Is customer support really that important?

Allright, before anyone beheads me for blasphemy, I know customer support is all-important, crucial, and epically essential to success. What I’m actually wondering is whether or not it’s a liability, and how best to deal with it if it is. Guy got me thinking about this in his recent review/riff on The Long Tail book by Chris Anderson. He lists several great attributes of the Long Tail. One I particularly enjoy is the possibility for near-zero selling and marketing costs; think Google, MySpace, and YouTube, all built to spread without traditional marketing. Brilliant. But then Guy also includes near-zero support and training costs as an attribute. He says that “one support call or email, and you’re dead too.” This second attribute is called into question by John Dodds’ Geek Marketing 101 post.

John proposes that technical support is marketing, and he lists it as number seven on his list of Geek Marketing ideas:

In the absence of all of the above, your users inevitably need help. A technical support department speaking in non-technical, hand-holding language transforms their purchase from waste of money to life-enhancing boon and is the greatest marketing tool you have.

So is customer support a death-knell or is it in fact the greatest marketing tool you have? My instinct tells me that startups must offer same-day email customer support, no matter what the cost. I know that I appreciate the timely support I get for the web apps I use, and I can’t imagine not offering the same to my customers. Great support is one of those things that can inspire people to become evangelists. So John is right that great customer support is a great marketing tool, although I know it’s not the greatest.

It’s not the greatest because while great support offers a chance for great marketing, I submit that having a highly useful product that is intuitive and easy to use is an even greater marketing tool, and by a very wide margin. The truth is, customer support costs money, therefore you want to minimize the need for it as much as humanly possible. In this way, Guy is right; it is possible for support requests to overwhelm your bottom line, although I think his insistence that “one support or email, and you’re dead too” is going a bit overboard. So customer support can be a liability, but if it is dealt with correctly, it provides a vehicle, albeit a sub-optimal one, for great marketing.

If you’re going to offer great support though, you’d better have a business model for your startup, or you’re really going to be in deep shittake. A great situation would be to offer a subscription-based service that has a free entry-level plan. This is what people are calling the “freemium” business model. Offering a free plan gives people an easy way to try you out, your product, and, your support. In this case, offering great support could be a part of what inspires the user to upgrade to a paying plan. This is one reason why the freemium business model is so great for your bottom line.

John and Guy are actually both right about support then. Melding both of their propositions together, we would say that every startup’s mission should be to first aim for near-zero support and training costs, but then to also recognize that support will invariably be needed, and to offer it in a great way that will win them fanatical loyalty.

Thankfully we already know that the secret to keeping support emails at the lowest volume humanly possible is to create products that are so intuitive, that people barely need help. This is almost all handled by your interface, which is why a focus on great design is of the utmost importance. Still, even with a perfectly designed product, there will always be some support requests.

Once we accept that no matter how simple and perfectly designed our product is, we will get some support emails, we should bend our minds to figuring out how best to lower the number of those emails. Since we can’t hide our email address or suddenly go on a long vacation, we have to find other ways. I think fun training is the answer.

I personally believe in offering this training with text and pictures, and in narrated video screencasts. You would deliver the text and pictures in articles, via a well organized blog. You’d make sure that everything was categorized and easily searchable. You would also have a section for screencasts. I believe that every feature of your web app should have a screencast that illustrates how it’s used, even if it seems like the feature is self-explanatory. I believe in the power of full multimedia to impact people and help them learn better. Plus, it gives the narrator a chance to employ humor and personality, which can set people at ease and help them learn better too. Once you have this great support content, you should highlight it to your users as often as possible. Illustrate how they can answer their questions themselves much quicker using this fun training and documentation than by emailing.

Those are my essential ways to bring the number of support emails down. What else can be done to help us in our quest to eliminate as many support emails as possible? Guy thinks that “your offerings must either require near-zero support and training, or other people must support it for love and glory.” Is it possible then, that just like marketing can cost literally almost nothing as a result of the harnessing of people power, that there is also a way to harness people power to handle support as well? Is there a way to provide support to the masses via the masses, distributing the support load so it burdens no one? I can’t think of an implementation in the support world that is as strikingly persuasive as those we have in the marketing world. I mean, even MySpace has to provide support. But is there a better way?