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Forefront Support — On demand, elastic customer support as a service
Answering repetitive and basic inquiries was a waste of my time on my previous projects, but I couldn't hire someone to help. So I started a service that resolves ~80% of your inquiries by looking at your documentation/FAQs/common questions, on demand.
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Jacob
?makers What types of products are best supported by a service like Forefront? How would it work for more complex products, like Producthunt?
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@jacobhartog Hey Jacob - it’s meant for quickly resolving the majority of tickets which don’t require complex problem solving or access to a product’s backend. Obviously it works better for some products, but with my own projects I found the majority of support inquiries tedious to respond to since they were primarily “how to” questions or customers looking for reassurance on something.
I wanted to share something I've been working on since I thought it might help people here.
I've been earning a modest income by developing e-commerce plugins for Shopify. When I started, I thought the bulk of the work would be the programming part, and I'd just collect subscribers after that. However, I learned that most of the work actually comes with providing customer support. My users wanted interaction with a human (and felt they deserved it since they were paying for the service). However, I couldn't afford to hire an agent to do support full time (let alone train them).
The problem was that most of the inquiries I was getting were repetitive basic. Stuff like "How do I do X?" or "Why isn't Y working" - which they could figure out just by reading the FAQs. I thought other people might have this problem as well. So I asked other developers if they would be interested in outsourcing their customer support. I got my first paying customer and got started.
I started by answering all the tickets myself. I learned what the common questions were, and wrote up a process document. I hired an agent and set out to find more customers. Now, we're supporting 3 products.
Some stats:
Average response time: just under 4 hours (although most tickets are resolved within 30 minutes)
Guaranteed response time: 24 hours
Ticket resolution rate: 85%
Issues with customers: 0
Positive reviews garnered: 2
Would love to answer any questions anyone has. Please check out my website at forefront.support. If anyone has any feedback I'd really appreciate that!
Drop me a line at adam@forefront.support for 10 free responses to try out!