Do not index
Do not index
TL;DR
- You should start doing customer support once you have your first customer
- Customer support done correctly drives your product roadmap
- Everyone on your team should be involved and you should be doing support daily
- Atlas is the easiest way to talk to your users and understand what you need to build for them; S24 gets Atlas free for 6 months + 50% off for 1 year + free AirPods
Most important things to do during the batch
During the batch, your partners tell you to do two things:
- Talk to your customers
- Build your product
Fundamentally, both of these things are customer support. It may not look and feel like what you have traditionally called customer support, but at the end of the day, what you need to do during the batch is figure out how to build something people want. More specifically, you need to figure out what your customers want. And it turns out, your customers will tell you what they want if you make it easy enough to do so.
Talk to your customers
So how do you learn from your customers? First, you make it easy for them to talk to you by talking to them where they already are:
- (Loops) B2B and early stage → Slack Connect
- (Portao3) outside the US → WhatsApp
- (Superorder) small business or service industry oriented (eg, restaurants, retail, mom & pop shops, etc.) → SMS
- (Respaid) B2C or D2C → chat
- (YC) if in doubt → email
When you find yourself missing things or stepping your cofounders toes when responding, it’s time to get organized with a ticketing system (like Atlas).
Building something people want
Now that your customers can talk to you easily, you want to make it easy to understand how they’re using your app. If you share the same office, you can walk over to their desk and have them show you how they use your app. If you don’t share an office, then you have to get a little more creative:
- use session recordings (via tools like Atlas, PostHog, and/or Sentry) to watch your customers using your app
- tie in your error logs (via tools like Sentry) to see where your app is breaking when they use it
The best antidote to your product ego is watching 5 minutes of user sessions. It’ll ground you like nothing else and give you much better feedback than user interviews.
Why now and who does support
Your rate of improvement is directly correlated with the frequency at which you get customer feedback. If you give your customers the right channels to talk to you and setup the right observability tools, customer support should be happening every day.
Doing customer support grounds your team in reality, so make sure everyone on your team is doing it.
The best way to make sure everyone on your team is exposed to your customer issues and is able to contribute is to make it easy for your teammates to see what customers are saying. You can do this by setting up a support triage channel in Slack that shows all of your customer issues and allows your team to respond directly to customers (or to collaborate internally on new problems you’re seeing).
Why Atlas
If you’ve made it this far, hopefully you’re bought in to the importance of customer support. The next step is to find a tool (or set of tools) to help you do this well. Our worldview with Atlas is fundamentally differentiated from other support tools in that we believe customer support should drive your product roadmap. This doesn’t mean customers have carte blanche, but it does mean that you need to inextricably tie what you’re building to a real need your customers have.
We’ve built Atlas to help you deeply understand your customers with products like session recording and a customer timeline. And we’ve built it with product-oriented people in mind: it’s faster, lighter, and easier to use than tools like Zendesk and Intercom.