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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

>which somehow always seem to be experiencing unusually high call volumes...

That's because the times you call, by the laws of probability, are exactly the times when it is most likely to be busy. The same principle leads patients to estimate the business of a doctor's waiting room higher than the doctor or staff would.

There's a name for this type of phenomenon in the abstract, but it eludes me.

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In practice, I think that what we're actually seeing is what happens when customer support is seen as a cost center. The company could spend more on support, or they can add a notice to the call waiting and call it a day.

I don't think it's that. It's just really hard to scale support. It doesn't matter if you shovel money at it, it's still hard. Companies that are growing very quickly will always have periods of less-than-ideal customer support.

I don't think thats true. I work at a startup that's recently raised our series B, and I use our customer service all the time. I always get excellent response times, and I'm treated just like every other user of our product. Our CEO spends a ton of time ensuring that operations and customer happiness are priorities. If it's a focus of the company, it's definitely possible.

Your CEO spending a LOT of time on just prioritizing support probably means that support is a hard problem that needs serious resources.

What are you saying exactly? I'll take the CEO, and the company, that takes support seriously over the one that doesn't. Support does need "serious resources" because it has long-term benefits to the company that too many companies think are not important and don't give it enough priority.

Good examples are John Legere (TMobile CEO). How often do you see the CEO of Verizon or ATT actually showing a human response to customers in public?

The parent said that he didn't believe it was true that support was difficult. I was saying that if it's something his CEO is dedicating lots of time and resources into, it may actually be difficult!

Obviously a CEO a who values support is important, as obviously support is important.

I'd love to hear more about your company and how they scaled support, if you have time, ping me john@heapanalytics.com. If there's something I can do early to make scaling support easier later, I want to know :)

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