"We value our customers" while you're on hold is obvious BS. They could hire ppl, ofc, but it's vastly better to have so few bugs & so good a UX that you don't need so many people to provide support. These orgs pay the price for not having a culture of quality in angry customers.

@allenholub

When I worked at Claris (Apple spinout led by CEO Bill Campbell), new employees were encouraged to sit at help desks for a while first. That way whenever we made a design feature the question was ALWAYS asked - how many tech support calls will that decision generate. We know the cost of tech support. 4 calls and we had lost our margin on the product.

@amkhosla @allenholub is that 4 calls per feature? Or 4 calls per customer over some time horizon?

@jarrett @allenholub

4 calls period. If your margin is $40 4 calls will bring you to 0. (These are 1991 numbers)

@amkhosla @jarrett
I was just on the phone to a "customer service" agent at @verizon for 2 hours! That probably cost them a year's profit from me, and they didn't solve my problem, so I'll probably spend another 2 hours (or more) once I can stomach doing that.

@allenholub @jarrett @verizon
The cost of tech support is non-trivial. So much so that my very last startup attempted to solve that:

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/11/business/technology-need-to-fix-a-computer-ask-another-computer.html

First customer was Palm Pilot, then Activision, then Apple, then the Airlines, etc as we built... Palm proved our model worked when a caller said "Thank you" at the end of the call, on our fourth call. We tried to sell to Verizon. They didn't buy, LOL