| I'm the co-founder of a company that provides "elastic customer service" (influx.com) and I'm happy to share with you what I see happening in practice. Most founders start out doing customer themselves. This is absolutely the right thing to do for reasons outlined elsewhere in this thread. When the business grows, the the founder(s) can't continue handling 100% of customer support, both because there other priorities and because the volume grows beyond what the founders can personally handle. Generally in this "transition phase" time-to-first-response grows steeply. I wrote about my experience providing customer support on a open source project, you can see where the "wheels started to fall off" - ie time to first response climbed steeply: http://moniker.net/2013/07/10/two-open-source-emails-a-day-f... At the time, I felt bad about TTFR growing steeply.
I now understand that it's a really common state of affairs. So at some point, the founders need help, and they either hire or outsource, or do a combination of both. You asked about "the average time it takes you to resolve customer queries". A typical time-to-first response before Influx starts working with a client is 12-15 hours, with a outliers at 1-2 days. On "stay close to your customers" - it's 100% correct but a harder question is "how do I stay close to my customers and scale at the same time?". The answer depends on the size of the business. I see people using a combination of metrics and qualitative insights. The metrics look after big picture health and qualitative insights involve customer support staff bubbling issues back up to the product+dev teams. |