👨💻 Do you have customer support for your product?
What do you think about support - or have you even thought about it? =D
Do you think every product must have some kind of support?
Should it be a bot?
A human?
Email?
An AI agent?
Or all together?
In our case, with a complex workspace, I think working support is definitely a must.
We’re building it right now: a Guide Agent that helps users onboard more easily, leads them through processes, answers questions, opens feedback tickets, and more...
And there’s another interesting thing.
One of my friends works at a big company that is basically all about support - they provide support packages for other products.
Do you think this kind of business is still relevant today?
Personally, I feel like these days makers increasingly think about support as a part of the product itself, rather than something separate.
So… what do you think?
How do you approach support for your product?
Replies
As for a minimalist phone – yes, I am also sometimes present there :D
But for SafeLimit – not yet :)
@busmark_w_nika Is it Human Support ? or some bots or agents?
@adana Human support mostly with shortcuts :)
I agree support should feel like part of the product especially when onboarding is involved How are you deciding what should be handled by AI vs a human
@shivam_kushwaha16 In RunEvr, users have a support room where they meet an agent from the very first moment.
They can ask questions, talk, and get support from the agent. If they need a human response, a human support person joins the room and continues helping them =)
@adana Yeah I agree human support still matters when the issue needs context or a more personal response How do you decide when an AI agent should hand the conversation over to a human
@shivam_kushwaha16 The user decides. The moment they ask for a human response, human support joins immediately.
@adana That makes sense I like that the user can decide when they need a human and the handoff happens right away This feels much more natural than forcing users through an AI only flow
Building a smart guide agent sounds cool on paper but how does your system handle weird edge cases where the user inputs completely corrupted custom parameters?
@favour_yusuf34 First, we suggest questions or actions for users. In most cases, they choose one and go from there.
Then, the user can simply chat and ask for whatever they need, just like in any AI chat.
Good input - useful answer. Bad or corrupted input - well, you know… =D
We combined a fast AI tier with direct Slack access to the engineering team, and our customer satisfaction scroes jumped almost overnight withouit overloading our developers.
@thomas_jack3 Interesting approach… But could that potentially cause delays in support? Does that issue exist?
if your software requires an intensive onboarding bot just to explain basic navigation the core ecperience probably needs a complete redesign from scratch.
@joseph_collins2 Maybe not a complete redesign, but some new directions to make the experience a bit different.
we spent months perfecting our ticketing triage workflow and the best decision we made was letting our product managers handle support rotations twice a month.
@chandrshekhar_rawen Really? What did it change? Was it beneficial from the managers’ perspective, or did it have a bigger impact on the product?
I’d love to hear more about your experience.
for anyone running a complex workspace, robust documentation is way more valuable than a flashy chatbot that keeps giving generic answer to specific technical questions.
@fatima_sarki In our case, it isn’t just a chatbot, but an agent that has access to your documentation and can answer users’ questions based on them.
I'm a big Steve Jobs fan, and he shipped Apple stuff with no manual, which was crazy back then and now it's just normal. His thinking was if you need to explain how to use it, the UI's bad. I agree with that a lot. Though people really do use things differently, and there's a whole crowd of non-Apple folks out there explaining how to use Apple stuff lol Funny thing is I've automated most of my business, but support's the one place I go the other way. People want a person, and once they figure out it's a bot their satisfaction tends to drop. If a reply's going to take days though, a bot's probably better than nothing. So for me a question comes in, AI writes a draft, I check it and hit send myself, and everyone gets an answer within a day. I want to build our own chat support at some point too.
Oh and I made a RunEvr account to poke around! First thing I noticed was the chat support popping up on the right. UI and features both feel really current, looks great.
@hisashispace Thanks ! The support experience isn’t finished yet; soon, it’ll help more with onboarding as well.
I agree with Steve Jobs’ approach =) But for really complex products, like government systems, production management platforms, CRMs, etc., it simply takes a lot of time to explore everything. Support can really help a lot in those cases.
And regarding the human support you mentioned, in our case, we tried to create the feeling that the agents are actually part of the team. That’s why, when Ari - the guide, starts interacting with users soon, it should feel more organic than just a chatbot, I think =)
@adana Oh that's wonderful! Agents that feel like part of the team, I love that. And yeah, a CRM or a production system, nobody's figuring all that out alone lol Can't wait to meet Ari ☺️
@hisashispace thanks a lot <3
Yes, it's a main differentiator this day and age, I make group chats on whatsapp, slack, teams, with every customer, so we can jump on anything super fast and have a direct line with everyone, learned it from another great unicorn startup.
@toto_db So, do I understand correctly that your main purpose is human support? And do you manage all those chats and forums?
@adana Yes, exactly, having a direct line to an actual human makes a huge difference in a world of automated human contact and support, we manage all of those
@toto_db That's great !
We do, and it has turned into one of the most important parts of the product for us. CambrianEdge.ai is the world's first AI Orchestration Platform for Marketing, so a lot of our customers are working through bigger questions than 'where is this button.' Our team works closely with them to understand what they want AI to do for their marketing, helps them deploy the platform, and stays with them as their teams build AI fluency. It looks a lot like the forward deployed model, with support sitting inside the customer's day-to-day work.
@sanya_singh6 That's really good approach! And do you do the marketing of your product with the same product? =)
@adana Yes, we do. The platform runs a good share of our own marketing. It also means the approaches we bring to customers have been tested on our own work first.
@sanya_singh6 That’s the best thing. In our case, we also offer clients something that has been battle-tested on our own teams.