CHAPTER 11 Supporting Your Product
When launching a small product or service, often the first thing that
people do is to post a support@ email address and deal with the issues
right there in the inbox. The problem with email support with no other sys-
tem backing it, is that it is very hard to scale. If several people all log into
the same mailbox, you will need to enforce some kind of system to make
sure that requests don’t get missed (because everyone thinks someone else
will look at it), and that requests don’t get answered twice (as two people
jump on the email at the same time).
If you have a very small team, perhaps with one person taking respon-
sibility for dealing with email, this might work. If you see the need to scale
your support at any point, however, then my advice would be to look at
what systems can be put in place to ensure that you are not reliant on a
single inbox as your system. Many helpdesk products allow customers to
contact you via email, so moving away from email as a method of manag-
ing requests does not mean that your customers will need to log into and
post to a support forum. The system can be completely transparent to the
user.Support Statistics
Something that a helpdesk system can often do is provide statistics about
the support tickets raised: the figures I quoted earlier came directly from
our support system. By being able to discover trends in support, you can
see if a feature in your product or service has caused a spike or a drop in
the number of tickets. You can get some idea of how your support require-
ments need to grow to meet the needs of an increasing number of custom-
ers. This can help you to plan for hiring additional support staff ahead of
time, and check that the revenue you will have at that point will be suffi-
cient to cover that expansion.
In addition to giving you a basis for long-term planning, statistics can
help you plan the day-to-day support needs. When we deliver a major new
version, we see a large spike in the number of tickets as people upgrade