17% of founders are spending 4 hours or more on customer service a DAY. You?
I saw this over on Twitter, and even though it's on a Twitter poll, I found the results fascinating https://twitter.com/helloitsolly/status/1304345888614121472
17% of founders are spending 4 hours or more on customer service daily. That's almost 30 hours a week, which for some people would be a full working week.
How long do you currently spend? Do you think 'doing things that don't scale' means constant customer support in the first weeks and months? Is this a good problem to have?
I'm really interested to see if other founders find themselves addicted to their messenger bots and set themselves unrealistic goals in terms of response times?
@thesaasypeople Thanks for featuring my poll Reece
The reason I posted it is because so many modern founders have been told to do things that don't scale.
When it comes to delighting customers, I have some founders (clients of my freelance work) who spend insane amounts of time managing customer service experiences.
Frequently this is above expectations, which is great.
However I also note that some of these founders appear to you use it as a technique to procrastinate or a blocker to more productive or proactive work.
I guess I am trying to learn is having an instant support service appropriate for an early stage startup or are there smarter ways to go about it. What about proactive support like knowledge bases, workshops, templates responses, onboarding calls?
When do you stop doing things that don't scale?
I spend around 1-2 hours. Sometimes more. We also have a chat widget where we have support ppl 24x7 answering basic questions and collecting leads.
With each process in our company, as a founder I have tried to do less and delegate more and give responsibility to others. It has worked in engineering and in marketing. However, in case of support, the problem is that if you don't pay attention to support for a long time you drift away from the customer and really lose touch of what the customers want and what product itself
Founder of Pebble - Eric Migicovsky has this to say:
Every interaction with a customer is a chance to delight them and find out more about how they use your product. Clearly a founder, long-term, will have other priorities but in the early days I believe they absolutely should be doing CS while working to reduce those requests.
For the first couple of years I did customer support at a similar rate. It can never be a bad thing having the people responsible for the vision of the business closest to the people that matter (customers). Particularly when you're scrambling around trying to reach PMF.
I have since scaled back a bit, as we have a customer success team in place, but still check in regularly and probably ave around 1-2hrs per day.