I spoke with someone at Netflix when getting support there. Back then (maybe even still) they did ALL support via the phone. They said it resolved things quicker. For us it’s a mixed bag. For some customers, if we can batch the support calls its much faster to deal with the issue on the phone. And the “getting to know your customer” is vital. It’s our core competency.

Again you’re absolutely right! And sometimes we found that it was also easier to just call the person. Although we say we don’t provide phone support, in the past, if we found it gets too complex and a phone call would have been much easier, we made the call.

As for a remote desktop application, we’ve done this too. Sometimes there are some communication issues where it’s easier to just show the customer (although now we’re starting to build animated tutorials such as this one to really alleviate this need.

Anyways, for remote desktop support, what we found is that we don’t use it often enough to purchase a regular service. As well, if we’re using a remote desktop application for our clients, you have to remember that many aren’t very computer literate (if at all), then we don’t want any complex solution. The problem is that most remote desktop application are just too complex for people! For example, RealVNC (a paid product) which I find ahead of the open source tools, that I’ve personally purchased and love using, is still complex for many of our customers. Most computer users (not just our customers, ask your folks, siblings, friends, etc.) have no idea what their IP address is, never mind what an IP address is… So what we generally use is CoPilot from FogCreek.

We use this product because it’s incredibly easy for our customers. All we need to do is instruct them to go to the CoPilot website, enter in a number that we read over the phone, and away we go! It isn’t free, about $10 a session for one time sessions (you can buy larger plans but we haven’t really needed to yet).

I think the key is also to make your program as easy as possible to use and have good documentation. I’ll be honest, and I might have mentioned this before, but we get an unusually small number of customer service requests when you factor in our traffic and sales. As well, most of our support is pre-sales questions asking if LandlordMax can do things it can’t do (because they can’t find any mention of it on the website). For example the most common question we get is if the software is networkable. The current version is a standalone desktop application only. We are planning on offering a web based version in 2007 if all goes well, but it’s not available yet. So when they can’t find anything about this, they ask us. And to be very honest, we like that, it really helps us gauge just how much interest there is in pushing this product forward.

The other more common questions we find are going to be addressed on the website soon. For example one question is how many units can I enter into the software which I I talked about here on FollowSteph in the past (and how to address the question on the website’s copy).

Anyways, getting back to your question, you’re very right in that it’s also much harder to offer an annual support contract for a consumer product. It’s possible, but I don’t think based on our current metrics that it would be worth the venture…

I’d love to hear of a solution to this issue, I just don’t see it. And like you implied, it’s easier to sell with enterprise software. Actually, from my personal experience, it’s generally a big part of the deal itself. And often it’s even higher than the product, depending on what you consider par tof the annual support costs. Some companies make their whole profits from this alone and nothing else, where the sale price is a loss leader…

The company I work for operates in the enterprise market, and it is almost entirely phone support. It is quite expensive to run, but is factored into the annual support contract. I’m not sure if this is even possible with a consumer product.

Some companies may get a lot of support calls (making this a viable solution), others very few…

I have to admit for the amount of traffic and sales we get at LandlordMax, we seem to get very few support calls as a total percentage.

I completely agree with you. But again it comes down to both our cost/benefit. In our particular case, only about 7% of our customers used phone support. I don’t know what the metrics would be if we had to charge them $100/call, but I assume it would drop significantly. If that’s the case, assume less than 10% would still call (for sure much less than half), than that means we’d be opening up a support call center for 0.7% of our customers!

The issue here is that we don’t have the economies of scale to support that. If you’re Microsoft or Intuit, as I described above, then it’s great. 0.7% of many millions of customers is a lot. For Microsoft alone that’s probably many millions itself! And don’t forget they can also reduce their per call support costs in many ways through economies of scale.

For us, in a fairly niche market, I doubt we’ll ever sell $1 billion worth of software a year. The market just isn’t that big. You have to remember only a small percentage of those who own property rent, and most of the rentals are owned by an even smaller group (those that would need the software). I’m not saying it’s not a great market, it is for us! But the idea is that we have some financial constraints on what we can offer in terms of economies of scale.

Let’s assume we sell $10 million in software a year. And that 0.7% of our customers would be willing to pay for phone support. That means that for $70,000 in revenue we have to open up a call center (assuming free support). If you charge per call, than at our current price, that’s a call center for 466 people, or $46,600 in revenue to support and maintain a support center.

I know that might seem like a lot, but if you start to add in the costs, it quickly adds up. Money for renting the space, equipment, phone systems, credit charges, billing, etc. And don’t forget the biggest expense, salaries.

With our numbers, it just doesn’t make sense until we hit $25+ million or more in yearly revenue, at least that’s my take on it right now. We’ll see again in the future as the odds are I’ll give it another try…

Support should certainly not be free. Don’t forget there are customers though whose time are worth more than money alone (who’d rather spend time with their kids than fiddling around with a property management software), and wouldn’t mind paying for it to sort things out.

Great question! Actually we’re in the process of removing the phone numbers from the website this week. They should all be gone by the weekend.

As for how we’ll answer the phone, we’ll do just like in the past. If someone calls asking for support we say we don’t provide support by phone and their more than welcome to submit us a request by email or through the other online means which is guaranteed to be answered within 1-2 business days, but generally within the same day. The voicemail will also say that phone support is provided through email or online, much like before we tested phone support.

The phone lines will still be open for 2-3 weeks after we remove the phone numbers from the website just to give people a chance to adjust to this new change. After that, we’ll no longer accept any more support calls, we’ll direct to the online support.