Chiming in on “the support issue”

37signals recently posted a blog entry over at Signals vs. Noise that a large number of people took to be a call-to-arms against providing customers telephone support. As Sarah (repeatedly) pointed out, it was nothing of the sort, and rather was meant as a call to companies to evaluate their current support strategies, and to not feel tied into providing one type of support just because they have before, or because everyone else is doing it.

I don’t think that Sarah’s comments are at all out of line. Her post talks specifically about telephone and e-mail support: 37signals has (always) decided not to offer customers telephone support. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Companies have a finite budget to spend on support costs. Is it better to take that and divide it into multiple streams, or is it better to focus it?

The answer is probably “it depends on who you are”. I think that 37signals has made a fine decision here — their software is web-based, so chances are that most (all) of their customers have access to e-mail. On the couple of occasions where I’ve had to contact their support, I have always received a very timely reply from Sarah, Jason, Matt or David about the problem. Contrast this with the phone support that I’ve received from various companies where I’ve had to wait on hold for hours, and still haven’t received a resolution to my problem.

The ultimate goal is to provide fast, accurate answers to customers’ problems. If you have the resources to do that properly through 2 or 10 different channels, that’s great. If you’re only doing a half-assed job in 2 places, can you reduce it and do a stellar job in one place instead?