How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff (opens in new tab)

32 people is not a small company any more, and if every engineer you've got is also a support person on call for your customers you can't really say you don't have support staff, just that you don't have dedicated customer support employees.

The article does make a very good point though, the best way to reduce customer support is to improve product quality.

Customer support is one of the few areas in a virtual enterprise that does not scale, the costs can very quickly eat up your revenues.

I can't overstate how awesome it is having tech savvy customers. Support requests for S3stat (one of my businesses) more often than not come with implementation suggestions. Everybody who signs up has to at least gotten as far as to get Amazon S3 working for their site, so my userbase is essentially pre-screened for smartness. They just plain figure things out on their own, so if they contact you it's because something is actually broken. It rocks.

Compare that to the consumer-facing site I run where the biggest tech support request I get is from people who can't tell the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org, followed closely by people who sign up for an account, never do anything with it, then demand to have their account deleted.

My next project will be another one targeted at tech-savvy users. I'm already looking forward to the first bug reports with patches included.

We have about the same number of customers (maybe a bit more). We have 2 full-time support staff plus another that does support half-time.

This article makes some good points (about product quality and fixing bugs), but I would counter the article with:

1. Just because you support X customers with 0 full-time staff doesn't mean you do it well. I like to think of our support staff as a sales channel. When you have a great support staff, it builds a reputation for your company and results in a lot of referral sales.

2. A product like NewRelic is for developers/sysadmins. That makes it a lot easier to have engineers support it since they're usually talking to other engineers. I doubt it would be as effective for Saas apps for Joe the Plumber.

Your product makes a huge difference. I'm a company of 1 working after hours and I'm supporting 9,000 users with little more than email.