I love answering support e-mails. Yes, you heard me correctly.

Before I started working with Paste, my experiences with support had been frustrating. One particularly infuriating instance comes to mind…

Two years ago, my cell phone was having major malfunctions, and the actual store representative told me I’d have to call their main support line for help.

Seriously?

So I called support and listened to an automated woman talk for half an hour about all the other services available… none of which I cared about. Not even a little bit. I just wanted to know what was wrong with my phone and how to fix it. When I finally got to talk to a real person, she was such a low level customer service rep that she couldn’t help, either. She told me to send in my phone (seriously?!?!) and she’d have their technical engineers take a look at it. Keep Reading

“I’m kind of weird, I love negative feedback. Unsolicited complaint means somebody cared enough to write it down, and then when you fix their pet peeve they transform into a fan. Plus you got to fix a real problem for a real person, which is pretty rewarding.”

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/09/21/chris_clark/ via DF

It’s not fun knowing someone hates you. “Hate” is such a strong word anyway. But…

“The world is full of very average things made by people who don’t want to upset anyone, or too eager to please their peers. I believe you have to have an opinion – choose daddy or chips, I really don’t mind, just don’t say “I don’t really know”. And when you have opinions and strongly held beliefs you’ve got to be prepared to get some flack – in fact that’s part of the deal.You can’t have the nice feedback without accepting that some people are going to hate what you do.”

- Brendan Dawes

Great idea from Jesse at Hogbay Software. He has a new page on his site that lays out exactly the quickest and best ways to get support, and what to expect when you do. This is especially great:

“If you have an idea for improving my apps please send it. I read all email and forum postings, and they effect what I’m working on, but I’m not likely to respond directly.”

Unlike some in the web app business, we love hearing new ideas for our apps. They’re like a gift in email format. But it is sometimes tough to convey our love, sympathy, empathy, regret, and joy in a new creative way for each idea sent.

Read more about Jesse’s support ideas

Last year for some special clients and friends I gave out some Netflix Gift Subscriptions. While many of them were readily snatched up and quickly used, several weren’t.

A few weeks ago Netflix emailed me and said if they were’t used by a certain date, they would be automatically applied to my account. Great. Simple. Easy.

Only one problem. Once this happened, I found out that you can only apply one gift subscription at a time to your account. So as of the last week, all 11 subscriptions began ticking down in value as if they were being used, but couldn’t be applied to my account. Keep Reading