Answering Customer Support

There was a discussion on a mailing list I'm subscribed to where developers were complaining that they couldn't tell if a customer contacting them about their iPhone app is a paying customer or not. This was seen as such a bad thing that developers were discussing ways of creating unique IDs for each customer that would be required to submit a support request. Here is my response.

Shameless plug: Check out our new iPhone/iPod Touch app: Mecrets password manager with the really cool Touch Lock interface!

Maybe I'm being slow, but under what condition would it ever make sense NOT to reply to a support email about your product? From what I can tell, there are a few different reasons someone could email you:

1. They haven't bought your product but are interested, so they ask a question. If you give them an answer, they are more likely to buy your product, so you are increasing your revenue. In addition, you learn about what people are confused about, so you can improve your description and other marketing materials to minimize pre-sales questions and maximize buyers.

2. They have already bought it and have a problem/question. If you answer them, they are more likely to be happy with the product, tell their friends about it, buy upgrades, etc. Not to mention less likely to request a refund.

3. They are not serious but have some time to kill and want to annoy you. In my experience, this is an extremely rare case, and you can easily pick out these customers because they are rude or make ridiculous feature requests.

So why would you want to force your customers to go through the pain of typing in some multi-digit code just to ask a question?

If you want to reduce support, make your product better. It's pretty obvious, but I'll give an example: we had several releases of Pocket Tunes where we focused on all the support issues that kept coming up. After those releases went out, support volume went down dramatically.

Or you can just commit yourself to being a bargain basement developer with no support, which is a fine strategy because you can sell to people who want cheap software that kind of works.

But then again, I'm happy if everyone else gives terrible support to customers because that's another differentiator for us. :)