[HN Gopher] As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support
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As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support
Author : artkulak
Score : 293 points
Date : 2021-09-20 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plumshell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (plumshell.com)
| wenbin wrote:
| Great customer service is the best marketing :)
|
| Oftentimes, I would prefer using a product from a responsible
| sole developer, rather than from a faceless big corp.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| When I ran my own business I had a product in the thousands of
| dollars price range. Phone support for this product would almost
| always be an interesting conversation where I learned a lot about
| customer needs.
|
| I also had a $25 PDF tool with a trial version. For that product
| a lot of the callers had no clue what the product actually did or
| tried to get a $5 discount or some other nonsense. I quickly
| stopped taking calls for that product because it was so
| unpleasant.
|
| My lesson was to offer phone support only for high price, low
| volume items. Phone support for cheap things attracts a lot of
| unpleasant people.
| justinlink wrote:
| For the first few years of my product, I was in the same
| situation of being the solo-developer offering phone support.
| There were a few huge benefits, some mentioned in the article and
| a few downsides. Some highlights:
|
| When talking a user through a set of actions, hearing them
| stumble or fail to understand the UI is quite the humbling
| experience. You literally pay for it with your time as you listen
| to them struggle.
|
| Feature requests over the phone allowed the user to fully explain
| the need and helped me understand why that feature was important.
| The majority of the time a compromise could be struck between us
| where I could fulfill the feature request meeting my technical
| and time requirements while solving the problem for them. You
| can't do that with emailed forms.
|
| A major downside is I would often get sidetracked to solve
| trivial problems for frequent callers who I had developed a
| working relationship with from frequent calls. The squeaky wheel
| gets the oil problem. While some of these enhancements probably
| added great value to the product, it was more difficult to pull
| off the big projects. Maintenance in particular suffered.
|
| In the times of a major problem like an outage or error, I did
| feel some frustration in those rare times. It was critical to
| answer the barrage of phone calls, to let them know we were aware
| and working on the situation. But as the only one who could fix a
| situation, being stuck on the phone in a repetitive loop delayed
| things. I just wanted to fix the issue, where each caller wanted
| to explain it.
|
| It was a valuable experience for me, but I am generally happier
| to no longer have a phone on my desk.
| asimjalis wrote:
| How much do you charge? What kind of revenue is this producing? I
| realize you are getting many non-monetary rewards from this.
| bckygldstn wrote:
| This is an intriguing idea. I have heard before the
| recommendation to add a support phone number to your website, but
| always wrote it off as either out of date or something that only
| applies to large companies. The feedback from talking to
| customers is really valuable to solo developers.
|
| Part of why I run my own business is for the flexibility, and
| guaranteed 9-5 phone support would really threaten that. I wonder
| if there is a way to offer this on a best-effort basis without
| coming across as flaky? Perhaps putting the number only on the
| support page (like OP), but also only having the number there
| when you're online?
| Loughla wrote:
| >but also only having the number there when you're online?
|
| If you make that clear, and explain why, I think it would be a
| good idea. If nothing else, it might even encourage me to call
| with ideas if I knew you were physically going to answer the
| phone.
| konschubert wrote:
| Maybe you could ask people to submit their number in support
| requests so you can call them back when you feel like?
|
| It doesn't give all the benefits of having the number on the
| website, but if gives you the agency and choice.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I ran as a mostly solo developer for several years. I steered
| customers to make initial support requests via email, then
| scheduled calls wherever it was warranted (or sometimes just
| called them back if I had time and it would be more efficient).
| My business phone number was on my website and it went to an
| answering machine when I was unavailable or didn't want to take
| the call.
|
| Generally my customers didn't care what time of day I
| responded, so much as they appreciated how sincere I was about
| solving their problem in short order. Being so intimately
| knowledgeable about the product and able to effect relatively
| quick codechanges where warranted empowered that, and frankly
| the quality of support I provided ran circles around most of
| their other vendors where it took multiple tickets /
| interactions and navigating endless bureaucracy to reach
| someone actually able to help.
| reidjs wrote:
| I've never seen a company try this, but I wonder if an SMS/text
| support number could work. This would help with the
| 'flakiness', i.e., you don't have to respond immediately and
| you can help multiple people at once. No more waiting on hold
| at least.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Many companies will have a similar structure but a different
| implementation, using a website-widget where the customer
| asks for a call-back.
| michaelt wrote:
| I know some people with small businesses who use quality
| 'virtual assistant' services to answer calls when they can't.
|
| Obviously, they're not "first line support" solving people's
| problems - instead, they are "the CEO's personal assistant"
| scheduling a call back.
|
| After all, if you're an accountant or an architect or a lawyer
| or a dentist, there's no embarrassment in running a business
| that's just you and a secretary.
| Inhibit wrote:
| If you can cultivate your customer base to only sell this
| service to folks who want to pay for it. On a timed basis,
| generally. All the upside without the headache of dealing with
| angry people you don't have a business relationship with.
|
| Folks who want to purchase a service are generally grateful of
| getting whatever they're paying for. They realize that's not
| always the case.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| If you have a fine outgoing voicemail message which explains
| this, and call them back during your "support hours", I think
| they're still going to love you.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I've practically never disagreed with a user when they've had
| difficulty with software, or the workflow, or error messages or
| whatever. As someone with a very low tolerance for hard to use
| software myself - I totally git it.
| duxup wrote:
| I find talking to end users incredibly critical.
|
| First app I made for my first job:
|
| The app was made for our customer's partners. Lots of time was
| spent on layout and how this app would be used (they assumed
| everyone was a power user).
|
| I finally get it out in the field and talk to the first end users
| of the app.
|
| They just open the app, immediately hit search, find the thing
| they wanted, do thing and left. That's it, almost every single
| one of them did that.
|
| The whole main page and dashboard type experience our direct
| customer wanted because they imagined their partners were power
| users, nobody was using it...
| [deleted]
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Some years ago I got a librarian (MLIS) degree, and one of the
| things I remember from the training was that when a patron comes
| to you with a "reference" question (you know, the kind of thing
| that doesn't happen anymore, before there was google when they'd
| ask a librarian what they now ask google)... what they initially
| tell you they are looking for (or at least what you initially
| hear/think they are telling you), is usually not actually what
| they want.
