge numbers of customers will fail at it because either they don't understand the concept or their email provider redirects your license email to /dev/null. So you put it on the confirmation page. Solves the problem for some people, but not all. So you put a self-help license key lookup on your website. Solves the problem for some people, but not all. So you adjust your app's purchasing logic to include a random number as a parameter to the purchasing page, which you associate with the license key, and then you have the app poll the server for recently completed sales matching that random number when its license key entry screen is open. etc, etc
Other problems could be addressed by program patches, changes in written documentation, changes in business processes, etc etc.
If you consistently improve on that, support scales pretty impressively. (I support in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand trials a year and about 1700 customers, answering all queries by myself.)
But even with all these tools, taking the time to read each email and reply with a personal and thoughtful message takes some serious time, and time is an un-shrinkable and limited dimension unfortunately.
1. Create signatures in Mac Mail with answers to common email questions.
2. Use a help ticket system. Ours is simple and works great. It includes an FAQ system. FAQs are displayed when the customer chooses the category of their help ticket (in an effort to answer common questions in that category).
Also, we open-sourced it (its a Rails app):
3 employees, let's say 30,000 euros (40,000 USD) per employee per year (data from http://www.payscale.com/research/IT/Country=Italy/Salary/sho... assuming he pays everyone as Project Manager, could be lower). That would be over 100,000 USD per month in revenues.