It’s easy to say, “The customer comes first.” It sounds right, feels good, and makes for great marketing. And while that approach works in the early days, I’ve come to realize that after a certain point, it can do more harm than good.
Focusing heavily on providing excellent support ended up being a “too much of a good thing” situation for us. When you make it too easy for customers to reach out, they will. About everything.
Support at appointmed
Support via phone, email, or in-app chat is included in all our paid plans at no extra charge. We have an average response time of just under six minutes, handling over 3,000 cases a year. The majority of those cases are handled by just two people. Many therapists recommend appointmed not just for the quality of our product but because of our exceptional customer support. We take pride in that.
But there’s a flip side. When you’re always available and eager to help, customers will start to bring every question to you, no matter how small. Sometimes they are not even remotely related to our product. Over the years, we’ve answered questions about taxes, interior design, personal websites, legal challenges, and everything in between.
While this level of service builds immense trust and loyalty, it also created an overwhelming demand on the team as the customer base grew.
I’ve always built our company around the idea that work should be fun. We don’t just want to create an amazing experience for therapists. We want to create an amazing environment for the people building the products. And if the team is overwhelmed by an unreasonable number of support requests, everything inevitably declines.
Intentional Friction
To keep employees happy, guardrails are essential to prevent burnout. If the people providing support are frustrated or exhausted, customers will feel it. That’s why we try our best to find ways to help customers help themselves, through focus on usability, better documentation or automated solutions.
The real challenge, though, is defining clear boundaries. Especially for customers who could easily find answers themselves but choose to reach out anyway. They often feel entitled to having us as a personal assistant, walking with them every step of the way. We’re still struggling to find the right balance, but one thing is clear: support that scales requires (some) intentional friction.
That’s why we will start experimenting with a few changes to how we handle support. For example:
- Removing the ability to chat with us for non-customers on our marketing site.
- Replacing direct phone availability with a call-back service.
- Phasing out free phone support altogether and introducing a paid option.
- Exploring AI solutions to handle the most basic requests (Fin sounds promising, but we haven’t tested it yet).
Some of these changes are already implemented and showing promising results, but their full impact on customer satisfaction will only become clear in the coming months.
Customers are no longer our top priority
For years, we obsessed over customer satisfaction, but now we are starting to suffocate because of it.
Ultimately, happy customers aren’t the cause of a great business. They’re the effect. The real foundation of any successful company is the people who build it, support it, and improve it every day. That’s why our top priority isn’t customer happiness anymore. It’s employee happiness. Only happy employees create happy customers.
