Couldn't agree more. Posterous has great support, Rapportive has great support, I even had a useful, enjoyable live chat with Hipmunk last night.<p>I'd like to see startups have a full-time technically-literate support person in the team by default. Have them sit in on meetings and such, but no time on code, only customers.<p>The return policy for Costco costs them next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. The loyalty they engender because of it, and the two or three extra customers they generate from each of those fans, is worth so much more. It's a great lesson for business large and small.
I don't think it's about support. I think it's about respect and honesty.<p>The collective mentality at many companies (web or not) relays things such as "oh, they're just users" or "well, that's too bad it didn't work out".<p>It's easy to default into the general presumption that great support will solve problems like these. However, the underlying issue isn't support, it's respect.<p>It comes from the top and is echoed throughout the company right down to the customer. Sometimes support issues can't be solved and when they can't, respect defines the interaction. Even when problems can be solved, if a user / customer / co-worker is treated with respect, they typically feel valued and satisfied when they are treated with true respect.
The odd thing about this is that I don't really think it's that bad to offer good support. On my startup (historious) I see almost every user who's emailing us be really surprised when we respond within a minute or so.<p>We're always at the computer and reading someone's email doesn't take that long, or break your concentration very much. I know it's different for large companies, but they have the kind of money to hire good support staff.<p>At those scales, though, you lose something that's even more impressive: The ability to fix small bugs by the time you've replied to a user. If someone reports a bug to us, we usually have it fixed and pushed in one or two minutes, so when the user gets a response saying "thank you for the feedback, we've fixed the bug, you can try again" within a minute of reporting, they become really loyal to the service...
>earn a fan<p>Live in South Korea, die of fan death?<p>But on topic: I think the thing that infuriates me the most is when a support person clearly doesn't read what I write to them. I can't count the number of times I've had to reply and say, "Listen, I know you have canned text to make your job go quicker, because most people haven't researched their own problem before coming to you, but if you'd read what I actually wrote, you'd realize why your response was completely unhelpful."<p>That's usually followed up by another batch of canned text. ARGH.
Actually, I think this sort of infrastructure software may be the one area where it's more important to have good pricing than good support, precisely because the usage scales so large.<p>For example, take credit card processors: if a $50mil/year company has a choice between a payment gateway that charges 1.9% and one that charges 2.1%, they'll put up with a LOT of poor documentation, bad API design, and bad support to use the 1.9% company instead--that price savings is $100k a year, enough to hire a great engineer to deal with the bullshit.<p>Similarly, if you have a choice between an infrastructure company that charges you $300k a year vs. one that's $100k a year, a $200k different buys you a lot of "in house support".<p>When things scale big, pricing <i>really matters</i>.
Support makes such a difference. I just got locked out from my PayPal account and there's no way to get it back without talking to someone on Monday (that's 48 hours away). Seriously, it's a huge company and they can't run a call center on the weekends. I'm going to cancel my account and use the WePay guys instead.