I recently came across the idea that customer support queries indicate that the product is “buggy” in a special way – it is not user-friendly enough. In most industries that sell as-a-service products, customer support is almost a default operation within companies assumed to be necessary and indispensable. What if these companies changed their paradigms, discard the cynicism that no matter how good they make the product, there will be slow customers who just do not get it, and treat every customer support query as a bug report?

Our experience has shown that customers are just as eager to help themselves whenever possible as we as vendors are to help our customers be as independent as possible when using the product. Thus, improving the documentation, user interface, and general ease of “understandability” is actually, or at least ostensibly, a win-win proposition. The fact is that, as customer support queries decrease, customer support costs decrease and profits increase.

Yet the resultant lack of interaction with customers also has a cost – vendors speak to their customers less and thus understand them less. In fact, as businesses, vendors lose valuable opportunities to showcase their top-grade service and thus lose opportunities to convert prospects into buyers and buyers into repeat buyers. Customer support can be a big difference-maker and competitive advantage.

How do you view customer support?