In the beginning there was Sales

Making product choices involved a lot of people - whether its you walking into a store or a having a sales person visit you. There you’d find smooth talking sales folks - they’d charm you with their product knowledge, sell you a dream about how your life will be much better if you used their product and whisper sweet nothings to you till you did their bidding. (ok maybe the whisper sweet nothings part is an exaggeration) Word of mouth was a thing, but peoples mouths couldn’t go far. Hello Internet
Along came the internet and changed everything.
Word of mouth exploded - When people love or hate it, they share it, tweet it, snap it, blog it and much much more. Pre-internet you were restricted to physical social circles, today a bad review will get tweeted straight to your CEO . Nowhere to hide.

People wanting to know more about a product now simply google it - they’ll be greeted with blog posts, quora reviews, unboxing videos, facebook pages, twitter feeds and more. People figure out themselves whether they trust a product or not and make purchase/usage decisions without direct human assistance. “We need to rank better on google” and  “we need more likes on Facebook” is replacing/competing with “we need more sales guys in the field” or “we need more billboards”. It’s almost like product are selling themselves. Support is the new Sales With SEO and Facebook likes doing everything, where does that leave us humans? 
Products aren’t perfect - for the one thing it does amazingly well, there are a hundred ares where they fall short and that’s where support comes in.
For internet businesses - Support is not a backend function, it is the new sales.
Why? Because almost always it is the first human touchpoint that your customer will encounter - think Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, etc.

Support 2.0

In an age when you can rapidly scale your app/website to millions of people, how do we scale the human touch?  Well the answers lies in organisation design and _resource allocation.
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Instead of sitting somewhere far removed from product development, support folks should be sitting right in the middle of the development action providing feedback actively and forming an important part of the feedback loop that drives development decisions.  The very word “support” often brings to mind the sad picture of a underpaid worker, clueless and unempowered, sitting in a call center and getting paid bottom dollar to listen to your troubles.  Support folks should be knowledgeable and empowered, knowing better than the customer the ins and outs of the product and unhindered in taking decisions to help the customer Support is a core product feature. It deserves engineering/design/product bandwidth like any other product in your lineup. You need to staff it with up with people who apart from being impeccable communicators are well trained and extremely knowledgable - Product experts & specialists, not available-for-hire lackeys. You need to create tools that provide support folks full context about a customer and allow them to affect change directly rather than running through hoops to do the same
The long term goal of a support team in a product focused organisation is make itself redundant