|
| The process is a give-and-take "reference interview" where you
| collaboratively get to the bottom of what they are actually
| looking for, not just a simple process where they explain what
| they need and you find it.
|
| This has been very useful and applicable to any kind of tech
| support, and this account reminded me of it.
|
| (Also, btw, applicable to any kind of stakeholder expressing
| requirements/specs too...)
| dongping wrote:
| A related article about the XY problem: https://xyproblem.info/
| Aachen wrote:
| I find it hard to correctly state what I'm looking for when
| asking for help. Stackoverflow is the main example that comes
| to mind but it can be any place.
|
| How were you taught to get to the bottom? When saying what it's
| for, I often feel like I give way too much irrelevant backstory
| that nobody cares about. Or without it, I risk missing out on a
| better solution. Also, if one mentions the goal, people will
| often go "why don't you [redesign the whole thing and] use X"
| instead of answering the question, but perhaps that's out of
| the scope of what the asker can do for a better answer and this
| is more something answerers should avoid doing.
| kindle-dev wrote:
| Talking to users is so, so important if you want to build a
| product people actually want. Discord gets a lot of hate in here,
| but I haven't found a better product for easily engaging your
| users. It's lower friction than a phone call, and it's fun to see
| a small community build up around your product. Eventually,
| people start brainstorming on ways to improve things and even
| help each other out from time to time.
| melenaos wrote:
| I offer mail and skype support, the bad thing about skype
| messages and skype voice is that after the call is ended I don't
| have a mail with the user's requests. because of this, i have
| forgotten many requests and they have to call back to ask me
| again. On the other side when somebody sends me an email I put a
| task flag on it and I work through these flags during my working
| hours.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I can't seem to access this with Firefox, the certificate is
| valid for *.sixcore.ne.jp, not plumshell.com.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > the certificate
|
| But it's an HTTP link. Where are you getting a certificate
| from?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Phone them up, their number is on the web site.
| Aachen wrote:
| Related: I tried calling [insert virtualization company]
| support _because_ I had issues with the website, and of
| course the issues only started after paying for the product.
| When I press 1 for technical questions, it refers me to the
| website 's ticketing system and hangs up. (The sales line had
| me queueing for 3 hours 11 minutes then went to voicemail.)
|
| You're doing it too! The person is having issues reaching the
| site and you're referring them to the site :D
| shaicoleman wrote:
| Works for me. The site doesn't support HTTPS.
|
| Your browser is probably automatically redirecting HTTP to
| HTTPS.
|
| Do you have the HTTPS Everywhere extension installed?
| danpalmer wrote:
| Ah yes! It's HTTPS Everywhere. Thanks.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Does HTTPS Everywhere just blindly redirect you to an HTTPS
| equivalent? That's crazy! (As you're finding out) there's
| absolutely no requirement that a site that responds to HTTP
| will also respond to HTTPS, or will respond with the same
| page even! Could be completely unrelated content. Could be
| controlled by a different party!
| stickfigure wrote:
| We (two developers) offer chat support via Intercom. When an
| issue gets sufficiently complicated, we fire up a video call and
| screenshare. We find this works great.
|
| Maybe there's a cultural difference in Japan, but I think this is
| much better than phone support. There's a much lower barrier to
| sending a chat message than making a phone call, plus the
| communication is semi-asynchronous.
| Aachen wrote:
| For those not already familiar, what is intercom? Is it like
| Jitsi?
| stickfigure wrote:
| Intercom.io. They were a darling of HN for a while, combining
| chat and email (not video) into a single support stream.
| They've upped their prices quite a bit, but also expanded the
| product offering quite a bit. I've used them for many years
| at multiple companies and I'm still pretty happy. Dunno if
| there is something better in the market.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| I would like to offer this service too but don't want to use my
| personal as it's already full of recruiter spam. What services do
| you suggest to use? I see Grasshopper and Dialpad as 2 options.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I really enjoyed reading this. It makes me want to call the
| developer for support just to make my day better. :)
|
| I've worked with a lot of people who don't understand technical
| offerings and analytics well (both coworkers and customers) and
| have learned some similar lessons. Making oneself available for
| these kinds of calls seems like a distraction, but it prevents
| _so_ much more unnecessary and /or misunderstood work than a more
| structured queue as long as it isn't abused. (To do this, hiring
| needs to factor emotional intelligence, too; our talent pool
| defaults to slightly less polite than the older Japanese
| professional customers the author describes.)
|
| I try to maintain small enough connections between teams that an
| informal approach to balancing this kind of support can be used
| and most of the conversations can be directly between the person
| with the direct need and the person who owns the relevant service
| or worked on the project. Trying to scale it and introduce PMs
| and middlemen to save time is counterproductive because they
| often can't explain the heart of the problem, so the interruption
| doesn't pay for itself, and instead of bringing emotions that
| communicate valuable context to the developer, the middleman
| brings emotions related to their job, desire to please their
| boss, frustration at being assigned a low-context task, etc.
|
| So when that "scaling" is unavoidable it's always better to force
| work into a structured process because you might as well minimize
| time and communication if you can't get the right two people to
| connect.
| Doches wrote:
| > ...to force work into a structured process because you might
| as well minimize time and communication...
|
| This works for me, but for different reasons: my "structured
| process" for email support starts with an autoreply that
| mentions that we're a two-person company doing our best, and
| we'll get back to you as soon as we actually can (including out
| of hours if we get the chance), etc. Usually, folks get their
| emotional baggage and "ugh I have to email support" frustration
| out of their system and, by the time I respond with a follow-up
| they've already moved on to the "oh, this fellow human is going
| to help me out" phase of things.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| That's a very good point---design and writing of these
| systems makes a big difference and lets prevents the need for
| further walling off.
| Doches wrote:
| I offer phone support for a niche accounting app
| (https://quailhq.com), and everything in this article rings 112%
| true to me -- but especially this:
|
| > ...all sorts of people call you, and I've really learned a lot
| by talking with users directly on the phone.
