Marcelo Calbucci

    Before I even started Sampa, one of the hardest to forecast line item on my projections was support cost. What is the bell curve of customer support (emails+calls/month)? How long does it take to handle each request? What is the average distribution based on the number of months a customer has been with us?

    I'm only talking about Web 2.0 services focused on individuals, since this is what Sampa is about. There is also a big difference between paid and free services. For now, Sampa is free so the customer's expectations for support are lower.

    On average, we are getting about 100-150 emails per week. A rough distribution of the emails is this:

• 5% praising the service
• 20% asking how to cancel the service (this is specific problem to us due to some UX confusion)
• 25% asking good question, usually indicating a problem on the system or something that is not easily found.
  
• 25% asking very very basic question (how do people find my blog? how do I upload a picture?)
• 20% are questions or comments that are incomprehensible. Seriously. E.g. "How do I add a site to my site?", "How do I upload my blog to my photo album?"
• 1-3% people ranting how we suck.

    Overall, I think the number of emails we receive is well below what I expected when I started. Right now, we sign up more than 1,000 new customers per week. Getting 100-150 emails per week is pretty low.

    Now, there is a very interesting distribution of customer emails. Some customers send 5-6 emails in one week, and those are the "expensive" customers for us.

    So far, it hasn't been that bad, but now it's start to becoming noticeable. It's taking me 30-60 minutes per day handling customer support. I think the moment it takes 2 hours per day, then it'll be a huge cost of my time.