favo

Sometimes I wonder how much support one need.

I am working with Google Apps for emails, Apple for selling iPhone Apps and Amazon for some hosting.

All three companies are major players when it comes to internet services.

All three offer some very unique services at a very good price.

In the previous 6 months I had several support issues with all of them and was left wondering, how much support does one really need?

My answer is: None, well, a little bit, but it should be organized.

Let my explain why I came to this conclusion:

These three companies do their homework and have the ambitions to provide very solid premium services. Normally there should not be a need for support because services are running and everything is explained in a help section. That does apply to 99% of their customers for 99.99% of the time.

If you have a support request it will normally be something you can get help yourself by reading the help sections or it is simply a not (yet) supported feature. Use it as it is or leave it.

So why the need for support, if everything is working as expected and you can’t change the services themself? Right, no need for it!

This is exactly how we have run Google Apps the first year without the need for support, we run servers and services on Amazons WebServices the first year without the need for support (except some billing related request in the beginning) and sold iPhone Apps for the last two years without the need for support (except one support request on contract beginning).

But nothing is perfect and sometimes problems emerge that can’t be foreseen. In these cases a well organized support structure is needed. You will need to a clear statement when the problem occurs, a status about the progress and a final statement about it being solved/closed.

From the support requests I had in the last months, I can see only one company offering that kind of basic support structure: Amazon