|
| Sometimes users call me because they want to report a bug, or
| they've forgotten their email address. Sometimes they want
| business advice (!), or they have a niche feature they want to
| request.
|
| > This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone
| who calls is civil and polite.
|
| Hahahaha. Haha. Hah. Ahem. The biggest surprise to me when I
| started offering support (first email, and then later by phone)
| is how _aggressive_ people can be. My app has two classes of
| users -- one free, one paid -- and the paying users are almost
| invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be
| really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my
| favorite password reset request, etc.
|
| All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have
| something to do with it. Happily, once you break through that
| aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person
| trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and
| become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was
| straightened out together.
|
| It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America
| that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with
| people they don't know...
| silisili wrote:
| > and the paying users are almost invariably polite and
| efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to
| help
|
| I've found the same thing from people. But not in support, just
| in dealing with them.
|
| I move a lot, and inevitably end up giving a lot of things
| away. What I've found is that when I post offers for things for
| free, it attracted the absolute worst of people. People who
| would claim it and never show up, or claim it and tell me they
| could come get it in two weeks. And -tons- of people who say
| they'll take it and ask when I can deliver it. Then get
| offended when I tell them I'm not delivering it.
|
| I still remember vividly a dresser I was offering for free. A
| person said they'll take it, and asked when I could bring it
| over. When I told them no, they replied in all caps something
| along the lines of 'I HAVE A COROLLA HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED
| TO FIT IT IN THERE', like I was the dumb one.
|
| So now I just list everything for a pretty low price, then just
| tell them it's free when they arrive. It cut down on the amount
| of riffraff by about 90%.
| svachalek wrote:
| I've tried the same thing, adding a low price just as a
| filter. It works, but it's kind of a shocking lesson in human
| nature. Offer a $100 item for free and you will never sleep
| again thanks to all the responses, but try to sell it for $5
| and you may not get a response for days.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| Well, yes. If I see a $100 item posted for $5, I'm going to
| be extremely suspicious. That's probably going to be $5
| wasted on something that's broken and worth $0.
|
| If I see a $100 item posted for $0, then it doesn't matter
| if it's broken and worth $0 because I didn't spend any
| money.
| lowercased wrote:
| Good idea. I gave away a large copy machine - industrial
| strength, large size - the kind where you can feed it in 400
| pages and it will do loads of double sided copies and staple
| things in minutes. Nice, but it was old, and I had no need
| any longer.
|
| Put it on facebook market and had probably 40 messages in the
| first 2 minutes. I hadn't realized how easy/automated FB
| makes it to respond. And I felt like I was letting people
| down because I wasn't responding fast enough. Eventually one
| person came to my place to get it, but... they thought it was
| a printer, and they were looking for a printer, so they left.
|
| I kept getting loads of the same "still available?" messages,
| then "when can you deliver?" and "you want me to come pick it
| up?!" messages. Like... it's a $1500 (used today) copier. It
| was probably $7000 new. It has extensions to hold 10000
| sheets at a time. It's serious. No, I'm not _driving to your
| house with this this to see if you might want it_. WTF is
| wrong with people?
|
| Many days later, someone connected. And... it was great, but
| I was so wary/tired of dealing with freeloaders and
| tirekickers that I was suspect with him too at first. But
| this guy ran a boys club a few towns away, and their last
| copier had broken, and they didn't have funds to repair it.
| This was such a windfall for them. He happily came over with
| a big enough truck, loaded it up, kept offering to pay me
| ("are you sure? this is a lot!") and was just so damn
| grateful that I hadn't given it away yet. I'm glad I waited a
| bit longer vs just paying a company to come and take it away.
| infp_arborist wrote:
| I discovered that setting boundaries early is very helpful
| for these kind of transactions. Sentences where I highlight
| that clarity, punctuality and reliability is important to
| me usually dramatically increase the quality of contacts.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >and the paying users are almost invariably polite and
| efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to
| help.
|
| I've seen that whilst contracting and with software sales. I've
| come to the conclusion the bottom 10% of any market is a
| cesspit and I don't want any part of that either as a buyer or
| seller.
|
| I have a suspicion the top end is the same although I've had
| little experience of that.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| The UNIVERSAL truth of sales (and support):
|
| * Give away for free and you WILL be treated like shit
|
| * Charge for the same (even a nominal fee) and people will
| value it
|
| This is known by many names: "Tragedy of the Commons",
| "Economics of Scarcity vs. Plenty", "Reciprocal Value", etc.
|
| But it's a UNIVERSAL result so certain you can plan for it to
| happen and plan to avoid it with complete certainty.
| technological wrote:
| While working as L2/L3 support for a enterprise product, i
| notice that people were not that mean/angry as they sound in
| the email (Maybe it was a wrong interpretation of mine) when
| you actually call them. Even though calling customer sounds
| like lot of time waste but many issues were resolved quickly
| over the phone rather than email/ticketing system. I really
| enjoyed talking with various customers and understand their use
| case and usually used to go beyond and above to help them.
| dougmccune wrote:
| Yes! This was a huge lesson I learned as well. You can spend
| days going back and forth over email with a customer trying
| to figure out wtf they're doing. They get irritated that
| you're not getting it, you get irritated that they're not
| explaining things right. All can be solved with a quick phone
| call or screen sharing. But younger folks new to support are
| often really hesitant to pick up the phone. Just pick up the
| phone!
| Doches wrote:
| I started doing this ("picking up the phone") and you are
| 100% right in that in can work absolute wonders. Folks who
| have grown increasingly frustrated at a back-and-forth
| email exchange are just insanely delighted when I skip
| forward several rounds of mutual frustration and just
| unexpectedly call them.
|
| "Hello, is this Marc? This is Trevor from Quail; email was
| taking too long, let's just figure this thing out
| together." is my go-to phrase, and I've lost count of how
| many customers I've converted from almost-churned into the
| best possible evangelists through the simple mantra of
| "just pick up the phone!"
|
| Absolutely solid advice.
| _benj wrote:
| This was my experience too. I worked for a while in tech
| support for my university and while from time to time we'd
| get frustrated calls from professors that couldn't upload
| their grades or where frustrated by how things looked
| different, it was super satisfying finding ways to help solve
| their problems.
