[jwr]

This is excellent advice. I will add to it:

If in a small company you are spending a certain percentage of time/money/effort on support (probably 10-15%), there is no reason for that percentage to be different in a large company.

Go through that again with me, please. You've been spending 10-15% of your time listening to customers and providing good service. When you grow, why would you want to provide worse service?

And yet, this seems to be the established thinking (oh, we can't possibly provide direct E-mail support at this scale, let's hide our contact information and make customers jump through hoops just to contact us, and let's keep our support team small so that we can make more money).

Your customers will report lots of issues, and yes, some will be bogus. But most will point to real problems, either with your software, your hardware, your usability, your processes/procedures, or the limitations of any of the above. If people write to you, it means they took efforts to contact you: do not just discard their reports as "bogus".

Another way to look at this is that every bug report is worth its weight in gold, because for every customer who reports a bug, there are 10 others who do not, and just stop using your app/service/whatever.

Also, if you ever extend/automate/scale your support, make really really sure that there is ALWAYS a way for at least some user reports to make their way to developers, designers and architects. Otherwise many valid bug reports will get stonewalled and lost. See the recent Apple FaceTime ("facepalm") fiasco for a good example of this.

[SpicyLemonZest]

An organization with 5 customers can babysit each one to make sure they’re happy in 10-15% of their time. An organization with 1000 customers couldn’t do that even with 100% of their time. The only way to maintain a fixed allocation of customer support funding is to make it less high-touch as you grow.

[jwr]

I respectfully disagree. Note that 10-15% of resources of a 5-customer organization is very different from 10-15% of resources of a 1000-customer organization, assuming your customers actually pay you money (generally recommended).

This means that even assuming you get no benefits of scale (and you should be, your software/product should improve as you learn and support load should fall), there is no reason why you can't provide the same level of support as your organization grows.

The problem is that people assume for some reason that a larger organization can't dedicate 10-15% of their resources to support. This is why whe get crappy support or no way to contact the organization at all.

[PeterisP]

This is all about scaling. You want to do 10x the customers with 2x the employees, so that the business finally starts to make money. The service level that took 10-15% of your resources back then would take the majority of your resources now; the same % of your resources now is much less hours per customer.

[nacs]

There shouldn't be a linear increase in support requests with a larger customer base.

As your product scales to more customers, the percentage of support requests generated should be going down as you improve your product and support documentation based on existing customer support requests.

[sk5t]

This ("shouldn't be a linear increase in support requests") is true some of the time, but not all of the time in all lines of business. Make a thing foolproof, and the world will go on generating greater fools, you will see a greater variety in weird requests or bizarre expectations, etc.

[Aeolun]

The number of requests may scale linearly, but the number of actual issues won’t.

[jwr]

But that's my point, isn't it? If you want to do 10x the customers with 2x the employees, you will be cutting into your support resources, and your customers will suffer.

This is exactly why we (as customers) all have to suffer bad or no support. And sadly, we put up with it, mostly.

[SpicyLemonZest]

There are serious overhead costs to running a company 10 times as large. If you also have to hire 10x the employees, you'll end up needing to charge more than most customers are willing to pay. (Customers who are willing to pay out the nose generally do get good customer service, even from organizations that are normally bad at it, up to and including teams of engineers deployed to the customer's office to help out.)

[a1369209993]

If you have 200 times as much revenue, why don't you have 200 times as many employee-hours?

[Swenrekcah]

I think most companies want economics of scale, but even if they don’t:

Finding 10 good engineers that care about your customers is difficult but doable. Finding 2000 is much much more difficult.

Trusting 10 engineers to communicate with customers without promising things they shouldn’t, mentioning upcoming features that hurt current sales, have generally good communication skills, is again difficult but doable. Asking that of 2000 people....

[bostonvaulter2]

That highly depends on how much money you're getting from each customer