[tlogan]

The key point of the article is this:

> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.

Every inexperienced entrepreneur starts with a promise that their support will not be terrible like Google, Comcast, or other big companies. And that will be their path to success.

But in the end, you learn that you need to offer the same level of support that other companies in your market offer. And if your support is really better, nobody will really notice. It does not matter.

And inexperienced entrepreneurs are stubborn (a good trait). So they usually have to learn that lesson on their own.

[solarkraft]

Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I tend to tell people when I have the rare good support experience.

[tlogan]

I do the same.

Only very (awesome) good and very bad experiences are widely shared.

The problem is that creating a truly great (awesome) memorable support experience happens less than 5% of the time (as you said it is rare). And that experience is shared to 10 people in average: not really a lot.

[elevation]

I think this is spot-on for the business of shipping podcast players.

But big-company-style support is only inevitable if your company must scale. Many markets can sustain players with higher margins and a premium product+support.

[tlogan]

I disagree. But that is that what I learned.

Sadly, it is hard to convince people of this unfortunate and depressing fact: customer support is nice, but in the grand scheme of things, it usually does not matter that much.

Everybody has to learn that lesson on their own.

[hn_acc1]

That depends. My employer sells to enterprise / Fortune 500 companies. We have very responsive support staff. We've been around 15+ years.

The question was asked: would we ever consider a scaled-down version of our product for the consumer market? The answer was: we don't know how to give bad support, so we can't play in the consumer market.

So I'll agree for the CONSUMER space. For the B2B space, companies with good/great support do exist. Now, maybe our level of support is similar to other companies in the same space (no idea), but if you escalate, you will have someone respond within a given amount of time, we take our SLAs seriously, etc, etc.

Anecdote: AMD RMAing my Ryzen 1700 due to the hardware issues the early chips had and shipping me a new one, no questions asked definitely improved my feelings towards AMD compared to say, Intel's response to FDIV (yes, I am that old - I remember that playing out in real-time on usenet).