Customer Support

“I think a huge amount of money is going to get burning customer support.”

“People may not realize, but customer support is already in this phase. I call it the autopilot category. You have already a billion dollar in AR in this category where outcomes are solved.”

“Customer support will not be using frontier models.”

“The thing that we built and we kind of built this intentionally from the start was not an agent that does customer support well, but rather an agent that follows business process well. And executing on operational workflows, doing sales lead qualifications, an…”

“When you had models, you know, let's say a few years ago, you'd have to give it very, very tight guidance, very specific instructions that you didn't want it to deviate from, and as the models got smarter, you could kind of give it broader and broader guidance…”

“Step one should be to, like, just do it with a frontier model and see how well it does. And most times you'll see that you don't have to touch the weights. But there are certain workflows like customer support like an invoice to pay system, some of these more …”

“Customer support is like, one percent of global GDP. It's the same market size as advertising.”

“I think it's 91% of all of our customer support is handled through self-service and AI.”

“So, you know, for example, support is, is, is an interesting vertical, right? Which is a lot of stuff happening within support where, you know, the ticket deflection and automatic resolution of tickets, these are things that whether somebody builds it themselv…”

“Like support to me is not a job very, very soon.”

“I think customer support is uninvestable today, and I get so much shit on Twitter for this, because everyone shits on them, but I'm like, Sierra and Dakagon, obviously two market leaders in terms of brand, and how much money they've raised, and you've got 16 p…”

“We do customer support, and the majority of our customers starts with customer support, and we make an absolute ton of money on that.”

“It's hard for me to imagine one person, like I'm bearish on this billion dollar startup. I just want to share this thought simply because of the support costs, even if AI is helping you at a billion dollars, just like, unless your ACVs are, you know, very high…”

“The only area where that's really possible today to pull off is, is probably customer support, customer success, because you can kind of objectively measure the resolution of something.”

“Rule following is like a hard research problem, but if you solve rule following, then you unlock, you know, better customer support. And I think a lot of Sierra's success can be attributed to, like, their focus on this.”

“You know, it's, you know, it's some big companies that are very tech forward, you know, 50% plus of customer support is already done by AI, and that's a four hundred billion dollar industry.”

“Users who spend, you know, probably two human generations learning to type into a box and process 10 blue links have suddenly pivoted, and they just want the answer and the results, and I think that's table stakes for customer support at this point.”

“And so I think, yes, we will, you know, if you think about, you know, you have a chat channel and a voice channel, and you have, you know, a messaging channel and an email channel, you're going to have an LLM channel. Where the LLM will kind of be the initiato…”

“I think the transfer is pretty high in areas like customer support copywriting SEO, like some of these marketing related areas.”

“The less they pay, the more they're going to hit up support. It's just how it works.”

“I think in concept from a north star perspective, we should be able to take 80, 90% of customer support out in the next two to five years across the landscape.”

“It's so much better to get back to someone with a 90% perfect answer in real time than any brutal other process. There's just no excuse.”

“Other than coding, which is the InfraPlay, at the app level, I think customer support, customer success is the number one use case for AI, because it's just so obvious. You have lots of people answering phone calls, answering emails. You can do it all with AI.…”

“And so I'd say to date, the categories that feel like they've worked best are coding, customer support, legal, and healthcare.”

“Coding and support. These two use cases have found product market fit with AI. No question. We're not going back. If you're not doing it, you're already behind.”

“But for solving, like, the bottom 70 percentile problems why is my card declining? Why is there a hold on my card on? What happened to the replacement card I shipped? Why is it not arrived? Like, basic questions. AI automating now, almost, we have 60, 70% of t…”

“20 to 40% of support is all done on AI today, and it's great.”

“I think the only area that we don't have anything in right now that's like very obvious is, is is customer support. And so, you know, we have a growth fund. We're looking”

“The speech to text and text to speech, those things are indistinguishable from human beings now, and you can train these things, the evals are good, the prompting is good you know, I, you know, going back to what we were saying earlier, like, what we're seeing…”

“Most customer support will be automated within 36 months. Not just tier one tickets, complex, multi-step resolution that previously required senior support staff.”

“I think the reason we're over indexed though, is that there are not that many use cases that have those two dimensions to them that are objectively measurable and that there's a known economic value that's constant, right?”

“Your second hire in product-led is almost always customer support, because you will be a higher volume, probably a higher volume app with a lot of customers, and so you're going to have a lot of emails and live chat if you offer it.”

