Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

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I love that Sandi does this. However, it doesn't scale. I signed up on the 18th when her blog post about it hit HN. I didn't get a personal email from her but I had the expectation to after reading the post. :/

I'm trying to figure out how to make this type of thing scale beyond your first 100 customers, and I've come up with a few thoughts.

1. Don't create that expectation of a personal connection. This is the most common thing you see at large companies. I don't think this is a good way to do it.

2. Hire someone as the face of the company -- the community manager probably, and send a mix of automated and personal mail from them. But make them the face of the company. This is something I'm responsible for now. And it still has limits.

3. Randomly assign a contact person within the company for every signup. And automate the insertion of their signature in every email. This however has issues with turnover, and the voice of the emails.

So far, I think what works best is automated (but specific) emails from me, the CEO. And then introductions to the rest of the team for problem resolution.

I'd love to hear what others think works best.

Even if the reply-to just dumps responses into a customer support queue, that's better than 90% of mass mail is doing.

Separately, I think it's great if you can have all of your employees involved in the support and outreach process, but that's a cultural thing and thus a bit harder than changing a mail header.

Yes, I think all employees involved is a huge win. In our company of 3, we do that. But one thing that's problematic from the customer's point of view, is:

"Who should I contact to solve my problem?"

The ideal experience in my opinion is a single contact point, with the authority and knowledge to solve every issue you have.

That's of course unrealistic, but I want to find a way to approximate that. The closest thing I've heard is Alla Klein:

http://code.dblock.org/alla-klein-a-fake-person-in-charge-of...

My startup never uses no-reply and someone reads pretty much every reply.

But note that this is not zero cost. The time your support staff spends deleting out of office replies and spam is time they aren't helping real people.

It's trivial to filter out of office messages if you use a decent email program. The false positive rate should be as close to zero as you can get.

Reading every feedback email from every real user teaches you how to create better products. If you make it clear users can provide feedback, there's an opportunity from them.

I ask every single real person who leaves my service why they left, which translates to about 12 emails from me per week. Most of the time, the feedback isn't actionable, but 2-3 of every 50 emails translate to something I can use to make my product better.

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