Email for issue tracking hasn't scaled for me past the 200 customer mark, after that it was Highrise then FatFree CRM all the way. Way too useful to be considered an "extra".
yea, I figured it probably doesn't work out for all. Though, most "inbox CRM" people I've talked to have scaled well past 200 customers (including us). What is the biggest pain that a specialized CRM solves for you?
Looking at Olark's pricing model it would seem that it would have to scale to 1000 customers + prospects (estimated breakeven for a team of 4 at 20K/month divide by $30 as most popular plan yield 670 customers, assume 330 prospects in pipleline needed to counteract turnover and enable grown) just to get a reasonable breakeven point for a small team. What is the limit of this approach in your plan for growth?
we haven't felt any limit to the Gmail inbox approach - even moving beyond breakeven - and chat actually tends to reduce our overall support traffic by making our conversations quick, and avoiding drawn-out support threads.
In general, I'd say support bandwidth is dedicated more to a "moving window" of how many new customers you have, rather than total customer base. Most customers tend to be pretty low-touch after the first month, where they get most of their questions answered.
(btw, just posted a more detailed reply to your comment on the article itself)