It would be an interesting experiment, but there are also big upfront costs. I think it might be more useful as a poll to let firms know if they should offer support, rather than an actual a la carte model, because the costs of support are include large fixed costs.
I've been on the other side of this, advocating for our internal support team to handle questions about a service we were releasing. Today there is great temptation to rely on social media, etc, and not have a real support service.
For me, it took over a year of lobbying, meetings, etc, just to get the go ahead. Here are the things I had to do:
- gather data on how important it is to provide support by giving examples of customer issues that need support to resolve.
- lobby multiple managers
- get this into planning docs so it can be funded
- create a dialogue tree for support to handle, with triggers for escalating
- find actual devs (other than me) to do tier 3 support when support can't help
- do regular training sessions for the support staff
- build internal tooling for them to use to help look up answers
- hold regular meetings that I came to believe were nothing more than reassuring the support staff that we hadn't abandoned them.
And still, after all this, they ended up cancelling the project after a few years in operation when support got new leadership that didn't favor supporting the service. At that point I was too exhausted to go back and fight the battle again.
It is expensive to have someone provide you with answers. I mean, really expensive. And no one wants to do it, because the downside -- publicly embarrassing the company, setting wrong expectations about what the person on the other end of the line can help you with, etc, are all pointed at the person in charge of support, whereas the upsides -- "helping customers" -- is not something anyone in the company uses as a KPI. It rarely gets noticed in terms of an individual's career path.
After that experience, I really understood the moat of luxury brands. Being able to be a company that excels in non-tangible things such as quality that goes above what the rest of the market can provide or great personalized service is incredibly hard and beyond most companies. There is a whole infrastructure behind you that must be maintained and great vigilance is required to keep that customer experience high. It's something that has to be in the corporate DNA, in the sense that leadership is imbued with this as a motivating factor that colors most of their decision making. That's just not gonna be the case for a very big company, and certainly not a monopoly or market hegemon.
I've been on the other side of this, advocating for our internal support team to handle questions about a service we were releasing. Today there is great temptation to rely on social media, etc, and not have a real support service.
For me, it took over a year of lobbying, meetings, etc, just to get the go ahead. Here are the things I had to do:
- gather data on how important it is to provide support by giving examples of customer issues that need support to resolve. - lobby multiple managers - get this into planning docs so it can be funded - create a dialogue tree for support to handle, with triggers for escalating - find actual devs (other than me) to do tier 3 support when support can't help - do regular training sessions for the support staff - build internal tooling for them to use to help look up answers - hold regular meetings that I came to believe were nothing more than reassuring the support staff that we hadn't abandoned them.
And still, after all this, they ended up cancelling the project after a few years in operation when support got new leadership that didn't favor supporting the service. At that point I was too exhausted to go back and fight the battle again.
It is expensive to have someone provide you with answers. I mean, really expensive. And no one wants to do it, because the downside -- publicly embarrassing the company, setting wrong expectations about what the person on the other end of the line can help you with, etc, are all pointed at the person in charge of support, whereas the upsides -- "helping customers" -- is not something anyone in the company uses as a KPI. It rarely gets noticed in terms of an individual's career path.
After that experience, I really understood the moat of luxury brands. Being able to be a company that excels in non-tangible things such as quality that goes above what the rest of the market can provide or great personalized service is incredibly hard and beyond most companies. There is a whole infrastructure behind you that must be maintained and great vigilance is required to keep that customer experience high. It's something that has to be in the corporate DNA, in the sense that leadership is imbued with this as a motivating factor that colors most of their decision making. That's just not gonna be the case for a very big company, and certainly not a monopoly or market hegemon.