One thing that keeps surprising me about Wave is how insanely important good customer support is. If you ask people why they love Wave the top 3 answers are:
- it's cheap
- it's fast
- if you call support, they solve your problem *while you're on the phone* (omg!!!)
- it's cheap
- it's fast
- if you call support, they solve your problem *while you're on the phone* (omg!!!)
I thought the 3rd one was kind of the minimal bar for functioning customer support, but for certain other relevant companies, it's more like you call support and then they solve your problem a week later. Hopefully.
Unfortunately it's easy to quantify the costs of customer support and hard to quantify the benefits, so I suspect a lot of companies systematically under-invest in good support, especially if they rely a lot on hard/quantifiable data instead of free-form talking to tons of users.
Some data points that surprised me:
- ~50% of Wave's headcount is customer support
- ~3% of active users call support every day
- The top reason for calling is to ask for info ("what is Wave", "how do I sign up", "how do I do X", etc.)
- ~50% of Wave's headcount is customer support
- ~3% of active users call support every day
- The top reason for calling is to ask for info ("what is Wave", "how do I sign up", "how do I do X", etc.)
The call volume is really high partly because many Wave users aren't very tech-literate (or very literate at all) and need a lot of help to use the app. Being able to give those folks the help they need is a key part of how we've gotten so many users!
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