|
| It was kind of an unique situation because I was also a
| developer of the system that I was giving support for thus I
| really had inside knowledge and when things "looked
| different" I could tell them way they looked different and
| how it could benefit them in the new way they looked. I don't
| remember a single case in which after explaining the way
| people actually preferred the "old look".
|
| I see that time as a highlight in my professional experience
| (should emphasize on my resume now that I think about it!)
| shkkmo wrote:
| > It's almost like there's something cultural happening in
| America that's making everyone assume the worst when
| interacting with people they don't know...
|
| I think part of the direct issue with support is that people
| are very used to dealing with extremely poor support from a
| wide range of large companies and are primed for having their
| issues dismissed or being forced through largely irrelevant
| support scripts.
|
| That's why as soon as they realize that isn't what is
| happening, their attitude suddenly gets a lot better.
| reidjs wrote:
| Many companies unintentionally incentivize that behavior
| because the more angry you sound the more likely you are to
| get bumped to a higher tier support agent.
| [deleted]
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Here's an unfortunate lesson learned from a company that was in
| the untenable position of providing phone/tech support for debt
| collection software: the only way to get the people calling in
| to be less hostile was to include a clause in the contract that
| stipulated their license could be revoked if they repeatedly
| abused the support engineers.
| mLuby wrote:
| This is the American approach right here:
|
| "You have to closing all the time. Be aggressive, learn how to
| push. And there is no such thing as a no-sale call. Either you
| sell the client some stock, or he sells you on a reason he
| can't. Either way, a sale is made. Now be relentless." -Boiler
| Room https://youtu.be/2frX1E0deb0?t=113
| Doches wrote:
| No, this is the Yankee approach! No red-blooded Southerner,
| raised on cornbread and unflinching politeness, could engage
| in such relentless pushiness without dying of shame along the
| way.
|
| (alternatively, said red-blooded Southerner might just shoot
| you out of spite. There are...drawbacks.)
| mLuby wrote:
| Good distinction to make.
| [deleted]
| svachalek wrote:
| The free vs paid thing is so true. Just see app store reviews.
| No one expects so much as someone who didn't and won't pay a
| thing for what they are demanding. It's a whole different
| mindset.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "It's almost like there's something cultural happening in
| America that's making everyone assume the worst when
| interacting with people they don't know..."
|
| The US is a low trust society. You can feel it in all aspects
| of life. Companies are very controlling and feel the need to
| constantly monitor their employees, people assume the worst
| from strangers and are afraid to go to places they don't know.
|
| I myself am getting more and more worried when I talk to a
| doctor because I have seen it now several times how people got
| screwed over by doctors, hospitals and health insurance.
| hpkuarg wrote:
| > The US is a low trust society.
|
| Not at all. Almost every commercial transaction at the retail
| level allows you to use a method of payment that does not
| guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money
| (credit cards). You order food for pickup, and the great
| majority of restaurants will let you walk in and pick a bag
| off an unattended table without any attempt to verify that
| you did in fact order what you're taking; and anecdotally,
| I've never had my order be taken by somebody else,
| accidentally or otherwise.
|
| The US is a high trust society.
| mikestew wrote:
| Forget credit cards, the U. S. is a place where you can
| scrawl your name and a monetary amount on a piece of paper
| and people will accept it as if it is cash. If that isn't
| "high trust", I don't know what is.
|
| (Granted, these days that piece of paper gets run through
| Telecheck or whatever, so the risk has gone way down that
| last few decades.)
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| All that stuff is not done out of trust but because it's
| cheaper for them to not verify things. Amazon doesn't make
| returns easy because they trust you but because they have
| run the numbers.
| burlesona wrote:
| Honestly, as I've now lived in 9 different cities all
| across the US, what I've learned is that the US is wildly
| heterogeneous and generalizations about it are therefore
| rarely useful or resonant.
| jaywalk wrote:
| >Almost every commercial transaction at the retail level
| allows you to use a method of payment that does not
| guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money
| (credit cards).
|
| That's not how credit cards work. At all.
|
| >You order food for pickup, and the great majority of
| restaurants will let you walk in and pick a bag off an
| unattended table without any attempt to verify that you did
| in fact order what you're taking
|
| I have literally never seen this once in my life. Where do
| you live where the "great majority" of restaurants operate
| this way?
| samizdette wrote:
| Chipotle and Starbucks do it with online orders. However,
| they do that because they are big enough corporations to
| replace anything wrongly taken for free.
| kaibee wrote:
| This really varies a lot with where you live. I'm almost
| an hour out of philly, very solidly middle-class office-y
| medical/pharma area and yeah, the sushi place I go to
| (not a chain, local place) just lays out the stuff on the
| counter for pickup, and you just look at the attached
| receipt since you actually what _you_ ordered. This would
| of course be ludicrous to do in some parts of the city
| itself.
| IncRnd wrote:
| >>Almost every commercial transaction at the retail level
| allows you to use a method of payment that does not
| guarantee that the seller will actually receive that
| money (credit cards).
|
| >That's not how credit cards work. At all.
|
| Not the OP, but that's exactly how cards work. When a
| card is swiped the seller doesn't receive the funds until
| possibly days later. There is absolutely no guarantee
| that the seller will actually receive that money, since
| it can be disputed or charged-back.
| jaywalk wrote:
| In retail, the actual risk of not receiving money for a
| credit card transaction is pretty low. In the case of a
| stolen credit card, the retailer is not responsible for
| the fraud and will be paid. Outside of some sort of
| mistake (or outright fraud) on the part of the retailer
| that they refuse to correct, the fact that the credit
| card was physically present resolves pretty much
| everything else.
| void_mint wrote:
| > It's almost like there's something cultural happening in
| America that's making everyone assume the worst when
| interacting with people they don't know...
|
| I would probably compare it moreso to just the abysmal state of
| quality of support, even for expensive or important services.
