The company I work for has a large, competent and expensive support team. Every single customer state it's their #1 reason they're with us. Yet nobody in the business, investors, or dev teams want to believe it and there's a huge pressure from business to automate, and from the devs to 'do as the other companies do it'. We're building UIs nobody wants to use; our customers would much rather call us, and have us solve their problem in a 1min conversation rather than spend hours figuring it out by themselves. The company is extremely profitable btw
Just recently where I work, we dropped a major supplier of single board computers because their customer service was almost entirely unresponsive the one time we needed their support. We spent a million or two a year with them. Small potatoes in the big picture, but still significant money that is now going to one of their competitors.
That change was a significant cost to us as well, as it meant that the system we were using the boards in had to be redesigned to accommodate a different board.
Yeah, with B2B it's possible at least, since the businesses that pay for your services actually make money. Good customer support can directly and visibility impact their bottom line by reducing hours on debugging and any costs from downtime.
Average people wouldn't be willing to pay enough to provide such level of service.
