Growing Your Business: Time-Effective Customer Interaction | Hacker News Reader

Growing Your Business: Time-Effective Customer Interaction

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13 pointssteiza6 comments

I think this article does a good job sparking discussion. I.e. What do you guys do to balance working on your product verses talking to customers? How do you manage customer service in small teams?

there's two angles here. 1. "how do you deal with support" which is to say, how do you respond to potentially hundreds of questions a day and not drop them, and 2. "how do you decide how much time to spend on support, vs. other things"

As for 1.

I use RT, but frankly it doesn't work that well for us. We're all primarily email people. Nobody wants to use the web frontend

I've worked other places that just used a shared IMAP box; if you were dealing with a customer, you pulled them out of the shared IMAP 'support' box and put it in a shared box by your name (that way, if you were sick the next day, someone else could cover for you) and dealt with it. I'm seriously considering abandoning rt for that solution.

As for 2, personally, I think I often spend too much time talking about stuff rather than doing stuff. But, talking to people requires a different kind of energy from coding, so I'm not so sure that it's eating into productive time. I mean, for me, it's almost a social break. (I mean, if I did it more, it wouldn't be so much of a break; I'm at least moderately introverted.)

What's RT?

We took WuFoo's advice and just used one big shared Gmail inbox (similar to your approach), with one person monitoring the inbox every day. Most day-to-day issues can be handled by anyone on our team.

RT is one of the most commonly-used ticketing systems in the ISP business: http://bestpractical.com/rt/

I think that even when sharing folders it's important for everyone to have their own account. it's confusing if you have multiple people speaking from the same address. You might be able to do that with gmail by modifying the sender address (with a shared IMAP box with everyone having their own client, the sender address can be set in the client config.)

I've done more than a few installs of RT over the past decade, and if I never have to again, then I would say that my life has been successful.

My company (Mad Wombat Software) is building software that would be perfect for you. All customer mails go to a single mail address, and you can manage it from there. Every 'ticket' is owned by someone, but you can set up custom views to simulate a shared queue.

It's got a nice web front-end, but you can manage everything completely through email. We'll be going into beta shortly, and we'd be happy to set you up with an account. Contact me at dave@madwombat.com.

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