You don't seem defensive at all, just overwhelmed. I appreciate that you are taking your time to train additional support people well; throwing warm bodies at scaling problems is a sure path to customer dissatisfaction. I also understand that it takes a while to train someone. I have watched about 75% of your videos (very helpful), and most of your help pages (also helpful), and it's clearly a complex system dealing with a complex set of variables, most of which don't even apply to me or, I suspect, to any other individual user.
While don't have a solution for you except to do more of what you're doing (hiring and training support personnel), I can see a things that you might want to think about:
- The vast majority of your support questions are probably either (1) from new users or (2) questions that lots of people have. Can you train people more quickly on those questions and throw them into the fray, then if the question isn't a common one, have a more expert person pick it up? You are probably already be doing this, but in case you are not it might be an avenue to explore.
- I was introduced to OwnerRez by a guy on Fiverr when I was trying to decide which channel manager to use. There are a bunch of these guys on Fiverr. I can't tell you what the other ones are like, but the guy I worked with knew OwnerRez extremely well, how it compares to your competitors, and how it works with other software (e.g, pricing engines). He was well aware of all the configurations and how they worked in practice. Maybe you can reach out to some of them (I'm sure they exist on other freelancer sites too) to do tutorials and answer questions for a discounted fee, and you guys make up the difference. Since my guy was $50/hr, if you paid him $25, leaving the customer to pay $25, that would be a sweet deal for the consumer, and cost you a lot less than hiring new people. This would work well especially with new users. You know what a support call costs, so you can do the math. There may be other hidden experts out there who can help -- possibly some of your advanced users with a philanthropic bent, or who themselves want to make a little money by helping out your clients. While I don't want to say Intuit is at all a company you want to emulate, one of their successful (in my opinion) initiatives was to expose their users qualified consultants. You can certify them if you want by giving them a test.
- You can tell people where they are in the queue. Like a progress bar on a slow download, it doesn't speed things up, but it's great to know when you are likely to get an answer, so you can bookmark it in your mind and move on to other things. Place in line, estimated time to an answer, all of these things let you customer know that although you are behind you are working on it and you'll get to them, and give them the time of an expected answer. This will calm everyone down and it will also make your issues transparent to your user base. Is that a good thing? It is when your customers are pulling for you, which your customers evidently are. If you're circling the drain I wouldn't recommend this, but I don't think you are.
- I wasn't aware at all that you could actually get a phone call with someone. When I called in, I got a message saying to leave a message, and someone would get back to me. I thought it was going to be answered by an email, and since I'd already sent in an email, I hung up. You might want to make it clearer that someone can get a real phone call if they leave a message. And if you are doing phone calls, why can't I schedule one from the OwnerRez site?
- For burning questions, either a per-call fee. Everyone I know hates these things until they really need help, then $50 seems like nothing. Every single one of the issues I've had so far (except one), were my fault. I misconfigured something, I misunderstood something, I left something out. Every time the solution was pretty easy once I "got it." I suspect that this will be the case with most people. If I had had the opportunity to pay $50 for 15 minutes of someone's time, or even $100 for 1/2 hour, I would have done it, because my mistakes with OwnerRez cost me at least $500 due to an error with my discounts. Many things can wait, but some things can't, and people are willing to pay, on a purely rational basis, for quick solutions. I would have.
I hope you don't take what I'm saying as aggressive or that I'm unhappy, because I'm not. I have lucked out to find a fast, scaleable solution backed by people who obviously care. That's absolute gold in a world of shoddy companies cutting as many corners as they can in their quest to increase users so as to sell themselves to the bigger fishes. I'm merely making some suggestions about how to handle growth.