| Call your health insurance provider and try to get something
| changed/fixed in a reasonable fashion and you'll be met with
| red tape/nonsense/phone tag. I am a person that usually starts
| out angry on any customer support line, only because of the
| shenanigans it takes to get someone on the phone in the first
| place.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have
| something to do with it.
|
| I worked in a call centre for a summer in southern England
| dealing with deliveries for a high-end retailer, and I can say
| with 100% conviction the stereotype foreigners have of the
| reserved, mild upper-middle class English person has no basis
| in reality when you're a mere peasant on the phone to them!
| Some of the rudest, pettiest, most completely unnecessary
| conversations I've ever had happened that summer, their
| complete lack of perspective really made me rethink how I saw
| the world.
| dougmccune wrote:
| > It's almost like there's something cultural happening in
| America that's making everyone assume the worst when
| interacting with people they don't know...
|
| My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first
| tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have
| fairly useless scripts they have to run through. You're dealing
| with a human (sometimes), but it's about the equivalent of
| dealing with a robot. It's hard to remember to have empathy
| when whatever you say is met with a standard, often nonsensical
| readout of the next thing in their script. So I think we've
| trained people to expect a horrible first tier experience.
|
| That said, I've done a lot of B2B enterprise software support
| and have found exactly the same thing as you. Initial emails or
| calls will come in and the tone is aggressive and impatient. I
| think this stems from the assumption that the response will be
| useless (until maybe it gets escalated 3 times to someone
| actually useful). But when you respond as a capable human who
| legitimately is trying to help them out (and not just pass them
| on to someone else), suddenly the tone totally changes and you
| have wonderful interactions. People are incredibly
| appreciative. Nobody is used to a support person actually
| solving their problem. Hell, they're not even used to someone
| replying to them at all most of the time. The bar is on the
| floor. So when you exceed that bar and actually help someone
| quickly and efficiently, they turn into super fans.
| treeman79 wrote:
| People forget they are dealing with a human being even in
| person.
|
| Having worked retail you ARE the company. Not a person.
| Someone doesn't like the company, it's okay for them to treat
| you like dirt.
|
| Obviously not everyone, or even a majority. But bright that
| I'm glad to stay away from it.
|
| I've also seen Vice Presidents at companies train managers to
| scream at vendors. It's just part of doing business for them.
| christophergs wrote:
| Very true. This is one of the amazing things about Stripe
| support. They are the only large company where the first
| person you talk to actually has a clue
| abuehrle wrote:
| Interesting. I've had the opposite experience. Stripe is my
| favorite company, and I look to them constantly as
| inspiration for how to do things in my business, but their
| support is comically bad -- wrong, clueless, and, in some
| cases, actively misleading.
|
| The developer chat room _is_ awesome and helpful. Maybe
| that 's what you're talking about?
| ollien wrote:
| One thing I've been impressed by is that Chewy has no phone
| tree. It's direct dial to a human who actually can help
| with most issues. Apparently their reps commonly get
| mistaken for phone trees out of instinct.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first
| tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have
| fairly useless scripts they have to run through. You're
| dealing with a human (sometimes), but it's about the
| equivalent of dealing with a robot.
|
| Tier 1 is of course script-based, it's simply an efficient
| approach to troubleshooting without forgetting any angles.
|
| The issue is when the tier 1 agent is on three or four
| support chats at once, or when they have KPIs for average
| email/chat/call handling time, going over which docks their
| pay.
|
| Multiple concurrent interactions are particularly bad, and
| there's little opportunity to do anything more than just go
| through rote script steps, and resolve or escalate quickly
| before moving to the next one. The end result usually is that
| the customer gets subpar support without any actual human
| dimension, and the agent somes to preemptively hate the
| customer.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Yes. Battery-cage poultry farms are about as humane as most
| outsourced call centers. It's not uncommon to have support
| desks trying to deal with 500+ requests a day with just a
| single handful of agents. The agents have KPIs, the
| outsourcing company that they work for has brutal and
| rigorously enforced contractual SLAs to the first-party
| company that they are providing service to.
|
| It's a very dark and depressing sector to build software
| for.
| azalemeth wrote:
| > The bar is on the floor. So when you exceed that bar and
| actually help someone quickly and efficiently, they turn into
| super fans.
|
| I had this exact experience from the other side with Seagate
| the other day -- completely unexpected and out of the blue.
| I'd had a few drives on a raid fail. I spoke via a chat app
| with a support agent who _listened to me_ , understood my zfs
| configuration and accepted the "smart status: failing now" as
| grounds to RMA.
|
| When I then was late actually doing so (because I was an in-
| patient in hospital and a colleague replaced the drive), they
| gave me a prepaid ups label as a get well soon card. I note
| that their competitors are doing things like calling
| different drives "WD red" and "WD blue", with very different
| drives inside and reaching to the bottom.
|
| Net result? The next 40 TiB raid will probably have iron wolf
| drives in it. I didn't expect to come away from an
| interaction like that with a vague feeling of brand loyalty,
| but actually by _not fucking it up_ and letting me speak to
| someone who knew what zfs and smartctl was _as first-line
| support_ I found myself _massively_ impressed by it, quite
| unexpectedly so. Business that are xkcd /509 compliant
| deserve more.
| strbean wrote:
| > It's hard to remember to have empathy when whatever you say
| is met with a standard, often nonsensical readout of the next
| thing in their script.
|
| Personally, I have greater empathy for people in those roles.
| Working support must suck, but being first line support in a
| call center truly sounds like hell. I'm usually pretty good
| about not letting my frustration with the
| company/product/support process spill over and cause me to
| mistreat ground-level workers.
|
| Maybe there is a cultural/linguistic phenomenon at play here,
| where Western/English-speaking cultures rely more heavily on
| synecdoche, so we just view the support person purely as an
| extension of the company/product causing us problems?
