As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support (2017)
I offer phone support for a niche accounting app (<a href="https://quailhq.com" rel="nofollow">https://quailhq.com</a>), and everything in this article rings 112% true to me -- but especially this:<p>> ...all sorts of people call you, and I’ve really learned a lot by talking with users directly on the phone.<p>Sometimes users call me because they want to report a bug, or they've forgotten their email address. Sometimes they want business advice (!), or they have a niche feature they want to request.<p>> This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone who calls is civil and polite.<p>Hahahaha. Haha. Hah. Ahem. The biggest surprise to me when I started offering support (first email, and then later by phone) is how _aggressive_ people can be. My app has two classes of users -- one free, one paid -- and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request, etc.<p>All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together.<p>It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...