I definitely fell into the latter category. Of the total time I spent doing customer service, there were about ten people I knew on a first-name basis. They had my personal e-mail address and I'd always respond to them within a half hour, often with a call back.
I never did have good tracking metrics in place for time spent per customer. I was a one-man shop and this was in 2000-2003, so there were limited open source options.
Customer support ate up a little more than half my time. This took away from programming and business development. Of the customer support time, maybe five or ten percent was spent on these ten customers -- and that is out of ten thousand paying customers and a few hundred thousand free users.
I never got a four million dollar phone call, but I also don't know how much these ten users evangelized my services. Who knows -- maybe they were responsible for a thousand paying customers?
There's an old phrase: "I know half of my ad dollars are wasted, but I don't know which half!" Nowadays it's a lot easier to measure return, but I still think we're not at the point where we can quantify good will from customer service.
