Customer support and, in a broader view, customer service can be considered a “make or break” factor when deciding whether to patronize a brand or company; they are important. These days, however, good customer support is lauded and placed on the pedestal too much, ignoring the fact that the best customer support is actually customer support that is not needed. Most people just want to find out the information they want or do what they came to your website to do without having to contact anyone, no matter how quick, effective, or friendly the person on the other end is.

We run a young daily deal platform where the only way we can improve our product is to have constant feedback from our early customers so that we can build something that is wanted by the market. We thus treated customer support queries and customer feedback as reasons to be happy – people are interested in our product, people are engaged with our product, and, now that they have made first contact, we can even show them how quickly and effectively we solve problems for them! The truth is that having to contact anyone on anything is an absolute pain. Quick, effective customer support is simply the best apology that the vendor can offer – a weak compromise – for providing a product, service, website, ebook, game, etc. that basically does not do what it is supposed to do (hence the need to shoot off an email or make a phone call to the vendor).

There are really two broad strategies that a company can employ with regard to customer support: 1) accept that customer support is inevitable, a norm, part and parcel of running a business, and focus on offering the best customer service standards, and 2) treat customer support queries as anomalies or bug reports (preventative customer support), where preventive action ought to be taken by rectifying the “bugs” that precipitated the customer support queries in the first place. Of course, to say that customer support is an anomaly is far-fetched – big customer support departments exist even in the most successful companies out there, e.g. Google, PayPal, Amazon, etc. (though note Amazon’s actual stand on this issue – founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said that “[o]ur version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact.”) The best customer support strategy, in our view, is, unsurprisingly, a hybrid – cure the “bug” that precipitated the customer support query in the first place while being quick, effective, and friendly.

Some companies (deliberately) misinterpret the concept of preventative customer support by making it laborious and difficult for customers to contact them, with methods including hiding email addresses, forcing customers to use a customer support portal ticket system, making the abovementioned process long with many fields to fill up, etc., and then concluding that the lack of customer support queries means that the product is relatively faultless. This form of fake prevention will only cripple the company in question in the long run, because crucial learning points are blocked off and filtered out by an intimidating customer support process. The best way to know if the offering is good is to make it ridiculously easy for people to contact you and at the same time getting a very low number of customer support queries (“you guys are awesome” emails do not count). That way we know that people are not contacting you because there is no need to, not because it is a pain to do so.

Customer support is not a good thing, all in all. It is a glaring symptom of a poorly-made product. People are buying a product after all, and the overwhelming majority of people would choose a good product with poor customer support over a poor product with good customer support (because, really, a good product does not need customer support). Ultimately, customer support is a means to an end – it is a qualitative system for product testing and feedback that should be used to improve the product until, ideally, no one has any more bugs to report.

P.S. I made a distinction between customer support and customer service, because the former is the activity of providing help to a customer who asked for it, while the latter is really a spirit, a culture that is embedded in everything a company does (of which customer support is a small part). Needless to say, good customer service should always permeate throughout any organization that wants to succeed.