Scaling Customer Support for TinyPilot
Indie Hackers - January 28, 2022
Michael Lynch (@deliberatecoder)
In the beginning
I’m super available!
Soon after
- I’m spending 4-5 hours per day responding to customer support emails
- Many of the questions repeat
- Answers aren’t reusable
Founder’s ideal
- Minimize time on technical support
- Customers submit clear steps to reproduce the issue
- Customers read all of your available documentation
- Customers assign fair, accurate priority levels to all requests
Customer’s ideal
- Solve their problem ASAP
- Minimize time explaining the problem
- Avoid:
- Signing up for a new account
- Learning a support ticket system
- Digging through documentation
Support channels
| Support channel | For customer | For founder |
|---|---|---|
| Live chat | Great | Terrible |
| Support email | Good | Bad |
| Ticketing system | Bad | Good |
| Help forum | Okay | Good |
| Documentation | Okay | Great |
Incentivize customers to use better support channels
Customers will use the most obvious email
Restructure to present the better email
Build a FAQ
Create a help forum
- I like TalkYard
- Open-source
- Indie developer
- Managed hosting starts at $2/month
TinyPilot’s help forum
TinyPilot’s help forum
Benefits of help forum
- Builds a public corpus of technical help
- Useful way to search past error message
- Users help each other
Shared inbox >>> private inbox
- Even if you’re the only person answering
- Builds an archive of answers
- Easy to scale up when you hire
- Offers more support-friendly tools than regular email
HelpScout
HelpScout: Assigning threads
Surprises about customer support
Surprise 1
Customers can answer a maximum of two questions per email
Maximum of two questions
Me: Sorry to hear you’re unable to see the remote screen on your TinyPilot!
- Can you go to System > Logs > Get Shareable URL and share the URL with me?
- Can you go hit the F12 key in Chrome and then click the “Console” tab? Does that show any errors?
- Have you tried rebooting the device?
Maximum of two questions
Customer: I just tried rebooting the device. It didn’t work.
Me: …
Surprise 2
Quick responses are bad
Quick responses are bad
- Expectation: “Customers will love my lightning-fast replies!”
- Reality: Customers stop being thoughtful when replies are fast
Why do fast responses make customers worse?
- Low latency in replies
- No incentive to capture all relevant information
- Customer: “If I leave something out, the founder will just ask me for more details in a few minutes.”
Solution: Avoid responding in under 2 hours
- Set expectations on support pages
- Exceptions for legitimately urgent issues (e.g., incorrect shipping address)