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > Working support must suck, but being first line support
| in a call center truly sounds like hell
|
| I've worked support, it truly is hell. I reserve most of my
| empathy for the front line support staff. When things are
| shit, it's almost never the first line support staff's
| fault, so it's not fair to take my frustrations out on
| them.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| I've worked support, it truly isn't hell*. Show the user
| that you care about their issue and can help them resolve
| it; project confidence; empathize. That's all you have to
| do. Unfortunately, none of that is possible with a
| language and culture barrier in the way, not to mention a
| script or KPI's full of useless information you have to
| collect.
|
| * Also unfortunately, most companies' hiring mentality
| for support is "warm butts in seats", and to top it off,
| oftentimes they prohibit their support from providing any
| kind of resolution to various genuine issues. In which
| case it definitely is hell, and the fact that people
| continue in these positions rather than jumping ship at
| the first opportunity only enables these businesses.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > Show the user that you care about their issue and can
| help them resolve it; project confidence; empathize
|
| I did all of this, was good at my job, and there wasn't a
| language or cultural barrier. It was still hell.
| touisteur wrote:
| I worked as 'the software guy' on a big customer infra
| project where I'd be 1/4th of my time on customer sites
| reproducing problems, narrowing their cause, asking users
| to show me how they broke it, testing exhaustively and
| exhaustingly new releases or quickfixes w/ specific
| complaining person at customers' site, writing detailed
| descriptions of new versions, relentlessly opening
| tickets as a customer advocate but also triaging my time
| and tickets. The rest of my time would be fixing some,
| pushing colleagues to fix others, documenting,
| reproducing, proposing changes to avoid whole classes of
| problems... And implementing features (either asked by
| customer and I had time, or new feature idea that we'd
| fit in customer's budget twice - once as a prototype/PoC
| and once as a qualified feature).
|
| It was one of the best experiences in my life and
| 'software' in that system was quite the gamut. I loved
| over anything being the voice of the customer, bringing
| back some reality in an org that can be quite
| bureaucratic, myopic to real needs and forgetful of
| problems.
|
| It also was the time I spent the most political capital
| and when I discovered I was appreciated but to a point
| and that you can be right and lose, and that some people
| feel the customer is 'the other team' and you play 'for
| them'. Quite eye opening about what happens when words
| (customer obsession) meet KPIs or actual incentives...
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I think companies deliberately and abusively do this, use
| front line support staff as human shields from their
| customers. This isolates the people inside from the
| consequences of their decisions and the front line will
| take the brunt of it.
| dheera wrote:
| I think also the process to get support is part of what
| causes the loss of patience.
|
| For example being forced to listen to a 2-minute recording,
| then they ask you to punch in your account number, so you
| do that, and then the first thing the representative asks
| you is for your account number. Like WTF I just entered it,
| it should be popping up on your screen. And then they try
| transfer you to someone, and then that goes to a voicemail,
| so you hang up and then try the whole thing again 5 more
| times.
| void_mint wrote:
| > I think also the process to get support is part of what
| causes the loss of patience.
|
| This exactly. In my city, Comcast's phone support is
| nothing more than "Did you restart your modem? We'll send
| out a tech", which can take days.
| munificent wrote:
| _> It 's almost like there's something cultural happening in
| America_
|
| Everyone can fill in their pet theory here, but mine is that so
| much of being American these days is disempowering.
| Corporations have so much power that not only do they not care
| about us, but we can't even avoid using them.
|
| Get sick? Good luck fighting your giant health insurance
| provider or hospital conglomeration.
|
| Looking for an entry-level job? Navigate a Kafka-esque
| application system only to (if you're lucky) work for a
| miserable low-level manager who also has no power and transfers
| that anger onto you.
|
| Want to spend time with friends? Their preferred communication
| medium is now one of a couple of huge social media companies
| with horrific privacy policies and a history of emotionally
| damaging its users.
|
| Want to go to a show? Have fun buying overpriced tickets from
| one of the two or three ticket monopolies and then pay an
| exhorbitant, insulting "convenience" fee.
|
| So everyday, in many of our basic daily rituals, we are
| reminded of how little agency we have in our own lives and how
| much we both depend on and are subject to the whims of
| billionaires (who, meanwhile, are busy destroying the Earth).
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Agree. I've had this experience far too many times where I
| call tech support and explain the problem to me and they're
| like "sorry there is no button for me to enter that into the
| computer" or when I need some report/export and people are
| like "sorry my computer cannot do that".
|
| You're talking to a human, but they behave like a broken
| robot.
|
| Also there's the 30 minutes waiting music that repeats every
| 1 minute a cheerful recording of someone saying "your call is
| important to us". It's obvious that it isn't, or else they'd
| hire more people so that they can pick up the phone more
| quickly.
| ufmace wrote:
| I've mostly found the humans pretty helpful actually, at
| least at the places I've called. What drives me nuts with
| most phone support is that it makes you spend 20 minutes
| wading through a phone tree offering the same automated
| options as the website. If I'm calling, it's always for
| some weird thing that isn't handled automatically, if I
| wanted to do one of the easily automated things, I would
| have already done it on the website.
| bserge wrote:
| On the other side, you get "Sup, the fuck do you want? I'm
| not getting paid enough for this shit"
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Most of the time I'd prefer that to what you get instead.
| Lammy wrote:
| >Also there's the 30 minutes waiting music that repeats
| every 1 minute a cheerful recording of someone saying "your
| call is important to us"
|
| Even these manage to be dehumanizing to the employees some
| times. W*lgreen's has one that interrupts every minute to
| say "our staff is busy answering other calls", and the
| singular "our staff is" annoys me every time, like they
| view the front-line humans as just a possession to be
| exploited for every possible cent. Human Resources, if you
| will.
