So many companies are ineptly racing to the bottom with customer service, that when you offer great customer service, your customers are so amazed, they stay with you forever.

Also agree with some in noting the challenge of how you balance this if you have a lot of free customers or a bad vampire-time-sucker-customer. 🙂

I have been starting to observe times where one calls into a company for support, spends valuable time going through the automated system, and then is told they will have $XX added to their bill if they want to speak to a real person.

These are usually not SAAS companies (cable, phone, etc.), but I have never observed a person NOT get extremely angry and want to leave that company when that happens.

Make sure everyone who is doing customer service for your company is happy and on board with your company’s mission. If they are not, it is impossible to hide.

I am finding myself overwhelmed with customer support requests from players who do not pay my company. They enjoy the game for free, as they are welcome to do, as the game is not subscription based. But do you feel that the free customer deserves the same amount of customer support as the paying customer? In theory, we could say yes, but what if it’s not feasible financially?

It’s worth stating that a free customer who feels they are being handled respectfully and kindly by customer support is more likely to become a paying customer — and there is definite value in free customers in the fact that they can promote your brand with their enthusiasm for your game — but it’s very easy to get to the point where the customer service desk is swamped with player help requests, but so few of those players are actually paying into the game to provide the wages of customer service staff. If the customer help desk is swamped and customer service is suffering across the board because of the sheer volume of requests, and there are not enough funds coming in to cover customer service for the 90% of players that do not pay, what do you do? Is the only answer to provide basic customer service (which may be slow or undesirable) to non-paying customers, and premium customer service to the paying customer?

Absolutely agree that customer service plays a huge role whether or not a person becomes a customer. Great article on the topic.

About response time. It takes usually a few minutes to answer to a customer. As we have customers from different time-zones, I happen to answer customers before and after sleep, when I eat or even waiting in a queue in a supermarket from mobile because getting to the computer can take too much time. Such responsiveness is very rewarding.

Before I get into that story, let me say that I 100% agree with this post…as long as a customer is being reasonable — and in my 20 years of experience, 99% of the time they are — it’s soooooo easy to have empathy and tact, and to simply make things right for the customer. So when I read this post earlier today, I forwarded it to my team as yet another reminder on why AWESOME customer support is so critical for our company.

And then a few hours later, I go through one of worst experiences I’ve had as a customer in a long, long time. And this isn’t with a big company like Verizon or American Airlines. It’s actually a small company that, ironically, I signed up for via Groove’s Small Business Stack (https://www.groovehq.com/software-stack).

After paying for said service for 6 months, we realized today that our account had auto-upgraded from the Basic plan to the Plus plan 4 months ago. Yet according to their own reports, our account had never crossed the threshold that would have bumped us into the Plus plan.

“No problem”, I think to myself. “I heard about these guys via Groove, and they even use Groove themselves, so we’ll email them and ask 1) what happened? and 2) can you credit our account?”

They replied, rather tersely IMO, that we upgraded ourselves manually and so there was nothing they could do.

Except that we never upgraded our account, so WTF???

We went back and forth a few more times trying to explain this to them, and they finally replied with, “We can not do that [credit your account], you selected the Plus plan and entered your credit card. Attached are the Stripe logs so you can see this was all done by you.”

Whoa man…first of all, take a chill pill.

Second of all, when I looked at the Stripe logs, I see that the upgrade request, invoice, and payment are happening at the exact same second, AND it’s overriding a downgrade request that happened about an hour before that. To me, it looks like a bug more than anything else. And yet the customer support guy keeps insisting that we are upgrading manually.

Therefore, I’m either an idiot because I upgraded manually and didn’t know it, or I’m a liar trying to get a credit I don’t deserve.

Either way, forget dealing with this guy. I’m gonna try and work this out with a manager that will see I’m being reasonable.

So I googled and realized the guy I’m emailing with is THE CEO!!!

FML… 🙁

In the end, I really liked his product, but I couldn’t stomach continuing to do business with him. So we’ve canceled our account and we’re switching to one of his competitors. C’est la vie.

My own analytics work with SaaS-based products has shown that level-of-engagement in the 60-90 days prior to renewal almost fully predicts the probability of renewal.

Strong Client Support = Reduced Churn !

And that’s critical to long-term product success in the SaaS world…