By Rachel Andrew CHAPTER 11While moving from client work to a product is something that many of us
aspire to, it isn’t quite the client-free utopia you might imagine. As developers
launching a product, we went from dealing with very few clients over the
course of a year to having thousands of customers to take care of. The ma-
jority of customers happily use our product and we rarely hear from them,
although there are some names that
we know very well in support.
When I talk to my peers about
Perch and support, they tend to ask
about how we deal with customers
who take up all of our time and ask
question after question. There are
days when it feels as if we are just
building some websites one ticket
at a time, but I thought it would be
interesting to take a look at our actual sup-
port statistics. Only 26% of our customers have ever raised a support ticket
and only 10% have raised more than one ticket. Once we get to the more
frequent requesters, we find that 10% of requests are made by the same 10
people and in fact 2% of requests are from one customer.
The graph above demonstrates that there is a long tail of customer
support reflected in the majority of customers who never contact support
or do so only once. We also have a very small number of customers who
contact us a lot. In their defense, those top support requesters also have a
lot of licenses and so have developed a lot of projects using our software.
The idea that we will be swamped by people wanting basic help, or help
with related issues such as their CSS, hasn’t really held true. Yes, we do
spend a significant amount of time helping some customers with poorly
configured PHP hosting, or answering questions better suited to a CSS
forum. Yet, most of our customers we never hear from at all. We know they
are using Perch and many of them have a large number of licenses, but it
must just be working for them.
The long tail of customer support.