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Part of the cost cutting culture is embracing incompetence
| and using IT systems to provide a consistent, albeit shitty
| experience.
|
| Everyone aspires to make their customer facing business like
| McDonalds because it's cheaper to measure outputs from a
| broken system than to effectively lead humans.
| bserge wrote:
| None of those are exclusive to America. Not even the first
| one. Get sick in Europe? Best hope overpriced Ibuprofen works
| or you're gonna do a hell of a lot of waiting. Just to get
| some dipshit who tells you to take a paracetamol and chill.
|
| Try to get a fucking job in Europe. No one is hiring because
| you're a tax burden. "But you're protected". Just not for the
| first 6 months. Or anytime they decide to fire you for
| bullshit reasons and you get told to move the fuck out of
| your decent apartment and drain your bank accounts if you
| want any benefits.
|
| Friends? Heh.
|
| Shows? Overpriced and garbage.
| Doches wrote:
| > Get sick in Europe? Best hope overpriced Ibuprofen works
| or you're gonna do a hell of a lot of waiting.
|
| Live in France, _cannot confirm_.
| bserge wrote:
| Well, let's hope one day you need an actual specialist.
| drstewart wrote:
| >Live in France
|
| Live in America, _cannot confirm_ your little anecdote
| about all Americans assuming the worst.
|
| It's funny how Quail's front page seems to be filled with
| glowing reviews from cynical aggressive Americans but
| none from the cheery French. Weird.
| pjerem wrote:
| On the health side, as someone with a chronic disease, I
| must say that I'm really grateful for the French healthcare
| system. I had a lot of quality care for basically zero
| euro.
|
| However I see it falling apart everywhere day after day
| with not any political will to stop this (and i can even
| feel the will to let it fall voluntarily).
|
| I know it's still top notch compared to most of the world.
| But I'm so sad to see that governments of the last decades
| just didn't care about fixing the issues while they were
| still manageable.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Best hope overpriced Ibuprofen works or you're gonna do a
| hell of a lot of waiting. Just to get some dipshit who
| tells you to take a paracetamol and chill.
|
| I live in the Netherlands, and this is the most frustrating
| thing about the healthcare system. I've had innumerable
| instances where the local GP recommends Paracetamol and my
| family doctor actually diagnoses the real problem.
|
| It's a running joke in this country:
| https://amsterdamshallowman.com/2019/07/dutch-healthcare-
| par...
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| To be fair, medicine is most just theater making people
| feel cared for while their body heals itself. They could
| make the theater more elaborate and expensive, but to
| what end?
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > To be fair, medicine is most just theater making people
| feel cared for while their body heals itself.
|
| I already take the placebo effect directly; if I'm going
| the trouble of dealing with your travesty of a medical
| system, it's because that _wasn 't sufficient_.
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| totally agree. If you want to value the christian values are
| might be cancelled by the big companies because you are not
| woke enough.
|
| Time's over. US
| Tycho wrote:
| > _Get sick?_
|
| While you wait for your appointment, research your condition
| using any of the free, high quality medical knowledge bases
| on the web, and/or connect with a community of other internet
| users with similar afflictions to get advice/perspective.
|
| > _Looking for an entry-level job?_
|
| Learn to code and become an in-demand knowledge worker. In
| the mean time, perhaps monetize your existing skills and
| assets by becoming an AirBnB host or Uber driver or delivery
| driver.
|
| > _Want to spend time with friends?_
|
| Use a widely available asynchronous messaging service to
| organize an outing, perhaps using a money-transfer app so
| that one person can take care of booking etc. If you can't
| meet in person, maybe you can have a video conference on one
| of the various free platforms, or just have an extended group
| chat with your friends.
|
| > _Want to go to a show?_
|
| Browse the web for a vast selection of shows you would never
| hear about otherwise.
|
| Not that these points negate your complaints, but I think you
| paint an unnecessarily miserable picture. I think that in
| itself is one of the big cultural problems of America and
| elsewhere.
| gazelle21 wrote:
| I cant tell if you are trolling or not. In case you aren't,
| all of your solutions involve a large amount of free time
| and money. Something a lot people don't have, I worked in
| the restaurant biz before moving to tech. It was brutal,
| even getting a day off to go to the doctor would cost me a
| large portion of my pay check. I was able to "escape" due
| to having a solid support system, a lot of my former
| coworkers did not have this.
| infogulch wrote:
| I vouched for your comment because you have some good
| points. You were likely downvoted for your first sentence
| because it's a (couched) accusation that GP is trolling.
| Consider omitting that statement next time, it does not
| add to the discussion. See the HN comment guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Tycho wrote:
| Hmm I could be wrong but I suspect that people spend
| record amounts of time watching TV (or equivalent) and
| record numbers of people own devices like smartphones
| that facilitate all of the above activities. Doesn't seem
| like time and money is the barrier you make out. Also
| they were not meant as solutions but as options that
| didn't exist in the past.
| infogulch wrote:
| Frustrated trying to just do normal human things because
| you're blocked by corporations and are powerless against
| them? Have you tried Just Don't Do That (TM)? Instead of
| doing what you wanted, try doing something we allow you to
| do. Powered By Technology Systems (R) will help you
| maximize what little agency you still have left, namely, to
| sit in your residence and consume the internet. The real
| world is no longer hospitable for humans, so just don't do
| anything!
| inside65 wrote:
| Not to negate the issues presented, but the severity
| seems overblown. Since when is using social media to talk
| to friends or going to a show of the nature implied here
| a "normal human thing"? Pretty sure majority of the
| world's population are living their lives without these.
| Seems like first world problems. Maybe that's the real
| issue plaguing americans, and I say this as an american
| myself, they have too many "first world problems" and
| don't appriciate simpler things.
| bool3max wrote:
| People don't have time for all that, nor should they.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| > _It 's almost like there's something cultural happening in
| America that's making everyone assume the worst when
| interacting with people they don't know..._
|
| It's the same in Germany.
|
| > _Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and
| people realize you 're just a person trying to help them out
| they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite,
| and we get whatever it was straightened out together._
|
| Yep, indeed. Especially once they realize it's the developer
| they are writing with, not a support agent. I always have mixed
| feeling about it, because I don't deserve to be better treated
| than the frontline workers of our company.
|
| So maybe it's a western thing after all?
| cloudwizard wrote:
| Part of the problem is that many American companies
| deliberately give you the run around to stop you from
| cancelling service. Spaces, a Regus company, is the worst. You
| have to submit your issues to accounting in TX but they won't
| talk to you. You talk to Support which can't actually help you.
| They threatened to call the Police when I complained in person.
| It took months but I caught them in a lie and threatened
| charges. A full refund immediately.
| soneca wrote:
| My theory for that is that companies in the US have a culture
| of prioritizing support tickets by a product of
| "outrageousness" and reach.
