Roast this idea
Inspired by another roast, I wanted to check my sanity as well.
Problem: The wait-times for online customer support whether via telecom or email can take a long time even in the order of days if there’s a lot of traffic.
Idea: Similar to Disneyland or TSA Precheck, what if customers could pay for an “express” option to get ahead for customer support?
Might be a terrible idea honestly but worth discussing because I found myself in a position recently where I was willing to pay A LOT to get answers immediately for a time-sensitive inquiry. Is it just me or can anyone relate?
What if company/startup has limited resources for customer support?
Not much they can do there :/
I decided not to pursue this idea after doing more research and getting perspective!
Some companies did or do that, even in B2B. This is about how you frame it. One thing is providing the extra value and another is extracting more money for poor service. In our own business, all customers get 24-hour guaranteed email reply service but those who need priority support can upgrade to 4-hour reply for a little extra.
Remember highly overpriced Acer Ferrari laptop from mid 2000s? It came with concierge service, a special technical support phone number that you can call day or night and someone will pick up the phone after no more than four rings. This can be just a rumor though, I cannot find anything concrete that supports this factoid today.
Agreed that it could be seen as extracting more money for poor service; it could be led by the wrong incentives for sure.
Thanks for the input!
It is already there in B2B. They call it by different names - Priority support (like priority boarding in planes), L3 support, etc.
Is B2C ready for premium support? Maybe in certain use cases. Balance of frustration vs need, I think. Bad example - If your refrigerator is down, you would need it back up immediately and may be willing to pay a premium for that.
Yep that's what others have said in this thread as well.
Thanks a lot for the input!
First thought, that would be awesome!
Second thought, that would portray the company as a money-grabbing cold-hearted corporation. They couldn't implement it themselves (and honestly should be improving their customer support).
If this could be done by a middle man that offered it as a service to the end consumer by making arrangements with the big company, that could work. But what would the arrangement with the company be? Or would you have automated bots stand in line for you when you know there will be demand and people pay to take the place of those bots? Could be interesting.
On a different note, though, I do feel like it could just be implemented as a feature of an existing service, so perhaps it isn't a fine business idea.
Thanks for the feedback Jacob!
That was one of my concerns as well — I'm unsure how companies would react to it and whether or not customers would perceive it to be money-grabbing or actually appreciate the option? Perhaps I can set up a quick MVP to test it out?
This comes from a personal experience where I had a time-sensitive situation dealing with a service (won't name it). There were legal implications at which point I remember thinking that I would pay $500 at that moment to get my inquiry answered on the spot but I had to wait ~24h — It felt like a hair-on-fire problem though I'm not sure if others have had this type of experience before.
Implementation-wise, you could think of it analogous to lines at Disneyland. There'd be a standard line and an express line, each with its own waiting time (you could pay more to opt for the express line with lower expected waiting time). The backend list would be sorted in alternating order of serving a standard customer, then express customer, then back to standard customer etc. Naturally, the express line would be shorter and thus it would be faster to get through to the front — this is just a preliminary thought though and could be flawed in many ways.
Overall, the solution would (1) help customers who need hair-on-fire inquiries addressed first and (2) help companies earn more money.
"Turn customer support into a profit center"
Hi Tuan,
What was the form of the answer that you were looking to get as quickly as possible? I mean - were you in need of a specific data that the company had and you could not access? What was this like - a number/a procedure explanation/a contact/you needed to change something about your previous order/smth else?
I'm not asking about specifics, but it would be interesting to understand the shape of the problem.
I have colleagues at my office who'd have to stay on the phone sometimes for hours on end to just change an air ticket, which is nuts.
Thanks!
I don't want to give away the company because the domain is actually quite small but it was basically that I needed to know how to correctly fill out a legal form correctly related to that company's business which had a deadline on it; missing the deadline would result in a big nuisance/penalty.
I ended up ringing up a ton of lawyers to figure it out myself because the company's customer service would take 24 hours to reply back to every email (they didn't take calls) and the discussion was a thread of emails.
In that dire moment, I would've paid a lot for instant service because the burden otherwise would've been immensely bigger.
