I hate doing customer support. How do I get out of it?
Let me start off by clarifying that I'm fully aware of the benefits of hearing about how customers are having trouble using my web app. But after many years of supporting the app, I'm pretty tired of answering the same simple questions over and over again via email.
What are your strategies for reducing customer support load? As an IndieHacker who works on multiple side projects, I'd love to spend more time working on strategy and product rather than responding to emails. I'm profitable with the app and wouldn't mind paying for a solution, although ideas that are free are still welcome 😁
Set up a FAQ / bot the answer basic questions. Hire a customer service VA - to handle live chat requests. If the VA doesn't know have them ask you, so you only answer the unique questions.
So I'm curious about this. Aren't VAs quite expensive? And how do I go about training them to answer questions about the app? I would love to have someone else take care of customer support, but I just don't know how it would work. I'd love to hear if you have any experience with it!
Try Tawk out its just a $1/hr - training is essential teaching the product. No need to over think it. Hire a smart VA, spend most of your time doing that and vetting the right one. Then teaching / training is easy
https://www.tawk.to/hire-chat-agents-1hr/
Hire someone who does customer support for you. This is the #1 time saver
Thanks! Any suggestions on how to go about finding someone and training them?
I'd like to add that in addition to having the faq, maybe you can adjust the user flows in your app.
E.g. instead of offering all options from the get go, have only a "next" button first two times (with a smart default) and only offer more options on the subsequent runs for that particular user and flow. I don't know if it's doable for your app, but you say the questions you get are usually simple so I would say it's worth at least looking into to it for sure.
Provide FAQ pages.
Attach some bot that would recognize typical questions and send users to that FAQ.
That's a great idea. I should totally look into some chatbots that can link to FAQ questions. Any suggestions?
Intercom.
Helpdesk, live chat (that your part time VA can use too) with AI article suggestion based on message topic and past responses.
Hi, long time lurker here, my small team and I are currently almost finished building first FAQ bot for a hotel, if you are interested we can talk more details.
No, I don't know. I even don't know if they exist :-\ but I heard about something like that so I suppose they should exist : ) You can really start with old plain FAQ though.
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Thanks for the suggestion! I did set up a FAQ section a couple years back and it definitely did reduce the number of questions coming in, but maybe I need to be mindful of adding new questions as their frequency reaches a certain point. I wonder if tools like Crisp or Intercom can help you analyze common customer support phrases/questions. Do you know?