|
| If you sound like your next step is to sue the company, they
| solve your issue before the ones that sounded understanding and
| forgiving. Same with reach, if your complaint reach HN front
| over or get traction on Twitter, it is solved first than those
| that just sent an email.
| leesalminen wrote:
| That's so funny, I did the exact opposite at my company. The
| nastier you are in ticket the slower we were to respond.
| Eventually word got out that if you're polite you can get
| answers from the CEO. If you're rude, you go to the back of
| the line and don't have a chance of talking with anyone
| beyond tier 2. It took a couple years for everyone to "get
| it", but it mostly works now. We only actually ever got 1
| letter from someone's family attorney (read: the customer's
| sibling). We just sent a FU nasty gram back on letterhead
| from our huge multinational firm signed by a partner and we
| never heard from them again.
| vmception wrote:
| There are basically no consequences when you are in a position
| to pay for something. You are either subsidized by a
| benefactor, have something else figured out (employment,
| recurring revenue), or are on a corporate account.
|
| Whereas the people that need things for free are overleveraged
| to the hilt where everything is indeed consequential.
| Doches wrote:
| While I'm not disagreeing with you, that's not really the
| case here. If anything, my free users tend to be retired
| hobbyists while my paying users are running local, in-person
| retail businesses on usually razor-thin margins. They're not
| subsidized or entitled; they're working their asses off and
| barely making things work (which I can confirm, since they
| run their business on my software).
|
| And "overleveraged to the hilt" implies that they have access
| to finance, which is certainly not universally the case. I'm
| working on a Stripe Treasury integration, which for a fair
| few of my users will be their first dedicated bank account
| for their businesses.
| nightpool wrote:
| > "the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient
| while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR
| SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request"
|
| I wonder if part of the issue is that paid users feel more
| confident in getting their concerns taken seriously, while free
| users feel (perhaps unconsciously) like they have to exaggerate
| the problem and shout to be heard? I can see that as a very
| natural learned behavior for modern users.
| Doches wrote:
| I hadn't thought of that as "natural learned behavior" but I
| think you're definitely on to something there. I'm not sure
| when, but sometime in the last decade I internalized the
| lesson that the best way to get through an automated phone
| system is to scream profanities or mash buttons on my phone
| until I'm redirected to an actual human: a mode of social
| interaction that I would be _mortified_ to engage in in
| literally any other situation.
|
| But I must have learned to do that because it gets results,
| or at least gets me to the humans faster. I guess what
| frustrates me as a human on the other end of that interaction
| is the assumption that you need to raise exaggerated hell to
| even reach my notice. I want to help! But folks are
| conditioned to expect the opposite, I guess.
| tdeck wrote:
| It's definitely not limited to the U.S. though. I recently got
| this email from a new irate user of my side project, trying to
| use an international card that Square wouldn't accept:
|
| > HELP URGENT
|
| > TRYING TO ADD A CREDIT CARD BUT YOUR STUPID WEBSITE ARENT
| ACCEPTING MY CREDIT CARD.
|
| They still had 13 days to enter a credit card, so this wasn't
| exactly "urgent". I think it's that people want to convey how
| frustrated they are so that you'll prioritize the issue, and it
| comes across as aggression. What I've learned from being on the
| other end is that this approach sometimes backfires. I feel a
| strong urge to put off responding to such rants because it's
| draining to deal with these customers, while customers who
| respond positively to help or advice make a sole proprietor
| want to help them more.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>You can detect critical parts of your product
|
| THIS!!!
|
| Not necessarily phone-only, but the help line/desk is an
| incredible goldmine of information on the actual in-field use of
| your product. More valuable than 100 design sessions, focus
| groups, Product Manager opinions, etc.
|
| Yet it is frequently ignored as a cost sink. This is in no small
| part a reason for the declining reputation of 'big tech'. Too
| many product managers just don't want to be pushed off of their
| 'vision' for the product by the actual in-field reality (Win-11
| seems to be the latest victim of this myopia).
| taf2 wrote:
| This is how I started CallTrackingMetrics... I answered as many
| customers calls as possible- talked to and listened to as many as
| I could and then tried to put it all together building a solution
| for marketing attribution and contact centers along the way - the
| we use internally with over 60 employees....
| xyzelement wrote:
| I would abstract this topic to: talking to your users is
| important, and phone is a high-bandwidth medium.
|
| In particular, it seems like this developer recognized that phone
| connects them to their less technically savvy users, who - by
| being most different from the dev himself - can give him the most
| valuable outside perspective. Depending on your market, if you're
| trying to sell into non-techies this could provide hugely
| valuable insights.
|
| In general, the closer you are to the development side of things,
| the more you have a very specific (and I guess "correct") model
| of how your system works. By default, all of your
| documentation/support forms/etc implicitly reflect this model.
| But if your users model the thing in their brain differently,
| then your help/form aren't the most helpful in educating them or
| eliciting their true feedback/problem.
|
| One final thing - I have seen 'magic' where developers who chafed
| at tickets coming in from support staff (withdrawn, user error)
| would all of a sudden get excited about rebuilding something when
| the user themselves or even the support person, just explained in
| a higher-bandwidth way why the problem is real. It's easy to read
| a ticket and go "oh that's dumb, they should just do X" but on
| the phone/in person you go more into like "oh, this is a really
| reasonable/nice/smart person who's trying to use my system to do
| something important, and it's not letting them."
|
| Gets a totally different type of results.
| gnicholas wrote:
| There have been a few times that I've offered phone support for
| my solo startup. When people email demanding it, I often do not
| offer it as an option because I can sense they are belligerent
| and it would be unpleasant and possibly unproductive.
|
| There are other times where I will suggest it to a user who I can
| tell is struggling with emailed instructions, or who cannot
| explain what he/she is seeing on screen.
|
| One thing to remember: you can block caller ID if you dial *67
| before the number. Don't want to have users calling your cell
| inbound!
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| This varies by country:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Disabling_caller_ID_...
| ram_rar wrote:
| I wonder, are there startups/apps that can build voice menu for
| phone calls for SMBs/indie developers? I guess, it ll be lot
| easier to derive insights from support related calls to improve
| product.
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(page generated 2021-09-20 23:00 UTC)