Castro Podcasts — Things I got wrong: Support

I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation. This way, customers would feel their subscription dollars were actually going toward something. When emails overwhelmed me, I asked a thoughtful user who emailed frequently and seemed to know as much about the product as I did if he’d help answer the emails, so I paid him to do that. And he did a great job, especially in terms of directly solving user problems.

However, what I found is this whole thing didn’t work as I thought it would. Sure sometimes we were able to wow customers, particularly when we responded right away with an exact fix for them. But the vast majority of our honest, thoughtful answers were deeply unsatisfactory to users, and it often annoyed them more than anything else.

Here are my unscientific categories of support requests/emails we get and why the approach is flawed.

I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email. I can of course try to justify why we charge what we do, and I’m happy to explain why an essential app is worth your money, and why software lends itself to subscription so well. But in reality the user is not satisfied with this. I can think of exactly one customer in two years who was surprised that software costs money and we’re actually doing work every day, thus charging a subscription makes sense. 99% of the time, no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email. I tried just offering an additional 30-day trial to anyone who asked, but this didn’t change the sentiment of the emails, and those trials had a substantially lower hit rate than our typical free trials. I could fill several blog posts with thoughts on subscriptions, but suffice it to say, emails about pricing are not helpful in terms of building rapport.

These emails are genuinely useful to me, the receiver. I want to know about the bugs people are experiencing on a daily basis. In the best case, I can say we know about this and are actively working on a fix or have already fixed it. Due to the way shipping works in the App Store, it’s common for a bug to be fixed but not distributed yet. Those are great emails to answer and we can satisfy the customer.

But there’s a long tail of bugs that are not like this:

None of these categories seem to build any meaningful rapport. Any honest answer I give is deeply unsatisfying to both parties, and we typically have better data from telemetry or crash logs than the emails provide. It’s certainly useful for us to receive them, but there’s not a helpful response I can give. In retrospect, this seems obvious, but before owning Castro it was not obvious to me that a human response detailing why I am unable to solve your problem today and am not even going to try is about the worst thing a user can receive!

Sometimes we get nuanced questions about App Store processes, store issues, specific locales, hyper-specific podcast questions, etc. A user recently had a Castro subscription on two different accounts at different times and wanted to let one expire while ensuring they got the months they paid for. We were able to resolve it for them quickly. People do genuinely appreciate this kind of responsiveness. So yeah, the idea probably works here. Unfortunately, these are less than 1% of support emails.

This comes closest to building the customer relationships I was hoping for, with the worst results. Customers email us with confusion about how podcasts work, how the App Store works, how their Mac works, and any number of tangential issues. What tends to happen is the same users do this over and over, and once they find out we answer, the requests get more frequent and more burdensome. I think I heard Patrick McKenzie use the term “pathological customers”. While in theory building rapport and loyalty sounds nice, what you actually end up doing is spending a lot of time on the people who ask the most of you, but their subscription dollars aren’t worth more, and they’re rarely satisfied. You end up feeling taken advantage of.

Similar to the last category. Good in theory, sometimes useful, but often the same small, unrepresentative segment with strong thoughts. Woe to the team who implements a suggestion based on an email, you are likely to get a full product roadmap soon!

Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request. If I did, by catering more to persnickety power users, we run the risk of alienating newer users who don’t know how things work. But our power users probably aren’t going anywhere, at least they’re a little harder to shake, and alienating new users is the death of the product.

To the user, any response aside from “Okay, we’re going to build that right now” is meh-to-negative. Various honest responses, such as “I thought about this or tried it in the past and it unfortunately didn’t work very well” are not going to knock their socks off. These just don’t do much in terms of loyalty and rapport.

Ultimately, for us, putting too much time into support isn’t a differentiator, and it’s often counter-productive. The person who paid our subscription but would never think about emailing us and asking for something for free deserves a great app just as much as the person who emails us every week. If we have a specific resolution or fix for their problem, great. If not, we’ve had better results by saying we appreciate the email, we read them, and we are actively working on the product to improve the issues. Avoiding explanations and specifics tends to get a neutral response and doesn’t suck anyone in or waste too much time. In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do. Because building loyalty or rapport at the moment something isn’t working and the user is frustrated hasn’t worked. The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product, so that’s where we’re spending our time.