Web3’s Customer Support Problem
Web2 companies changed the customer experience game.
UBER gave us on-demand rides.
Airbnb gave us flawless lodging experiences.
Amazon gave us same-day delivery.
And Spotify put the history of recorded music in our pockets.
Fueled by venture capital funding and a ‘growth now, profit later’ mandate,cash-rich web2 companies bent over backwards to acquire, retain, and grow their customer base. They sought little more than to improve their north star metric — annual recurring revenue (ARR), even if it meant buying it.
But a byproduct of this untraditional approach to growth was heightened customer service expectations.
It wasn’t enough to just acquire customers — they needed to be retained, and preferably, turned into advocates who would tell their friends and colleagues about said company’s product.
Web2 user experience has since become characterized by factors such as:
Most successful web2 companies know all too well that nearly three-quarters of consumers (74%) say they would stop doing business with a company if they received poor customer support or had a bad experience, and 30% would share it online.
Contrast a web2 company like Netflix with their traditional adversaries — cable TV providers.
Cable TV typically required the installation of a clunky set-top box, sign-up fees, comparatively high subscription fees, and expensive cancelation fees for early termination.
Netflix required none of this — just a flat $10 monthly fee. You could sign up and instantly be watching the latest season of Cobra Kai on your television, smartphone, tablet, or computer in no time.
You’d get tailor-made content recommendations, too.
Airbnb’s founders, Brain Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, put customer experience at the centre of their business and it seems to have worked, with the trio now presiding over a US$100 billion company.
But in the early days, the trio were known to ‘mystery shop’. They’d book random locations on their platform in order to walk in the customer’s shoes, evaluate said hosts themselves, and identify improvement opportunities. These learnings would later be incorporated into their hosting policies and reliability standards.
The company also rolled out insurance to give hosts and guest alike peace of mind.
And if you needed support, there was no need to sit on hold for over an hour, only to be transferred to another department before the line dropped out.
If a matter couldn’t be resolved immediately, you would be placed into a queue and either emailed or called back promptly with resolution advice.
Yes, web2 companies changed our expectations of customer experience, particularly customer support.
But as the world slowly but surely evolves into the web3 space, it seems that we are in many respects reverting back to lousy customer experience standards we took for granted before web2 companies came along.
A 2018 PwC study found that convenience and efficiency, friendly service, knowledgable service, personalization, user experience, and a seamless and intuitive mobile experience were among the key factors that people value most in their customer experience.
Ignoring web3’s pervasive scammer problem, web3 offerings tend to lag far behind their web2 counterparts when it comes to efficiency, user experience, and personalization.
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