Support

Yes, not only that, also just experience with selling very low priced products and how that’s incompatible with the kind of companies that we run and the kind of service we want to offer. So we have a relatively large support department who spend a lot of time being very diligent and careful with all the customers they interact with. And the math on that is that like someone writes us an email and it costs about five bucks, you take all the costs involved with running support department. It costs about five dollars to answer an email.

If you lower your price to the point where one email essentially put you under water on a on a customer relationship, you end up in a place where you don’t want to talk to your customers.

Small Is Beautiful livestream #7 (cache)

Il y a beaucoup de choses intéressantes dans cette discussion, je remercie Laura et Aral d’avoir pris le temps de faire un transcript de l’échange qui me permet non seulement de le lire à mon rythme mais en plus de l’archiver (bon et bien sûr de le rendre accessible aux personnes en ayant davantage besoin).

J’apprécie particulièrement cette partie relative au support, qui lui donne un coût permettant d’arbitrer une intention. Lorsque l’on crée une chose, on y place un espoir dont on essaye de s’approcher. La difficulté est de continuer à partager cet espoir et/ou de le faire évoluer sans renier totalement les conditions de son accession.

Cette difficulté est un travail quotidien.

We were about 45 people, I think, at the time. We had four major products that were all sort of succeeding and growing. And we looked at that and said, you know what? We can’t continue with four major products at the same time, if we’re staying at 45 people, we have to probably go to 150 because there’s these tipping points where once you install this layer of management, you need a bunch more people and so on. So if we’re going to run this whole thing, I can see a straight path to us being 150, maybe 300 people. And I looked at that and said, you know what, I don’t want to work there. I don’t want to work at a Basecamp of 300 people.

Ibid.