“Companies win early stage by being much better at customer support than big companies. So you have to be much better at customer support than big companies.”

“When it comes to customer support, I think it's key. I mean, I think that's another like product feature. It's part of the experience. And I try to just reply as fast as possible because it's not only about helping users for me, especially when I launch. Getti…”

“Seb at Clon has fired 700 people in customer support.”

“One big area where there's clearly been success is in customer support. both companies doing that as a service, but also larger enterprises doing that and building that functionality inside.”

“I always say to everyone, hey, put everyone in support for two weeks minimum. Just hear the pain points. Hear what they want. Hear what they don't like. Just hear everything. It's the best way to do it.”

“It's moving into core budget for customer support, for instance, where like areas where the application of AI is pretty obvious. It's definitely moving into core budgets.”

“Like, voice from a point of view of robots answering the phone, and hearing your query, and answering it as best as they can, and if not, failing over to a human voice. I think that's all certainly going to happen. Don't have a stated time frame for it yet.”

“As you start to scale up, you need to think about role specialization. Those are the two places where it makes sense to start specializing your roles, support or implementation, because those are the things that are very high volume and highly repeatable.”

“People don't end up losing jobs. The jobs get moved around and also, you know, for customer support, for example, it's a high attrition job. So people saying like, Hey, everyone's going to lose their job. A bot's going to take over. It's like, maybe some of th…”

“As we grew customers on the platform, there, so the number of active users on the platform grew, which was amazing, because that's how our revenue grew, but for every dollar of revenue that we brought in, we had to spend almost a proportional amount in support…”

“If you're a company, would you not pay an extra, whatever, five percent, 10% to be able to remove accents from all of your customer support people so that you know, you have higher NPS, higher, higher customer service scores and less, less issues and complaint…”

“So the people costs are customer service team, operations teams, But I like to think of that as the cost of port quality. So you bring up customer support. If the product's not clear, you hire lots of people in the back office.”

“One was that we agreed to provide our customer support person to the buyer for, I think it was a period of three months. So I think that was helpful for them to also just like Get familiar with the app and the sort of customer support requests and things like …”

“He does support every day.”

“Customer support can be the ultimate killer if you're trying to build or buy lifestyle applications.”

“Support as a lead source is, is incredibly valuable. Our support function talks to more customers than anyone in our business.”

“In vault up until very late stages, every single employee, even in customer support was a stockholder of vault or shareholder or an option holder of vault.”

“I think a center of absolute unbelievable treasure trove of knowledge sits within a support organization, if you have one, just because they're hearing both the blemishers as well as the praises of the product on a daily basis, and typically at a much higher v…”

“I would say the two main ones are sort of customer support and relatedly trust and safety, so ensuring that people aren't selling fraudulent items, and then core platform.”

“But in a lot of organizations, that guy would have been the villain. You know, like, look, pal, put a lid on it. You're costing us a fortune trying to serve these customers. And he would have felt not great about the company. It just would have been a disconne…”

“And that's usually the first thing I recommend people hire for. It's usually not outsourced, but it's just hire for is that support role, even though yes, as the founder, you can probably give better support in the early days, but as it becomes repetitive, I f…”

“I think when you get someone on with support, they usually stick around, based on the, like, industry metrics, three plus years, and that's some, that's a pretty, like, that leads to pretty good LTVs.”

“What becomes completely not scalable later is spending 60 to 90 minutes on a support ticket. But in the early days, I remember us doing it as well. I've done it with multiple products where I'm going above and beyond because you're scraping and clawing, not on…”

“If, for example, if you keep scaling customer support, if you need customer support, that means there's something wrong with the product, right? So you have to go back to the drawing board and understand why are people calling me, right? And then you start opt…”

“Well, there's some interaction patterns where that's going to work really well. Like if you want, if you placed an order online and you want to change the order or you want to see if it's available and you want to ask like an actual question, there's an actual…”

“I think personally that support in this business is basically the way to be churned.”

“The difference is, is that in our model, we identify that as a, kind of a bug in the model, right? It's something that we need to fix in the future. We don't want every single customer, if we're targeting 500,000, to have to raise their hand and for us to enga…”

“The community team does a combination of customer support as well as top member outreach. A lot of companies only do the first part, the customer support, and they forget about how do you, like, make sure you have a strong relationship with your top members wh…”