Timely, helpful and personal responses to email requests for support have always been important but in the past would probably not have affected my choice of application. This is no longer the case. Now that many of my most used applications reside in the cloud rather than on my desktop (along with much of my most valued data) the responses I receive to support request emails will without doubt influence where in the cloud I choose to upload, aggregate and organise my data.
Over the past few weeks I’ve sent a number of support requests / feedback emails to friendfeed and every time I received a quick, polite, and most importantly personal and helpful response. I even saw a quick change to the output of the widget after complaining about having to click to show all the images in a media post!
Positive support exchanges with other companies like Tumblr and Claimid have also been key factors in my decision to stick with them rather than competing services.
In complete contrast, a couple of days ago I sent a support request to delicious. I first received an automated response from Yahoo! Customer Care that my support request had been received and would be dealt with shortly. Twelve hours later I received a further message from Yahoo! Customer Care that despite being signed “Florence - Delicious Customer Support” was every bit as generic, unhelpful, impersonal and probably automated as the initial, explicitly automated response.
My experience requesting support from flickr several months ago (who are also of course owned by Yahoo!) was even worse. But is this a problem of scale? Does personal, helpful support simply not scale? Is it logistically impossible for really large companies to provide truly effective support to their users? Perhaps services like Get Satisfaction are the answer?
What seems clear to me is that for services operating in the cloud, especially as the data we pour into them becomes increasingly portable, good customer support could well become the deciding factor between them and their competitors. Now then, what was my magnolia account login again…?
