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Comment by thomassmith65 | Hacker News Reader

The author hired someone with technical knowledge, but that's not enough.

Technical knowledge and people skills are different things.

If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you. If your response is focused on "educating the customer" or is too conscious of what's fair for the business itself, it will probably not impress.

Great customer support is the kind that might result in a customer sharing their interaction with friends or social media. The support the author mentions in this post isn't likely to do that.

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Too late to edit my comment, but here is one example of going above and beyond for this business:

Uncommon Apps should create and maintain a pdf document with fair, useful information about competing podcast apps that do not use the subscription business model.

When someone complains to Uncommon Apps about the subscription model, if Uncommon Apps cannot change the person's mind (which will be the usual case), then Uncommon Apps can offer to forward a list of alternatives.

This would allow Castro support tickets to end with something useful. Uncommon Apps is losing this sale regardless, but at least there is some reputational gain.

You may or may not be surprised to find out I have actually done this, and it did not in fact make the user happier but in fact enraged them that instead of doing what they wanted me to do I had pointed them to a competitor.

The most likely thing is that the person who contacted you wanted more acknowledgement from you that, in a lot of ways, subscriptions suck.

If that wasn't the root cause of his/her rage, it might be that the person felt the referral was a way to get rid of them, rather than a way to help them.

It's tricky because communication involves so many soft factors.

> If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you.

Quite the opposite. If somebody has a bad first impression, they will not bother contacting a business. They'll find an alternative.

It depends on the nature of the interaction.

If I contact a company to decide if I want to become their customer, I probably like them.

If I contact a company about a post-sales problem or for technical support, it's a different story.

> post-sales

Then that's not your first impression.

That's fair. I suppose "current impression" would have been a better choice of words.

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