How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff

Re:How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff by jacquesm on Friday July 30, 2010 @09:27AM (#1561026)

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.

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Re:How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff by justinchen on Friday July 30, 2010 @11:09AM (#1561331)

This model also works because their customers (developers) are very technical so having a non-technical customer support would be very frustrating.

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Re:How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff by noodle on Friday July 30, 2010 @11:12AM (#1561345)

i came here to say basically the same thing. "no support staff" is not the same as using engineers as support staff.

i was expecting more of an article on a startup of 2 cofounders who are managing things themselves.

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Re:How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff by parallax7d on Friday July 30, 2010 @11:33AM (#1561440)

So was I. But technically "No Support Staff" means no one, on staff, doing any support. Thus the customers would have to use a stack exchange or some other type of self-sufficient system.

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Re:How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff by j5eb6ach on Friday July 30, 2010 @12:34PM (#1561681)

Because of its searchable Knowledge Base for customer self-help, we also chose to use Tender (the SaaS platform used by New Relic).

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