Time: 23:14 | 05/25/2010 | Download MP3
Summary
Kiran Max Weber and Sarah Hatter, two members of 37signals support team, discuss what it’s like helping out customers, the pros and cons of email-based support, and more.
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Jax
on 25 May 10Hi,
I’m strong believer in email support too, but is extremely difficult to work with clients who wants to do everything on the phone.
What do you recommend in order to get the costumers in the same page (email support) and convince them that its actually better to do it that way?
Thanks
Jimmy Chan
on 25 May 10Waiting for the transcript as well.
Bradley
on 26 May 10Curious what advantages/disadvantages you see in an advanced tool like Zendesk over simpler tools like Tenderapp.
Joey Wendt
on 26 May 10email support for life.
unofficial transcript
http://joeywendt.backpackit.com/pub/2024026-37signals-podcast-transcript-episode-15
Eric
on 27 May 10The bar is incredibly low when it comes to tech support.
I am starting my own business and any support is admittedly very ad hoc and often slow then I would like. Yet people seem very impressed with this support even when the response time is in hours instead of minutes. The standard really needs to be much higher than that…
David
on 27 May 10Hmmm… lets be frank: email-only support is cheaper for the company. It prevents you from being stuck on the phone for half an hour when if you send them an email instead, they spend that half hour without you because they don’t need you for most of the stuff. Once they’ve got you, I find, they don’t say “thanks for the suggestion, I’ll try it” they make you stick around while they try it. Sure, you need to give them URLs, but you can email it to them while talking to them. If you can get it all done in the first email, great, but if they don’t give you all the info, which you agreed they frequently don’t do, now several exchanges have to happen. I agree, its cheaper, and that is why we have to do it. I’m just disappointed, but not surprised, that you did not mention that.
SH
on 27 May 10@David, we don’t make decisions at 37signals based on what is cheaper for our company. In most cases, we make choices that cost us more money than an average company would spend because we believe there’s value in the outcome. We don’t deny our customers phone support because we think it will costs us money, we stick to email support because we have proven to ourselves (over 5 years of email support + experimenting several times with phone support) that right now it is better for our specific customers. Our customers get the answers they need quickly, get resolutions to their issues quickly, can report bugs to us and have them fixed quickly over the phone. It doesn’t matter what it costs us.
If phone support works better for your company, by all means that is what you should invest in. But if you can do a better job another way, I’d suggest you look into that too.
David
on 01 Jun 10Clarification please: “right now” is when the customer calls; 5 or 10 or 15 minutes later when the customer receives the email from you is clearly no longer “right now”. I don’t understand what you mean by “right now.” When a customer calls me, they are getting me “right now.” So I don’t understand what you mean by “right now” but I might after my next question…
Also you said above ”...and have them quickly fixed over the phone.” So you DO offer phone support? This seems to disagree with what I understood to mean email-only support. Since you typed “over the phone” perhaps I misunderstood…
This discussion is closed.