Customer Support for Free
Michael McDerment of Freshbooks has a great post on his blog about offering customer support for free.
At FreshBooks, customer service and support are included for free. To us people are people – we don’t treat them differently if they pay us a monthly fee or not. Traditionally, software providers have charged extra for support and we think this is crap. Support is as valuable to us as it is to the people who reach out when they need help.
We never thought too much about our free service “policy” when we started. We just figured if someone needed help they should get it. Our customers, let’s call them the Fortune 50 million, are entrepreneurs. They are busy and they don’t want to spend their time meddling with their billing service. If a person calls, it’s probably our fault for not designing FreshBooks to be easy enough to use, so they deserve support.
We 100% agree here at HomeStars. We have a different userbase than the folks at Freshbooks – somewhat less technical – who need guidance on some basic features of the website, but every time we talk with a new customer on the phone we learn something new about our site. What can seem intuitive to us, might not be to most. So let us know, of course, if you need help with anything on the site or there are bugs that we need to work on.
I met Michael yesterday at the Toronto Tech Week, startup day. His panel on the challenges of growing a company in Canada was enlightening, but not surprising to many in the room.
Posted by BrianS
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