I might dig into the assumption here that the primary pain point for a customer is only the long wait time. I suspect it's not only the long wait time but A) the collective total time spent (i.e., wait + service time), B) the uncertainty of how long it will take, and C) whether when they finally get to speak to customer support, will they solve the issue.
Brainstorming a couple of solutions:
Now the question is if any of this can be productized, or if these tools are better suited to be built internally. That's where I might dig in
Sounds like premium support, what I think is totally legit and nice to have.
Why not also allow faster queuing defined by the serving company itself and invisible for the customer, so VIP customers are getting faster support than those who have a lower score?
I think in this niche is a lot of opportunity.
There a lot of companies who offer "Premium Support" or similar things for a price. Often its also included in the paid version of Freemium products.
I see this more as a "feature" than it's own company.
Agreed.
I've received similar comments from others that it's more a feature than a standalone product.
I decided not to pursue this idea after doing more research and getting perspective!
I've had a similar-ish idea before. I get incredibly frustrated about once a year when my internet goes out and I spend literally an hour each time waiting for an agent to pick up and then going through all the BS steps to prove it's not user error. I thought how wonderful it'd be if I could call someone, explain my issue and then they make the support call on my behalf. I'd certainly pay to save myself an hour of frustration.
Exactly!
It doesn't happen frequently though; more a once in a while type of frustration.
As others have mentioned in this thread, I must say that it is more a feature than a standalone product. I've since decided not to pursue the idea after doing more research + getting perspective/feedback.
Hope you don't mind me being direct. The idea stinks!
Don't mind at all haha.
I haven't built anything — Just surfing around an idea to see what peoples' experiences/thoughts are so this is actually very helpful!
From the pov of the caller the idea seems fine. Some people will pay.
I think the biggest "customer" you would need to convince is the customer support team. You would need them excited about your product, since they would need to do a bunch of technical changes on their side to integrate your service.
From their perspective they're going to be concerned about the difficulty of integratoin, and they're going to be worried that just having the feature could give their regular customers a bad taste in their mouth. Those people calling in to CX are already a little pissed off because they're having a bad experience, they don't want to feel pressured to dish out more money just to fix a problem that they expect the company to fix for free.
Right. I was thinking about this too.
Definitely a trivial idea that has a host of pros/cons that may also be difficult to integrate. Ultimately tho I do feel the idea is not feasible and could be easily incorporated as a feature of an existing service.
The thing is that people are usually frustrated when they reach out to customer support because the reason they are reaching out is that something is broken that they need to get fixed. I don't think anyone would be willing to pay in that situation!
Just my 2 cents.
I see. Thanks for the input!
I think it already exist:
I think it could be damaging for the company from free customer support to 'pay for priority customer support', especially in B2C.
Also in term of developing a product you could sale, it would require a lot of effort in term of integration with existing paying/customer support API's.
Thanks for the input!
I realized this as well after doing a little more digging into the field — some have VIP functionality that targets the use-case I was thinking.
This is something already offered for Salas and Service businesses. Enterprise package often gives you priority support.
Thanks for replying!
I realized this as well after doing a little more digging into the field and also knowing that enterprise tiers typically have that priority, yes.
Many products and services offer paid premium / priority support.
Yep. Realized it too.
Thanks!
Your ideal customer would have to be someone with high volume calls/support requests (obviously)
I would think like this
While we may have our own viewpoints, at the end of the day, you will have to speak to folks who manage high volume support to get a real time understanding of what they are willing to pay for & what they consider necessary.
It's discovery calls time :)
Agree.
I think a lot of this would definitely just come down to talking to more people across both sides to see if this is something customers encounter frequently or not and also the customer support folks.
Ultimately tho I do realize that this could just be a feature (and for some services already is) of an existing service.
In my mind, it's a good idea if the support call is not about a problem with your product.
Let's say you want to change your address and need to call that's okay. However, if the customer is calling because the product is not working then I would not offer the "fastpass"
Curious why not?
Wouldn't you want to keep that customer happy to retain them or get feedback to improve the product so other customers won't run into the same problem potentially?
yes, definitely the support for a product "failing" needs to be fast! However, I can't imagine a world where you call for help and they charge you money and on something you already bought.
Ah I see. Thanks for clarifying Charles!
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